Flex

I am usually on Linux when I develop Flex applications and I recently discovered a cool trick that makes development even easier. Use Epiphany as the browser you run / test your applications in instead of Firefox. Here’s a few reasons:

• If Epiphany crashes because your app goes crazy it doesn’t take your normal browser and all its sessions down with it.

• Epiphany uses inotify or a file watch and automatically refreshes when your application changes. It saves quite a bit of time to have the application already loaded before I can even switch to my browser.

This past weekend I did a three hour workshop on Flex at the Rich Web Experience. We started with some very simple stuff and ended with a YouTube Video Player that includes a Draggable Panel, Live Reflection, and a simple Model View Controller (MVC) architecture. You can see the application here:

http://www.jamesward.org/youtube/youtube.html

You can get the code by right-clicking on the application and selecting “View Source”. If you want to compile that code you will also need NJ’s DragPanel and Reflector components available from:

Bruce Eckel has posted a terrific article on “Creating Flex Components”. As usual Bruce is able to promote understanding of deep technical topics through simple examples and clear narrative.

Article Summary:

As Joe Nuxoll of JBuilder and JavaPosse fame will tell you (given the slightest provocation), one place where the Java designers completely dropped the ball is in Java’s component model. This becomes especially clear when comparing it with a system like Flex which has full language support for components.

Step 1) Build a kick-a AIR application with Flex and/or Ajax

Step 2) Submit it to the AIR Developer Derby contest

Step 3) ???

Step 4) Profit!

Unfortunately I can’t participate because I’m an Adobe employee. But I wish you good luck and if you win please let me know if you need a travel companion (or 2 because we should take my wife too). :)

I’ve just posted the newest version of the Census RIA Benchmark application which compares data loading via various methods in Ajax, Flex, and now Laszlo. When I first began talking about the results of these benchmarks and heavily advocating AMF for large data sets some people suggested that my results were flawed because I wasn’t using gzip compression on the text streams. I have always wondered how many people actually use gzip but these critics seemed to indicate that everyone was using it. Based on some past experiments I postulated that AMF would still be significantly faster than using gzip. There is a trade off when you use gzip. The amount of data that has to cross the wire is significantly smaller but there is increased latency on the server to do the gzip and on the client to ungzip. Sometimes this trade off is worth it. Unless you are using AMF. AMF uses a very basic form of compression that is extremely fast, faster even than just creating XML or JSON strings. And of course much faster than creating big strings and then compressing/decompressing them. Now there is definitive proof of this. AMF is still by far the fastest method for loading large data sets in RIAs. Not only is it faster for loading the data, Tamarin makes client-side operations like sorts and filters extremely fast. All of this is evident if you spend some time with the Census application. Check it out and let me know what you think.

This week I have been in Crested Butte, Colorado at the Flex / AIR Jam. It’s been a great event for everyone. Those new to Flex have learned a ton and those with more experience have been able to extend their knowledge by working on real projects. Over the past two days I’ve made considerable progress on two different projects. One project is the new version of the Census - RIA Benchmark app. I’ll be posting the new version with GZip support and a new Laszlo test tomorrow. The other project I’ve been working on is an enterprise Flex application framework kinda like a portal. This project is named “Anvil”. The goals of Anvil are to support large Flex application deployment scenarios, illustrate best practices for application partitioning, and be a reusable open source framework for portal-like applications. I’ll be publishing more info on Anvil in the next few weeks.

For those who don’t know, MAX is Adobe’s yearly developer conference for products including Flex and AIR. There will be tons of great presentations by many of our engineers. Beyond the presentations what I enjoy most is the social aspect. It’s the conversations that happen between the customers, evangelists, engineers, pm’s, execs, etc that make MAX great. I hope that you will be able to join the conversation that will happen at Adobe MAX 2007. If you are planning on going, sign up by tomorrow so that you can take advantage of the early bird discount.

My friend Jon Rose has written a great article on using Flex and Java together. Jon is a long time Java programmer. We were coding Java web apps together back in the days before Struts. It’s great to see Jon making statements like “Flex is the most obvious and elegant solution currently available to Java developers.” The article also references some of my code from the Census App to show how easy it is to integrate Java & Flex. If you are a Java programmer you should definitely read this article.

As [previously discussed][1], my friend Joshua from Sun [recently blogged][2] about how the consumer JRE will take market share from Flash in 2008. Today Sameer Tyagi , also from Sun, [blogged][3] about problems with using Flex to front-end JAX-WS. Both posts seem to insinuate Flash and Flex as competitors to Java. Yet for me Java and Flex have always been a perfect match.

The continued success of Flash and Flex only helps to better position Java in the enterprise. Adobe is not a threat to Java’s continued dominance on the server. In fact many Adobe enterprise products are built on the Java platform including Flex Data Services. If you must have an enemy then I suggest targeting those who actually have something to gain by Java losing market share in the enterprise. That is definitely not Adobe.

My friend Joshua from Sun has predicted that “2008 will be the year that client Java starts taking market share from Flash”. This is a pretty bold prediction reminding me of when I used to hear this same sort of statement about Desktop Linux… “1999 will be the year of Desktop Linux”.

Don’t get me wrong… I love Desktop Linux. Been using it since about 1993. And I love Java. Been using it since 1996. But lets be honest about the reality of client Java, desktop Linux, anything that touches the mass consumer space. It has to just work. I’m thankful that Ubuntu and the Consumer JRE are headed this direction. But Flex and Flash are there today! Flash just works. So much so that in the first nine months, Flash Player 9 reached 84% adoption in the US and is likely well beyond 90% currently. That is a platform you can rely on. One you can build on today. Tons of consumer Flex applications have already been deployed. And tons more are not visible because they are still being built or behind the corporate firewall.