In a few weeks I’ll be over in Amsterdam for JFall and FlexCamp. Both events will have some new and exciting presentations about Adobe AIR and Flex. At JFall I’ll be presenting “The Future of the Open Source Flex SDK” and at the FlexCamp I’ll be presenting “Gumbo, what will bring Flex4 to us”. I hope to see you there!
At the JAOO conference in Aarhus, Denmark I was able to co-present with Josh Holmes from Microsoft about the Architecture of RIA. This presentation was technology agnostic so we didn’t talk about specific implementations using platforms like Flex / Flash or Silverlight. Josh has posted the presentation slides and detailed notes on his blog:
Check it out and let us know what you think.
Next week I’ll be in Denmark for a few Flex presentations at JAOO and at the local university:
Architecture of a Rich Internet Application (RIA) with Josh Holmes
Developing RIAs using Adobe AIR & Flex
Data Synchronization for Rich Internet Applications
Oct 1st Presentation at the University
Hopefully I will see some of you there!
This week I’ve been at Oracle OpenWorld checking out all of the new applications Oracle has been building with Flex. Some of these seem to be integrating Flex and ADF which is a great combination of technologies! I’ve recorded videos of some of these applications which I hope to edit and publish here soon. One of those videos will feature the new Oracle MetaLink, which is a fantastic Flex application (details on Edwin Biemond’s blog).
Flex and JSF have both been widely adopted by the Java Community. In many instances developers must choose between the two technologies. Today Exadel announced a new product called Fiji which alleviates this decision by providing a simple and seamless way to integrate Flex and JSF.
This is very exciting news for Java developers. For more information read the press release, check out the product page, or see the live demos.
Last year at JavaPolis Bruce Eckel, Christoph Rooms, and I did a keynote about Flex. That talk has been posted on Parleys.com (which btw is an awesome Flex app!). You can watch it there, in their Adobe AIR application, or right here using the new Parleys.com Share (beta) widget. If you have any problems watching it here please let me know or file a bug. Thanks!
A podcast I recently did with Chariot Solutions has just been published. Let me know what you think.
A friend of mine recently asked me to help him troubleshoot some performance problems with his Flex application. In his scenario he had a large list of data and wanted to filter the data such that each time the search string grew by a character the complex filter would only be run on the results of the previous filter. A very simple approach to this is just to keep a record in each item indicating if the item matched the filter for each search string. Even though the filter function will still run for each item, the complex part of the filter function could easily be isolated and only run for the subset of data which matched the previous filter. This may not be the best way to do this (I’m open to other suggestions) but it was simple. You can see the results of my first attempt here:
Intuit has been using Flex in some very exciting ways recently. One of those is to use Flex as a developer SDK for QuickBase. This allows developers to easily build a great user interface on top of the solid and in-the-cloud back-end of QuickBase. You can find out more about this in the QuickBase Developer Program.
A few weeks ago I presented to developers in the QuickBase Developer Program about making Flex applications look and feel great by adding effects and by skinning components. Intuit has allowed me to repost that presentation here. Let me know what you think.
 Bruce Eckel and I have been working on a new Flex book aimed at those totally new to Flex. It will be very short (about 140 pages) and provide just the right information to get someone started with Flex. The book will be called "First Steps in Flex" and should be available soon.
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