Flex

Over the next few months I’ll be going around the world (literally) speaking about Flex and Adobe AIR. Here’s a quick rundown on where I’ll be:

Wednesday March 25 in Las Vegas: TheServerSide Java Symposium - Co-presenting with Eddie O’Neil from BEA

Thursday March 26 in Philadelphia: Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise - Porting from Web 1.0 to RIA in the Enterprise

Thursday April 3 in Bangalore, India: Adobe RIA Architect Summit 2008 - Best Practices for Building Flex/AIR applications

In case you missed the Flex 3 / Adobe AIR 1.0 Pre-release Tour that went on around the world in January you can watch a recording of the session Serge Jespers and I did in Amsterdam. It starts out in Dutch but soon switches to English. You can skip ahead by clicking on a topic on the bottom left, then clicking the “Bekijk deze sessie”. Let me know what you think.

For the Flex 2 product pages on adobe.com I recorded a screencast of a Flex app being built in 11 minutes. For Flex 3 I recorded a new version of that screencast. In the new version I used Doug McCune’s CoverFlow component but extended it to easily support playing videos. Check out a demo of the VideoCoverFlow component and right-click to download the source code. For those trying to use the VideoCoverFlow component - the implementation has changed slightly since I recorded the screencast so check out the myTube application for an example of how to use it.

Today Adobe launched Flex 3 and Adobe AIR 1.0 – the most mature and comprehensive platform for Rich Internet Applications in existence.

The news of the launch is everywhere but I wanted to point out a few of the most exciting things related to this launch.

The Flex SDK and BlazeDS are now officially open source.

InfoQ has published an interview with me on the Flex 3 launch. They have also posted an interview with Kevin Hoyt on the AIR 1.0 launch as well as an overview of today’s announcements.

Almost a year ago I began working with Ron Hess and Dave Carroll from Salesforce on the Flex Toolkit for Apex - a port of the JavaScript libraries for Salesforce.com’s web services. Since that time the toolkit has matured and been used in numerous production applications. Today I am pleased to announce the new Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex. This new toolkit build on the Flex Toolkit for Apex and adds additional functionality for the new Adobe AIR runtime for desktop RIAs.

Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime for deliverying rich Internet applications on the desktop. Developers using Flex, Flash, HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax can easily build applications for the desktop using Adobe AIR. As of today there have only been releases of Adobe AIR for Windows and Mac but Adobe is committed to also delivering a version for Linux. This is great news for developers like me who use Linux as their primary desktop operating system. The Adobe AIR team is now in the phase of development where they need a handful of additional testers to begin testing initial builds of AIR on Linux. If you are interested please answer the questions below in an email to helptesterairlinux at adobe dot com.

An article titled “From Tags to Riches: Going from Web 1.0 to Flex” which I co-authored with Shashank Tiwari has been published on InfoQ. In the article, Shashank and I walk through the steps needed to port a traditional HTML-based application to Flex. We use the Java-based Pentaho BI Dashboard as our example application. Our goal in writing the article was to make the process easy for anyone to try on their own. It should be easy to try it yourself — just download the code and other necessary pieces. Also, if you want to play with the end result, you can access the Flex application here. Let us know what you think.

A little bug in the Flex Bug DB made it so you could only vote for open bugs - which is kinda silly since deferred bugs are marked as “closed”. Well that bug has been fixed and now it’s time for the Flex Bug Voting Exchange to commence! Here’s how it works - for each bug you vote for of mine (ones I own or just like) - I’ll vote for one of yours! Bugs in bold are worth 2 votes. Just post your bugs you want me to vote for in the comments here. But make sure you vote for mine! Ok, so go and vote for these:

Pieter Humphrey of BEA has posted a great screencast about using the BEA Workshop / Flex Builder bundle. He goes through a very in-depth demonstration of using all the great features of Workshop and Flex to build a RIA front-end for the Medrec Patient Application. Definitely worth watching! Thanks Pieter for posting that!

One of the first Flex applications I built was a Flex front-end for a web based personal budgeting application called “WeBudget”. I had originally built WeBudget as a way to track how much my wife was spending on clothing. The only problem was that this required my wife to actually enter her receipts into WeBudget. I tried to make it easy by providing a WAP interface but that didn’t really work so I gave up on WeBudget. Luckily Mint, a new startup which is “Refreshing Money Management”, has come to the rescue. For those who are not familiar with Mint it’s really simple - just setup your accounts and Mint begins aggregating your transactions so that you can easily see where your money is going. It’s a safe and private way to manage your personal finances. I’ve been using it for a few months now and I love it!