Today I leave for Europe where I will kick off my first few stops on the Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR Pre-Release Tour - Paris, Milan, London, Amsterdam, and Brussels. Then next week I take a week off the tour to speak at the Tampa Java User Group. The following week I resume the tour in the Midwest - Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, and St Louis. Find out more details about the tour at: flex.org/tour
Recently a friend asked me how to work around a visible depth issue in Flex. The problem is that a drop shadow and other filters only work on objects that are on the same plane . Suppose you have one object inside a Panel and another object “floating” outside of the panel but next to the object in the Panel. Everything works fine and these objects may appear next to each other until you add a filter to the objects. As you can see in the top example below, the drop shadow from the box outside of the Panel overlaps the box inside the Panel. What we would like to see is one contiguous drop shadow around both objects.
One of the most exciting Flex-related announcements in 2007 was the BEA Workshop and Flex Builder bundle. In case you missed it you can find coverage here, here, here, and a bunch of other places. It was big news! This was further validation that Flex is the standard for Enterprise Rich Internet Applications.
As a long-time Java developer I’ve always respected BEA. They build solid software that is the backbone of many large and mission critical systems. Their stuff just works. And their development tools are no different.
I’ve been using Alpha 1 of Flex Builder for Linux since it shipped back in October and it’s been working great! It’s great to see Alpha 2 out the door! More info here:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/releasenotes.html
[Update: QVM was an internal Adobe codename. The new VM’s name seems to be “Tamarin-Tracing”. For more info on this new VM read the announcement by Edwin Smith. Edwin doesn’t explicitly state that the VM is for mobile devices but it is hinted at. However the research paper that Edwin references does state that this tracing type of VM is good for mobile devices.]
The mobile space has been heating up lately with Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, and Sun’s JavaFX Mobile. But what about all of us developing with JavaScript 2.0 / ActionScript 3.0 / ES4? While we have been able to build for Flash Lite with Flash CS3, those of us developing with Flex haven’t had an easy way to use our existing programming knowledge to build mobile applications. Part of the reason for this is that the core language of Flex (AS3 / ES4) isn’t yet supported on mobile devices. The good news is that Adobe has just contributed a new VM targeted at mobile devices, to the Mozilla Tamarin project. Tamarin is the open source core of Flash Player 9 and will at some point be the VM in Firefox that executes JavaScript 2.0. More specifically AVM2 is the VM piece of Tamarin which executes ActionScript Byte Code (ABC). ABC can be created using the soon to be open source Flex SDK’s ASC compiler which turns AS3 (or ES4) into ABC. Unfortunately AVM2 wasn’t written to work well on mobile devices. So Adobe built Tamarin-Tracing - a new VM in Tamarin which is much better suited for non-pc devices. This is very exciting stuff!
It’s hard to believe that 2007 is almost over. It’s been an amazing year! Thanks for reading and contributing. I’m looking forward to another great year in 2008. And it all begins when I hit the road the second week of January for CodeMash 2008. I went to CodeMash last year and really enjoyed the conference, especially the water slides. :) I’ll be speaking again at CodeMash 2008 about Adobe AIR and Flex.
Update: I’ve merged BlazeBench and Census into a single demo. There is a known bug in in Firefox 3 due to a change in IFrame handling. To start the test when using FF3 you need to click on the results panel.
Today Adobe released BlazeDS, an open source Java implementation of AMF based remoting and messaging. This is huge news for the Flex, Flash, Adobe AIR and Java communities! I can’t wait to break the news with Bruce Eckel in a few hours at the JavaPolis day 2 Keynote! Check out the press release. And go download the bits. And take a look at my new BlazeBench application which shows why you want AMF and BlazeDS. Right-click on the application to find the source code on SourceForge. I’ll roll out a binary and source build in the next week or so. We have also officially published the AMF spec!
I had the great pleasure of being invited to be a guest speaker on the second RIA Weekly podcast with Coté from RedMonk and Ryan Stewart. In the podcast we discuss Oracle’s recent move to Flex and RIA as well as Java and Flex. Let me know what you think.
Jon Rose has just posted a great article on InfoQ about the Top 10 Adobe Flex Misconceptions. Let me know what you think about this list and my responses.
Yesterday was a monumental day for Flash Player. For the first time ever, a major release of Flash Player was simultaneously shipped for all three of the major operating systems - Windows, Mac, and Linux! This illustrates Adobe’s commitment to being truly cross-platform. There isn’t a ubiquitous platform in existence that is as committed to cross-platform compatibility as Adobe is with Flash Player. This is one of the things I love about Flash Player. Sun promised us “Write Once, Run Anywhere” with Java and yet they have never been able to really deliver it. Theoretically maybe, but in reality how many Java apps / applets do you see with the breadth of use that Flash Player has? Despite Java’s disappointing failure of true ubiquitous cross-platform compatibility I am hopeful that the OpenJDK will fix this. The OpenJDK does seem to be fixing the recent problem of Java 6 not being available on OS X.