Flex

At Salesforce.com’s 2007 developer conference, called Dreamforce, I did a few minutes of demos during the day two keynote with Marc Benioff and Bruce Chizen. I showed three real applications built with Flex, Adobe AIR, and Salesforce.com. It was a fun experience and I only had a few minor demo glitches. Thanks to PodTech the video is below. My demos are about four minutes in.

Jive Software has always stood out to me as being a company that really cares about the user experience. I remember way back nearly 10 years ago when Jive Forums was one of the only (or at least most popular) commercial products built on the Java stack. Recently I was able to meet some of the Jive folks when I presented at the Portland Java User Group. You can tell that they are passionate about creating great software. So it’s great to see that Jive Software is embracing Flex!

I’ll be presenting at the RIA Developer Camp on Nov 5th in San Francisco with Christophe Coenraets. Go sign up now before it’s full!

One of my old blogs has been turned into a full article on the Adobe Developer Connection and updated for Flex 3 Beta 2 & Adobe AIR Beta 2:

Building an Adobe AIR application on salesforce.com with Flex 3

Also a recording of the session that I hosted at Dreamforce has been posted on the Apex Developer Network:

Make Your App *Bling*: Build Amazing Salesforce Apps Using Adobe Tech. (click on “Apex & Beyond” then scroll down to the session)

The more software experiences become like the natural world the more users are pleased with those experiences. One of the most powerful, understandable, and universal concepts in computing is the idea of a desktop containing files and folders. Users embraced this metaphor in their software because it modeled their natural world experience.

There is a paradigm shift underway. In this shift, developers are creating user interfaces which more closely model the natural world. Since 2002, the term used to describe these types of software applications is “Rich Internet Applications”, or RIAs. Technologies like Ajax, Flex, Silverlight, Adobe AIR, and JavaFX are growing in popularity as this shift to RIAs gains momentum.

I love vi. I’ve been doing Flex development on Linux for about three years - mostly with vi. But to be honest when building complex applications it is nice to have things like code hinting and integrated debugging. I’m sure you *could* make vi do that with Flex but I am not brave enough to attempt to figure that out. So I’m extremely excited that Adobe is releasing a version of Flex Builder for Linux! You can download Flex Builder for Linux from the labs.adobe.com site right now!

Last week I attended Dreamforce, salesforce.com’s annual developer conference. It was exciting to see all the innovation going on with business applications. Much of that innovation is centered around Flex and Adobe AIR. In fact 18 of the 32 companies in the salesforce.com incubator are using Flex and AIR! Does that give you an idea of where the momentum is for companies building business applications?

At the Dreamforce Day 2 keynote, Workday CEO Dave Duffield gave a demo of the new Flex-based interface to their ERP software. Duffield said multiple times that they have standardized on Flex as their UI platform! A while back I was in early meetings with Workday that focused on their possible use of Flex. I showed them my Census RIA Benchmark and some of the other amazing things they could do with Flex. I’m really glad they have decided to fully embrace Flex for their UI. Compared with the other technologies they were considering, I’m sure their developers and their customers will be much more pleased with their experience.

Emmy Huang just posted a note about the Flash adoption statistics as of September 2007. Flash 9 is now at 93.3% adoption! This is great news for Flex developers! If you develop with Flex 2 or the upcoming Flex 3, 93.3% of your visitors can run your applications without any hassle of having to update Flash. Now why haven’t Sun and Microsoft published their statistics so that developers are able to compare the adoption of the different RIA platforms?

InfoQ recently published an interview with me about Flex 3 and Silverlight. In the interview I talked about what I see are some of the differences between Flex and Silverlight. After reading my words again I realized that they may come across as critical of Silverlight. I don’t at all intend them to be taken that way. Silverlight is helping to bring the idea of richer and better user interfaces to the masses. This vision is something I believe in and I’m glad that Microsoft and Sun (with JavaFX) have all now embraced the RIA vision and are making significant investments to make it reality. Silverlight and JavaFX, have validated the programming and deployment models which Flex uses. The combination of things like a declarative language, a procedural language, cross-platform bytecode, a high performance VM, vector graphics, and a web browser plugin have been the foundation of Flex based RIAs since 2004. Silverlight and JavaFX have validated that this is the best way to build a successful RIA platform. So please don’t read my comments on Silverlight and JavaFX as being critical. I’m excited that Microsoft and Sun now believe in the RIA vision. But I’m also glad that I get to evangelize the RIA solution which is proven and available today.