Flex

I’ll be in Salt Lake City next week doing a presentation on Flex. Invitation below. I hope to see you there!

JavaOne 2008 begins in just over a week! Adobe is a sponsor again so you will find me in the booth when I’m not out at the many JavaOne parties. On Wednesday night Adobe will be hosting their party at Jillian’s. Preceding the party Chet Haase and I will be presenting a quick, fun session about Flex. More details at http://flex.org/javaone

Also on Monday at CommunityOne I’ll be doing a Lightning Talk and participating in a panel.

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.

An article which Jon Rose and I wrote called “Top 10 Mistakes when building Flex Applications” was recently published on InfoQ.com. Let us know what you think!

It is always fun when you discover new product features that you never knew existed. This happened to me last week as I was looking into Flex 3 skinning. It turns out that not only can you use a single class with states to define component skin states (like “up”, “down”, and “over” on a Button) but transitions also work with these skins! This feature has been noticed by others as well. But I figured I’d blog about it anyways - because it’s so cool!

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.