Adobe has released Adobe Reader 9.1 for Linux! This is the first 9.x release on Linux and has a number of new features. My personal favorite is the inclusion of Flash Player so that Portable RIAs will work on Linux! Portable RIAs are beginning to catch on more and so it’s great to have true cross-platform support for them.
The current state of the economy has every business thinking about cost cutting and higher productivity. This is fueling significant growth in the Rich Internet Application space. There are numerous examples of businesses achieving substantial return on investment from RIAs. For instance, Allurent, a company that builds RIA E-Commerce solutions, created a better web shopping experience for Borders.com that resulted in 62% higher order conversion. Here is a great video that goes into more details about what they did:
While I was attending the Java Posse Roundup 2009 I was able to give a 5-minute Lightning Talk about Flex. There are now so many amazing things to show with Flex that it’s really hard to narrow down what will be the most compelling. In past years I showed more code and useful things. But this year I wanted to just make people’s jaws drop.
First I showed the Tour de Flex application to encourage all of the attendees to go explore some great Flex components on their own. I also wanted to show off the new 3D APIs in Flash Player 10 so I showed Justin Everett Church’s Cloth Demo. Then I showed a prototype of an Adobe AIR based catalog for the Anthropologie women’s clothing store.
I’ll be at the TriJUG tonight talking about integrating Flex and Java in real-world applications.
On Wednesday March 18th I’ll be speaking at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Vegas.
And on March 24th I’ll be speaking in Miami at the Miami JUG.
Hope to see some of you along the way!
The Adobe Platform Evangelism team has created a DVD so that everyone can take the Tour de Flex! Included in the DVD is:
If you or someone you love needs to experience Flex…
The Flex Framework RSLs (Runtime Shared Libraries) are a great way to reduce download time for your Flex application. But they have an unfortunate side effect… They break the ability to monkey patch Flex framework classes. The reason for this is the way that the Flex compiler structures a SWF file. Every Flex application has two frames. You can think of a “frame” as a container for compiled ActionScript classes. The Flex compiler puts as few things into the first frame as possible. This is so that the loading progress bar can come up quickly (as soon as the first frame has loaded). If you put too much on the first frame then you wouldn’t see anything happening until the whole first frame is loaded. When you monkey patch a Flex Framework class it usually will go into the second frame. The problem with monkey patching and the framework RSLs is that the RSLs get loaded in the first frame. The Flash Player’s class loader won’t overwrite classes so when the preloader finishes loading and then starts loading frame two (where the monkey patched class is) it will not overwrite the class loaded from the RSL.
Development of the next version of Flex, codenamed Gumbo, is well underway. I’d really encourage everyone to go grab a build and give it a whirl. I did because I wanted to see how I could take a sample I built with Flex 3, Degrafa, and AnimateColor and build the same thing with Flex Gumbo. Here’s that version:
And here is the new version built with Gumbo and FXG (requires Flash Player 10):
Next week I begin a Java User Group tour where I’ll be talking about integrating Flex with Java, Spring, and Hibernate. First stop is the Phoenix JUG on Wednesday March 11. Then I’ll be at the Orange County JUG on Thursday March 12.
I’ll be at a number of other JUGs over the next few months. I hope to see you along the way!
This is a talk from Devoxx 2008 where Matt Chotin, Chet Haase, and I talk about the new and exciting things coming with Flex.
Let us know what you think!
The Flex team has created a survey about Flex so that we can better understand how people are using it. It takes about 20 minutes but I really encourage everyone using Flex to go take the survey. This will help the Flex team decide what things to focus on in the future.