The Thinking in Flex keynote which Bruce Eckel, Christoph Rooms, and I did at JavaPolis 2007 has been posted! [Check it out!][3]

Let me know what you think.

BTW: Don’t you love that [Parleys.com][4] is a Flex app?!? And they also have an Adobe AIR version of their app which works pretty well on Linux. (To install the Parleys AIR app on Linux install [Adobe AIR for Linux][5] and then get [the Parleys .air file][6].)

Last week I spent a few hours with Dick Wall of the Java Posse working on an application which combines Google App Engine, Adobe AIR, and Flex. This was a fun experiment that turned into a pretty cool application. The application, named QuickFix, sends an image to Google App Engine which does an “I’m Feeling Lucky” transformation on the image and sends it back. Here’s a screenshot of it fixing one of the photos I took at the Java Posse Roundup this past winter:

Just a quick note about two great articles which were recently published:

ActionScript Collections and Functional Programming by Bruce Eckel

In this article Bruce provides examples and insights into the functional pieces of ActionScript. He also covers some of the lesser known things about Collections. I learned quite a bit from this one!

InfoQ Case Study: NASDAQ Market Replay

Jon Rose worked with NASDAQ to create a great case study about using Adobe AIR, Flex, and Amazon S3.

I’ve gone commercial. Kinda. I just bought jamesward.com and it is now my primary domain name instead of jamesward.org. I liked the .org URL but it’s a less familiar URL to non-geeks. You say .com and everyone knows what you mean. The .org will still work - redirects right to here.

So I’m a sell-out. Gone .com. Good news is that you still won’t see any ads on my site.

Adobe MAX is a special time of year. Kind-of like getting together the family for Christmas… Lots of drinking, carousing, and the gift of inspiring Flex talks by people like Ely Greenfield and Christophe Coenraets.

This year festivities take place November 16 - 19 at Moscone in San Francisco. Moscone has become like my second home so I’m glad to yet again visit that little village by the sea. Best thing about Moscone is the number of Starbucks within a block of the place.

Chet Haase and I will be doing a presentation at the SDForum Java SIG in Palo Alto on June 3. Hope to see you there!

InfoQ.com has posted an old interview I did with Jon Rose at their QCon SF 2007 conference. In this slightly dated interview I talk about the usual Flex, Adobe AIR, and RIA topics. Makes me wish I still had my beard. Gosh I was sexy. ;)

I run 32-bit Linux but there is a very vocal group of people who really want 64-bit Linux support for Flash Player. Today there is a decent work around for running the 32-bit Flash Player on a 64-bit Linux system using the nspluginwrapper. From what I’ve heard it works fairly well on most distro’s but I haven’t heard yet how well it works with the new Flash Player 10 beta. Despite this potential work around eventually Adobe does need to natively support 64-bit Linux - and they will. This is not as simple as a recompile - otherwise there would be 64-bit support today. There is a bug already filed in the public Flash Player bug database for 64-bit support. I’d encourage you to not just go vote for that bug but also to get involved. As Tinic Uro points out in the bug comments, the missing piece for 64-bit support is open source - so you can help! Flash Player uses the open source Mozilla Tamarin VM. This VM does not yet support 64-bit Linux because all that machine code generation in the JIT compiler needs to be ported from 32-bit to 64-bit. The code is in Mozilla’s Tamarin Central Mercurial repo. This IS open source! You can help get 64-bit Linux support for Flash Player!

Tomorrow night I’ll be presenting at the New York GNU/Linux Meetup Group about Adobe Open Source - including the Adobe Flex SDK, Mozilla Tamarin, Adobe AIR (pieces like SQLite and WebKit), and BlazeDS. More details here. Hope to see you there!

Artima recently posted two interviews with me which relate to Flex. First is an interview about Adobe’s Open Screen Project. The second is called Rich-Client Misconceptions. Also Bruce Eckel recently posted a very interesting article on Artima called “Concurrency with Python, Twisted, and Flex”. Let me know what you think about those.