Last week I was able to be a guest speaker on the RIA Weekly podcast. In the episode Coté and I talked about RIAs in Portals, Flex and Open Source, and other various topics. Give it a listen and let us know what you think.

Jon Rose and I will both be at the Flex Jam in Crested Butte, CO on Feb 25 - 27, 2009. So we will certainly be getting Drunk on Software! Hope to see you there!

I think I’m the only Flex developer out there that doesn’t like code behind or mx:Script blocks. So I have my own way of doing things. What can I say? I’m a cowboy! ;)

I frequently code event handlers inline like:

<mx:Button>
    <mx:click>    
    // do something
    // do something else
    </mx:click>
</mx:Button>

I just don’t like having to find code that is only used in this one place somewhere else. This method is just more readable to me.

FedEx has just launched their new Flex-based “My FedEx” application! This is a great example of Flex-based RIAs becoming more prevalant in enterprise software. Very cool stuff!

A little over a year ago Adobe opened the AMF spec. Now Adobe has announced it will be opening the RTMP spec! Wahoo!!! This is big news for Flex developers! For those that don’t know, RTMP is the streaming protocol used for streaming video and audio in Flash Media Server and for streaming data in LiveCycle Data Services. The spec is expected to be published first half of this year.

A new episode of Drunk on Software is available. In this episode we talk with Ryan Knight about Enterprise Flex Applications and the open source Anvil project. Let us know what you think!

At CodeMash 2009 I was able to participate in a panel discussion about Rich Internet Applications, Flex, Silverlight, and Ajax. The panel was moderated by Richard and Carl from the .NET Rocks! podcast. Also on the panel was Josh Holmes and Jesse Liberty from Microsoft and Leon Gersing. It was a fun panel - especially since we enjoyed some fine whiskey during it! But also because it’s great to see how we all have common goals - we all want software to be better no matter what the underlying technology is.

Adobe recently announced the release of Adobe AIR 1.5 for Linux! For us Linux users this is huge! Now desktop RIAs with Adobe AIR work the same on Windows, Mac, and Linux! I recorded a short instructional video that shows how to get it working.

(Original video size is 1024 x 768 so you might want to <a href="/air_on_linux"target=”_blank” >open it in a new window or tab.)

The Flash Platform (Adobe AIR, Flash Player, Flex, etc.) has become a mainstream software development platform. This is very exciting but also leads to me getting a boat-load of email. That is great! I love hearing from the community and answering questions. I do respond to every email I get - even if it takes a year! I am frequently asked about partnerships. It seems that everyone who is building products or services related to the Flash Platform wants to know how they can help Adobe and how Adobe can help them. I love getting these emails because as the ecosystem around the Flash Platform grows, the Platform itself grows. But due to my often high latency in responding to email I figured it would be good to document many of the Flash Platform Partner resources that are already out there. Here they are…