I had the great pleasure of being invited to be a guest speaker on the second RIA Weekly podcast with Coté from RedMonk and Ryan Stewart. In the podcast we discuss Oracle’s recent move to Flex and RIA as well as Java and Flex. Let me know what you think.
Jon Rose has just posted a great article on InfoQ about the Top 10 Adobe Flex Misconceptions. Let me know what you think about this list and my responses.
Yesterday was a monumental day for Flash Player. For the first time ever, a major release of Flash Player was simultaneously shipped for all three of the major operating systems - Windows, Mac, and Linux! This illustrates Adobe’s commitment to being truly cross-platform. There isn’t a ubiquitous platform in existence that is as committed to cross-platform compatibility as Adobe is with Flash Player. This is one of the things I love about Flash Player. Sun promised us “Write Once, Run Anywhere” with Java and yet they have never been able to really deliver it. Theoretically maybe, but in reality how many Java apps / applets do you see with the breadth of use that Flash Player has? Despite Java’s disappointing failure of true ubiquitous cross-platform compatibility I am hopeful that the OpenJDK will fix this. The OpenJDK does seem to be fixing the recent problem of Java 6 not being available on OS X.
While I was at Dreamforce this year I had the chance to do a video interview with Peter Coffee from Salesforce.com. In this interview we discussed the industry momentum behind RIAs in enterprise software and how Flex, Adobe AIR, and Force.com are being combined to deliver much better user experiences in business applications. The recorded interview is below. You can also find the original post on Peter Coffee’s blog.
Admittedly I know very little about concurrent computing. But the consensus seems to be that it’s the future. We can’t keep building faster CPUs so we are just going with more of them. This presents a problem for software that can’t easily be split into pieces. If some CPU intensive piece of code can’t be chopped up to run in parallel then it is constrained by the speed of a single CPU. So what is the solution? Some think that the programming models need to change to better accommodate parallel computing. The problem is that no matter how smart the programming model is at splitting stuff up you are always going to be blocked by IO operations - memory, ram, network, etc. Others think that one solution may be Transactional Memory. This can potentially alleviate the problem of threads waiting for locks.
A few weeks ago I was able to participate in a Chalk Talk with Salesforce.com and StakeWare. The session focused on how Rich Internet Applications, Flex, and Adobe AIR relate to the Force.com platform. With this combination of technologies companies like StakeWare can quickly build business applications that have rich user interfaces that work the same across browsers and operating systems.
PodTech recorded the session and have split it into three parts [part1, part2, part3]. I spoke in part 2. You can watch the video below or on the PodTech site.
At Oracle OpenWorld on Tuesday and then on Wednesday at Larry Ellison’s keynote the seventh Flex application announced at OpenWorld was demonstrated. Like Sales Prospector and Sales Library this application, Sales Campaign, is part of the larger Oracle CRM OnDemand suite that is scheduled to go live in the first half of 2008. The Sales Campaign application allows sales people to easily create and track the success of their campaigns. Like all the other Flex applications Oracle showed over the past few days the interface is simple, clean, and effective. Exactly what users want! Great job Oracle! Here is a photo of Sales Campaign from the Tuesday session (courtesy of Todd Ruhl - my personal photographer assistant - just kidding - Todd has been an instrumental part of educating Oracle about Flex and getting Flex adopted at Oracle):
The second Flex application which Oracle demonstrated at Ed Abbo’s keynote on Tuesday was Sales Library. The Sales Library helps sales people organize and share their sales content. The interface is very clean and elegant. The transitions are smooth and useful. Very impressive stuff! Here is a photo of the Sales Library demo from Oracle OpenWorld (courtesy of Todd Ruhl):
Still one more Oracle Flex application left to announce. Stay tuned.
In Ed Abbo’s keynote at Oracle OpenWorld on Tuesday, Oracle announced two new products that are built with Flex. The first, Sales Prospector, will go live in the first half of 2008. The Sales Prospector helps companies make better sales forecasts and in the words of Larry Ellison the software will “help the salesperson sell” instead of just forecast. The demo looked great! I can’t wait to try it out! Here is a photo from the keynote (courtesy of Todd Ruhl):
Matt Raible is one of those guys in the Java community who I’ve always respected. He has been around for a long time and contributed a ton to making the ecosystem better. He recently posted a few blogs about “Comparing JVM Web Frameworks”:
http://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/comparing_web_frameworks_time_for
http://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/comparing_jvm_web_frameworks_presentation
I wanted to respond to Matt’s request to provide feedback about his presentation. Due to the length of my response I decided to post it on my blog instead of in the comments on his. So here goes…