A little bug in the Flex Bug DB made it so you could only vote for open bugs - which is kinda silly since deferred bugs are marked as “closed”. Well that bug has been fixed and now it’s time for the Flex Bug Voting Exchange to commence! Here’s how it works - for each bug you vote for of mine (ones I own or just like) - I’ll vote for one of yours! Bugs in bold are worth 2 votes. Just post your bugs you want me to vote for in the comments here. But make sure you vote for mine! Ok, so go and vote for these:

Pieter Humphrey of BEA has posted a great screencast about using the BEA Workshop / Flex Builder bundle. He goes through a very in-depth demonstration of using all the great features of Workshop and Flex to build a RIA front-end for the Medrec Patient Application. Definitely worth watching! Thanks Pieter for posting that!

One of the first Flex applications I built was a Flex front-end for a web based personal budgeting application called “WeBudget”. I had originally built WeBudget as a way to track how much my wife was spending on clothing. The only problem was that this required my wife to actually enter her receipts into WeBudget. I tried to make it easy by providing a WAP interface but that didn’t really work so I gave up on WeBudget. Luckily Mint, a new startup which is “Refreshing Money Management”, has come to the rescue. For those who are not familiar with Mint it’s really simple - just setup your accounts and Mint begins aggregating your transactions so that you can easily see where your money is going. It’s a safe and private way to manage your personal finances. I’ve been using it for a few months now and I love it!

Today I leave for Europe where I will kick off my first few stops on the Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR Pre-Release Tour - Paris, Milan, London, Amsterdam, and Brussels. Then next week I take a week off the tour to speak at the Tampa Java User Group. The following week I resume the tour in the Midwest - Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, and St Louis. Find out more details about the tour at: flex.org/tour

Recently a friend asked me how to work around a visible depth issue in Flex. The problem is that a drop shadow and other filters only work on objects that are on the same plane . Suppose you have one object inside a Panel and another object “floating” outside of the panel but next to the object in the Panel. Everything works fine and these objects may appear next to each other until you add a filter to the objects. As you can see in the top example below, the drop shadow from the box outside of the Panel overlaps the box inside the Panel. What we would like to see is one contiguous drop shadow around both objects.

One of the most exciting Flex-related announcements in 2007 was the BEA Workshop and Flex Builder bundle. In case you missed it you can find coverage here, here, here, and a bunch of other places. It was big news! This was further validation that Flex is the standard for Enterprise Rich Internet Applications.

As a long-time Java developer I’ve always respected BEA. They build solid software that is the backbone of many large and mission critical systems. Their stuff just works. And their development tools are no different.

I’ve been using Alpha 1 of Flex Builder for Linux since it shipped back in October and it’s been working great! It’s great to see Alpha 2 out the door! More info here:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/releasenotes.html

[Update: QVM was an internal Adobe codename. The new VM’s name seems to be “Tamarin-Tracing”. For more info on this new VM read the announcement by Edwin Smith. Edwin doesn’t explicitly state that the VM is for mobile devices but it is hinted at. However the research paper that Edwin references does state that this tracing type of VM is good for mobile devices.]

The mobile space has been heating up lately with Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, and Sun’s JavaFX Mobile. But what about all of us developing with JavaScript 2.0 / ActionScript 3.0 / ES4? While we have been able to build for Flash Lite with Flash CS3, those of us developing with Flex haven’t had an easy way to use our existing programming knowledge to build mobile applications. Part of the reason for this is that the core language of Flex (AS3 / ES4) isn’t yet supported on mobile devices. The good news is that Adobe has just contributed a new VM targeted at mobile devices, to the Mozilla Tamarin project. Tamarin is the open source core of Flash Player 9 and will at some point be the VM in Firefox that executes JavaScript 2.0. More specifically AVM2 is the VM piece of Tamarin which executes ActionScript Byte Code (ABC). ABC can be created using the soon to be open source Flex SDK’s ASC compiler which turns AS3 (or ES4) into ABC. Unfortunately AVM2 wasn’t written to work well on mobile devices. So Adobe built Tamarin-Tracing - a new VM in Tamarin which is much better suited for non-pc devices. This is very exciting stuff!

It’s hard to believe that 2007 is almost over. It’s been an amazing year! Thanks for reading and contributing. I’m looking forward to another great year in 2008. And it all begins when I hit the road the second week of January for CodeMash 2008. I went to CodeMash last year and really enjoyed the conference, especially the water slides. :) I’ll be speaking again at CodeMash 2008 about Adobe AIR and Flex.

Update: I’ve merged BlazeBench and Census into a single demo. There is a known bug in in Firefox 3 due to a change in IFrame handling. To start the test when using FF3 you need to click on the results panel.

Today Adobe released BlazeDS, an open source Java implementation of AMF based remoting and messaging. This is huge news for the Flex, Flash, Adobe AIR and Java communities! I can’t wait to break the news with Bruce Eckel in a few hours at the JavaPolis day 2 Keynote! Check out the press release. And go download the bits. And take a look at my new BlazeBench application which shows why you want AMF and BlazeDS. Right-click on the application to find the source code on SourceForge. I’ll roll out a binary and source build in the next week or so. We have also officially published the AMF spec!