Over the next few weeks I’ll be presenting at a few conferences:
GeoWeb - Map Based RIA Development Using Adobe Flex and AIR with Duane Nickull
OSCON - Flex: the Open Source SDK for RIAs also with Duane
LinuxWorld - Building Rich Internet Applications with an Open Source Stack
I hope to see some of you at those conferences.
Recently I did an interview with Anthony Franco, President of EffectiveUI, about Flex, Adobe AIR, and Rich Internet Applications. Check it out and let me know what you think.
The last few weeks my wife and I have been tromping around the Alps (and we climbed Mont Blanc!) Now it’s time to get back to work. This week I’m visiting a few Java User Groups to talk about the usual topics: Adobe AIR and Flex
Here is the schedule:
July 7 - Zurich Java User Group
July 8 - Paris Java User Group
July 9 - Amsterdam NLJUG
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.
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. ;)
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!
Revolutions may be enabled by technology, but they are driven by people. Adobe’s recent announcements about Flex, Flash, and Adobe AIR on Linux are the most recent technology enablers for the software revolution that is currently underway.
Usually I’m one of the first to post about Adobe’s Linux related announcements. My trip to Bangalore, India, however, made me a little late to the party this time. In case you haven’t seen the announcements, on March 31, 2008 Adobe released an alpha version of Adobe AIR on Linux and an update to the alpha version of Flex Builder 3 for Linux (which supports building AIR applications on Linux). On the same day Adobe also announced that we joined the Linux Foundation.
Adobe recently released an alpha version of Adobe AIR for Linux and a updated alpha 3 version of Flex Builder for Linux. I wanted to show everyone how easy it is to build and run desktop RIAs with Flex and Adobe AIR so I recorded a quick video. In the video I use Papervision3D and a component I created called “TurbulentApplication” to turn an ordinary AIR Application into an application which pitches and rolls in response to the accelerometer values on my Ubuntu laptop. While most AIR applications work on Windows, Mac, and Linux, this one only works on Linux because as far as I know Windows and Mac don’t have a way to read the accelerometer values from a file, like Linux. If you have Linux (and an accelerometer) and want to run the application you can download it here. If you want to download the source code for the TurbulentApplication component, you can get it here.
Bubblemark is a popular benchmark for some of the RIA technologies including Flex, Adobe AIR, Ajax (DHTML), Java Swing, Java FX, Silverlight, etc. I’ve been trying for a while to create a new Flex version of Bubblemark to show just how fast Flash Player and Adobe AIR are. But I’ve come to a few realizations… First, you can make benchmarks say whatever you want them to say.
When trying to optimize Bubblemark I found a few interesting things. First was that IE (and some versions of Firefox) limit the frame rate of Flash Player (and possibly other plugins). This means that while the Flash Player VM might be able to actually achieve 200+ frames per second the actual visual result might be only 60 fps. And maybe this is for good reason. Why do you need a visual frame rate faster than the refresh rate on a monitor? You don’t. And especially not for RIAs.