Adam is a co-founder and Principal Technical Consultant at Cantina and has over ten years experience in web application design and architecture as well as experience in multimedia production (audio and video) and delivery. At Cantina, Adam has been involved in every manner of project from CMS-driven marketing platforms and social networking communities to implementing an entire ecosystem for online video delivery including custom interactive video players, SEO-friendly video portals, backend ingestion pipelines, analytics, and mobile delivery on iPhone and Android particularly on the Brightcove platform. Prior to starting Cantina, he was a consultant at Molecular providing technical analysis, design, architecture, and implementation services for clients ranging from real estate organizations to large healthcare providers including Analog Devices, Colliers International, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, and Fallon Community Community Health Plan. Adam holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as well as a Diploma in Sound Design for Visual Media from the Vancouver Film School.
We’ve had a bit of time to jump back into Grails plugin development (or maintenance as it were) and couldn’t be happier to find the recent improvements in Grails 1.1. The biggest improvement (though perhaps not advertised as such) to me, was the inclusion of functionality that allows plugin developers to build test applications against [...]
One of the founders of Woofoo just wrote a terrific article on what it takes to build a web application called “Web App Autopsy“. They were lucky enough to get some great information from three other firms, Blinksale, Feedburner and RegOnline. I think the charts and information they put together are great, but if you [...]
Please join me in welcoming Stephen Pember as the newest Technical Principal Consultant at Cantina. After a long and rather selective search, we’re very excited to bring Steve on board to increase our technical capabilities and to help us continue to deliver a great consulting experience to our clients. Steve brings a wealth of experience [...]
Brightcove isn’t waiting around for Flash to be supported on the iPhone. They’ve recently published an article in the help section of their web site which illustrates how easy it is to build web applications targeted for the iPhone using Brightcove’s Media API, without any server side code. http://help.brightcove.com/developer/samples/iPhone/iPhone-portal.cfm This sample application highlights a couple [...]
At Cantina, we use Google in practically everything we do. We make heavy use of Google Apps for Domains to manage our email, calendars, and internal documentation. YouTube is a constant distraction, er, research tool. Some of us share photos via Picasa. SketchUp can be a handy tool for working on game development. And every [...]
While I know some of us are sitting around waiting for our bailout checks, at Cantina we’re doing our part to stimulate the economy. We’re looking for someone with incredible technical skills and a real passion for programming. You’ve got to have the personal skills to please our clients and always over deliver. You should [...]
As a software engineer, I find that I apply basic software engineering principles to all aspects of my life, and a big one is the “don’t repeat yourself” philosophy, or DRY. Nowhere have I felt more pain on this lately than with trying to solve the problem of a unified email, calendar, and contact solution [...]
I thought I would sit down and write my first post by thanking the team at Cantina for the opportunity to work with them. I’ve only been here two weeks and I already know I’m working with the best teams on the planet. As I met with many of their clients over the last few [...]
Our good friend and former colleague Greg Brown has just recently launched the first official 1.0 release of the open source Pivot Toolkit. The Pivot Toolkit provides Java developers a great new way to build applications with rich user interfaces that can be easily deployed both to web users and to desktop users. Pivot harnesses [...]
I’ve been working on a project that involves rolling a Grails-based application into a much larger build process, one which ties together several Java components and test suites through an Ant build process. This integration involves Ant calling the Grails command line tasks (clean, test-app, war, etc). The standard build.xml that is found after creating [...]
Several market trends have been shaping the mobile services we offer at Cantina. The use of consumer technologies in the enterprise is increasing, including everything from Dropbox, social networks, Google apps, and mobile devices. Companies considering the deployment of business applications to the mobile context need to consider bring your own device (BYOD) strategies to [...]
