Adobe AIR

One of my old blogs has been turned into a full article on the Adobe Developer Connection and updated for Flex 3 Beta 2 & Adobe AIR Beta 2:

Building an Adobe AIR application on salesforce.com with Flex 3

Also a recording of the session that I hosted at Dreamforce has been posted on the Apex Developer Network:

Make Your App *Bling*: Build Amazing Salesforce Apps Using Adobe Tech. (click on “Apex & Beyond” then scroll down to the session)

The more software experiences become like the natural world the more users are pleased with those experiences. One of the most powerful, understandable, and universal concepts in computing is the idea of a desktop containing files and folders. Users embraced this metaphor in their software because it modeled their natural world experience.

There is a paradigm shift underway. In this shift, developers are creating user interfaces which more closely model the natural world. Since 2002, the term used to describe these types of software applications is “Rich Internet Applications”, or RIAs. Technologies like Ajax, Flex, Silverlight, Adobe AIR, and JavaFX are growing in popularity as this shift to RIAs gains momentum.

I love vi. I’ve been doing Flex development on Linux for about three years - mostly with vi. But to be honest when building complex applications it is nice to have things like code hinting and integrated debugging. I’m sure you *could* make vi do that with Flex but I am not brave enough to attempt to figure that out. So I’m extremely excited that Adobe is releasing a version of Flex Builder for Linux! You can download Flex Builder for Linux from the labs.adobe.com site right now!

Last week I attended Dreamforce, salesforce.com’s annual developer conference. It was exciting to see all the innovation going on with business applications. Much of that innovation is centered around Flex and Adobe AIR. In fact 18 of the 32 companies in the salesforce.com incubator are using Flex and AIR! Does that give you an idea of where the momentum is for companies building business applications?

At the Dreamforce Day 2 keynote, Workday CEO Dave Duffield gave a demo of the new Flex-based interface to their ERP software. Duffield said multiple times that they have standardized on Flex as their UI platform! A while back I was in early meetings with Workday that focused on their possible use of Flex. I showed them my Census RIA Benchmark and some of the other amazing things they could do with Flex. I’m really glad they have decided to fully embrace Flex for their UI. Compared with the other technologies they were considering, I’m sure their developers and their customers will be much more pleased with their experience.

*\* WARNING - THIS IS TOTALLY UNSUPPORTED, UNENDORSED, AND A COMPLETE HACK **

I tried for a while to get the actual Adobe AIR runtime installed via wine on Linux. But I wasn’t able to get it to work. Then I realized that I don’t really need the whole runtime to just test my AIR applications. All I need is ADL - the testing tool for AIR applications. So I gave it a try on a Salesforce.com project I’m working on:

Step 1) Build a kick-a AIR application with Flex and/or Ajax

Step 2) Submit it to the AIR Developer Derby contest

Step 3) ???

Step 4) Profit!

Unfortunately I can’t participate because I’m an Adobe employee. But I wish you good luck and if you win please let me know if you need a travel companion (or 2 because we should take my wife too). :)

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.

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…