I’ve just posted the newest version of the Census RIA Benchmark application which compares data loading via various methods in Ajax, Flex, and now Laszlo. When I first began talking about the results of these benchmarks and heavily advocating AMF for large data sets some people suggested that my results were flawed because I wasn’t using gzip compression on the text streams. I have always wondered how many people actually use gzip but these critics seemed to indicate that everyone was using it. Based on some past experiments I postulated that AMF would still be significantly faster than using gzip. There is a trade off when you use gzip. The amount of data that has to cross the wire is significantly smaller but there is increased latency on the server to do the gzip and on the client to ungzip. Sometimes this trade off is worth it. Unless you are using AMF. AMF uses a very basic form of compression that is extremely fast, faster even than just creating XML or JSON strings. And of course much faster than creating big strings and then compressing/decompressing them. Now there is definitive proof of this. AMF is still by far the fastest method for loading large data sets in RIAs. Not only is it faster for loading the data, Tamarin makes client-side operations like sorts and filters extremely fast. All of this is evident if you spend some time with the Census application. Check it out and let me know what you think.

This week I have been in Crested Butte, Colorado at the Flex / AIR Jam. It’s been a great event for everyone. Those new to Flex have learned a ton and those with more experience have been able to extend their knowledge by working on real projects. Over the past two days I’ve made considerable progress on two different projects. One project is the new version of the Census - RIA Benchmark app. I’ll be posting the new version with GZip support and a new Laszlo test tomorrow. The other project I’ve been working on is an enterprise Flex application framework kinda like a portal. This project is named “Anvil”. The goals of Anvil are to support large Flex application deployment scenarios, illustrate best practices for application partitioning, and be a reusable open source framework for portal-like applications. I’ll be publishing more info on Anvil in the next few weeks.

For those who don’t know, MAX is Adobe’s yearly developer conference for products including Flex and AIR. There will be tons of great presentations by many of our engineers. Beyond the presentations what I enjoy most is the social aspect. It’s the conversations that happen between the customers, evangelists, engineers, pm’s, execs, etc that make MAX great. I hope that you will be able to join the conversation that will happen at Adobe MAX 2007. If you are planning on going, sign up by tomorrow so that you can take advantage of the early bird discount.

My friend Jon Rose has written a great article on using Flex and Java together. Jon is a long time Java programmer. We were coding Java web apps together back in the days before Struts. It’s great to see Jon making statements like “Flex is the most obvious and elegant solution currently available to Java developers.” The article also references some of my code from the Census App to show how easy it is to integrate Java & Flex. If you are a Java programmer you should definitely read this article.

One of the “problems” with using Flex so much is that I get used to having a simple, predictable layout mechanism. I seem to have forgotten how to do just about anything in HTML. So can someone help me fix the Digg, Reddit, and Share This stuff below? I’ve tried and tried and can’t figure out how to get the dang things to align correctly. Ideally they would align to the bottom of a div or something. Gosh it’s really embarrassing admitting publicly that I can’t do HTML anymore. But since you have already seen how bad this blog looks, you probably already guessed that. :) Oh well. Please help.

As [previously discussed][1], my friend Joshua from Sun [recently blogged][2] about how the consumer JRE will take market share from Flash in 2008. Today Sameer Tyagi , also from Sun, [blogged][3] about problems with using Flex to front-end JAX-WS. Both posts seem to insinuate Flash and Flex as competitors to Java. Yet for me Java and Flex have always been a perfect match.

The continued success of Flash and Flex only helps to better position Java in the enterprise. Adobe is not a threat to Java’s continued dominance on the server. In fact many Adobe enterprise products are built on the Java platform including Flex Data Services. If you must have an enemy then I suggest targeting those who actually have something to gain by Java losing market share in the enterprise. That is definitely not Adobe.

My friend Joshua from Sun has predicted that “2008 will be the year that client Java starts taking market share from Flash”. This is a pretty bold prediction reminding me of when I used to hear this same sort of statement about Desktop Linux… “1999 will be the year of Desktop Linux”.

Don’t get me wrong… I love Desktop Linux. Been using it since about 1993. And I love Java. Been using it since 1996. But lets be honest about the reality of client Java, desktop Linux, anything that touches the mass consumer space. It has to just work. I’m thankful that Ubuntu and the Consumer JRE are headed this direction. But Flex and Flash are there today! Flash just works. So much so that in the first nine months, Flash Player 9 reached 84% adoption in the US and is likely well beyond 90% currently. That is a platform you can rely on. One you can build on today. Tons of consumer Flex applications have already been deployed. And tons more are not visible because they are still being built or behind the corporate firewall.

Today is the last day you will be able to get the early bird discount on the Flex/AIR Jam and RIA Summit conferences in Crested Butte. Also, attendees of the Flex/AIR Jam will get a free copy of Flex Builder! The Jam will be a fantastic way to learn how to use or extend your knowledge of Flex and AIR. Bring your laptop and spend two days of hands-on, coached coding. The RIA Summit will be a three day Open Space style event focused on discussion about Rich Internet Applications. I’ve been to events run by Bruce Eckel in Crested Butte before. They are the best events I’ve been to and highly recommend them. Go sign up today to get the early bird discount. I hope to see you there!

This tutorial has been updated to Flex 3 Beta 2. The new version is now on the Adobe Developer Connection:
Building a standalone Adobe AIR application on salesforce.com with Flex 3

The excitement around using Flex & AIR to build amazing front-ends for Salesforce applications continues to grow. Nitobi has posted [a cool AIR application][1] that uses the Salesforce Ajax library. Also Dave Carroll of Salesforce has posted [a great blog][2] about why Flex & AIR developers should care about the Apex platform. Back in April I posted [the first version][3] of a tutorial about how to use the Flex Toolkit for Apex to build AIR (was Apollo) applications. Since the Flex 3 and AIR betas were released recently it’s time to update that tutorial. So if you want to start building some sexy interfaces on top of salesforce.com follow along…

On Sunday I was in Portland for UbuntuLive. I had two sessions, one focused on what I call “The Irrelevant Operating System” and the other was about building cross-platform applications on Linux with Flex. This was the second Linux conference I’ve spoken at. I hope to speak at more because Linux has been an important part of my computing life. I was trying to remember when I first started using Linux. I think it was in 1993 around the Slackware 1.0 release. I’ve used Linux as my primary desktop pretty consistently since then. Today I use Gentoo and Ubuntu. It’s pretty exciting to see what Ubuntu is doing with Linux. They will continue to lead the way and bring Desktop Linux to many more people. It was a great conference and hanging out with some great people Sunday night at Kell’s Irish Pub in Portland was delightful.