Tomorrow at 3:30 at Adobe MAX 2008 there will be a session on building rich Internet applications in the cloud using Salesforce and Adobe Flex. They will even be giving away a new Macbook! The combination of Flex and Force.com (the platform side of Salesforce) is a fantastic way to build RIAs in the cloud. If you are at MAX this is a session not to miss!
Over the past few months Greg Wilson, Christophe Coenraets, and myself have been hard at work on a secret project. So today we are proud to announce the new Tour de Flex has just gone live! Tour de Flex showcases the capabilities of Flex, BlazeDS, LCDS, Adobe AIR, and Flash Player (now collectively called the Adobe Flash Platform).
Like the old Flex Component Explorer, Tour de Flex can be used to find components. But it goes way beyond just out-of-the-box Flex components. This first release contains 217 components and samples including popular Cloud APIs like Salesforce.com and Intuit, numerous community components from people like Doug McCune and Tink, commercial components from companies like ILog, and numerous other goodies. If you find something missing you can submit it!
While at AjaxWorld 2008 I had the chance to record another episode of the “RIA Cowboy Videos”. This time I talk with Lightstreamer about their AS3 / Flex APIs for streaming data to the client. Check out the video and let me know what you think.
IntelliJ IDEA 8.0, the popular Java IDE, has been released and now supports building and debugging Flex applications. This is great validation of Flex’s momentum in the Java community. For more information on how to get started see “Creating Flex Applications with IntelliJ IDEA”. If you are a Java and Flex developer you should definitely download the trial version and check it out.
Normal computer users like my father know at least three software vendors: Microsoft, Adobe, and Intuit. Microsoft is known for Windows and Office, Adobe for PDF (Reader / Acrobat), and Intuit for Quicken and QuickBooks. Yet all three of these software vendors are changing. All are moving in two directions concurrently: rich Internet applications and the cloud. These two paradigm shifts are changing how developers build software but more importantly they are changing how people like my father experience and use software.
Update: I’ve posted another Portable RIA demo.
The web began as a platform for browsing, finding, and exchanging documents. Over the past ten years the web has moved beyond this document-centric role, and is now a platform for exchanging data. We typically refer to web sites used for data exchange as web applications. The next major evolution of the web is underway as web applications become more interactive and useful. The industry now refers to these next generation web applications as rich Internet applications or RIAs.
I’m here at day one of Dreamforce 2008, Salesforce.com’s annual conference. During Marc Benioff’s keynote they announced the new Force.com Sites technology for Salesforce hosted websites which can integrate with Salesforce data. At the end of the keynote Marc brought out Neil Young to talk about LincVolt, an open community for converting gasoline based cars to electric / compressed natural gas cars. It’s a very cool project but what I was really excited about was their use of Flex on the Force.com Sites powered LincVolt website. Here is a camera phone picture of the keynote (notice the sexy Flex chart at the bottom - which you can also see by going to the site).
Since I’m frequently at conferences meeting cool people I thought it would be fun to start recording videos of some of the great things I get to see in my travels. For lack of a more creative title I’m just calling these “RIA Cowboy Videos”. This first video is from AjaxWorld 2008 where I had the guys from Neotys talk about and show off their product NeoLoad, that load tests Flex applications. Interestingly I just watched a screencast by the Farata Systems guys where they used NeoLoad to load test BlazeDS on Jetty using the new Servlet 3 NIO stuff. Detailed article here.
We’ve just posted episode 2 of the new “Drunk on Software” video podcast. In this episode Jon Rose and I talk with Stu Stern from Gorilla Logic about automated testing and FlexMonkey - a tool for automating unit tests in Flex. Let us know what you think.
Just a quick note to let everyone know that I’ll be at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference next week in San Francisco. On Tuesday I’ll be co-presenting a session on using Adobe AIR and Flex with Force.com. The rest of the time I’ll probably be in the developer lounge hacking on Flex code. Stop by and say hello!