Flex

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.

Adobe MAX is a special time of year. Kind-of like getting together the family for Christmas… Lots of drinking, carousing, and the gift of inspiring Flex talks by people like Ely Greenfield and Christophe Coenraets.

This year festivities take place November 16 - 19 at Moscone in San Francisco. Moscone has become like my second home so I’m glad to yet again visit that little village by the sea. Best thing about Moscone is the number of Starbucks within a block of the place.

Chet Haase and I will be doing a presentation at the SDForum Java SIG in Palo Alto on June 3. Hope to see you there!

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!

Artima recently posted two interviews with me which relate to Flex. First is an interview about Adobe’s Open Screen Project. The second is called Rich-Client Misconceptions. Also Bruce Eckel recently posted a very interesting article on Artima called “Concurrency with Python, Twisted, and Flex”. Let me know what you think about those.

At JavaOne 2008 the daily edition of “JavaOne Today” features an interview with Sun’s Tor Norbye saying “Java and the Flex SDK are both open sourced. I hope they both benefit from community involvement at whatever level people choose to get involved.”

Funny thing is that this is actually a quote from Chet Haase of Adobe which was featured in yesterday’s JavaOne Today. Whoops.

See a picture from Tor’s interview below.

9,547 = Number of members of the FlexCoders Yahoo! Group.

That’s 9,547 more reasons you can Count on Flex!

“Count on Flex” is a series of blogs about the current state of the Flex ecosystem… by the numbers.

There will be numerous mini-sessions happening this year at the Adobe booth at JavaOne 2008. I’ll be doing a “Building High Performance RIAs” session and a “The Open Source RIA Stack” session. Chet Haase will be doing a “Filthy Rich [Flex] Clients” session. Bob Tierney will be doing a “LiveCycle Data Services” session and a “LiveCycle and BEA” session. Duane Nickull will also be doing sessions. We also have one guest presenter, Igor Polevoy from Exadel, who will be demonstrating Flex and Seam integration with Flamingo. Igor’s session will be at 1pm on Tuesday. Other session times are TBD - so stop by the booth on Tuesday to pickup a schedule. Also, make sure that you come to the Filthy Rich [Flex] Clients session with Stephan Jansen (of Parleys.com and JavaPolis), Chet Haase, and myself which precedes the Adobe party on Wednesday night. Stop by the booth to pickup an invite. See you there!