Flex

Today is the last day you will be able to get the early bird discount on the Flex/AIR Jam and RIA Summit conferences in Crested Butte. Also, attendees of the Flex/AIR Jam will get a free copy of Flex Builder! The Jam will be a fantastic way to learn how to use or extend your knowledge of Flex and AIR. Bring your laptop and spend two days of hands-on, coached coding. The RIA Summit will be a three day Open Space style event focused on discussion about Rich Internet Applications. I’ve been to events run by Bruce Eckel in Crested Butte before. They are the best events I’ve been to and highly recommend them. Go sign up today to get the early bird discount. I hope to see you there!

This tutorial has been updated to Flex 3 Beta 2. The new version is now on the Adobe Developer Connection:
Building a standalone Adobe AIR application on salesforce.com with Flex 3

The excitement around using Flex & AIR to build amazing front-ends for Salesforce applications continues to grow. Nitobi has posted [a cool AIR application][1] that uses the Salesforce Ajax library. Also Dave Carroll of Salesforce has posted [a great blog][2] about why Flex & AIR developers should care about the Apex platform. Back in April I posted [the first version][3] of a tutorial about how to use the Flex Toolkit for Apex to build AIR (was Apollo) applications. Since the Flex 3 and AIR betas were released recently it’s time to update that tutorial. So if you want to start building some sexy interfaces on top of salesforce.com follow along…

On Sunday I was in Portland for UbuntuLive. I had two sessions, one focused on what I call “The Irrelevant Operating System” and the other was about building cross-platform applications on Linux with Flex. This was the second Linux conference I’ve spoken at. I hope to speak at more because Linux has been an important part of my computing life. I was trying to remember when I first started using Linux. I think it was in 1993 around the Slackware 1.0 release. I’ve used Linux as my primary desktop pretty consistently since then. Today I use Gentoo and Ubuntu. It’s pretty exciting to see what Ubuntu is doing with Linux. They will continue to lead the way and bring Desktop Linux to many more people. It was a great conference and hanging out with some great people Sunday night at Kell’s Irish Pub in Portland was delightful.

There is a ton of great Flex and AIR events going on over the next few months. Here’s the run down of events I’ll be at:

The FREE Flex Camp is July 27th in San Francisco. This is going to be a great way to learn more about Flex. Spots are going fast so go register today! I’ll be at this event so hopefully I will get to meet some of you in person.

On July 16th I will be presenting at the TriJUG in North Carolina beginning at 6:30pm. There will be some great give-aways including a copy of Flex Builder 2. Then on Tuesday July 17th, buni.org and I will be hosting a half day Flex Sprint in Durham. This will be a great opportunity to get some hands-on Flex training, FOR FREE! Andy Oliver and I will be helping as many people who show up, learn Flex. You just need to bring a laptop (with power adapter & wireless). Festivities begin at 8:30 and end at noon. We will meet on the lower floor of Bean Traders Coffee.

My all time favorite journalist, Robert X. Cringely, has just published his weekly PBS article, this time discussing the future of Adobe’s platform technologies. It’s a great read and great press for our (Adobe) platform. Let me know what you all think about his opinions.

Dave Carroll of salesforce.com has posted a very cool Apollo Widget that pulls data from Salesforce and uses the Flex Toolkit for Apex.

Very cool stuff!

On Monday I presented at the Salesforce Developer Conference in Santa Clara. It was a great conference! The keynote was especially exciting because it kinda turned into the Flex/Apollo show. Near the middle of his keynote Marc Benioff went on about how great Adobe is for innovating with Flex and Apollo. He then brought Kevin Lynch on stage who did his usual Apollo demos, which filled the crowd with “Ooos” and “Ahhhs”. Then they brought up someone who built some amazing Salesforce based applications. And guess what? It was a Flex app running inside a Salesforce S-Control! Then Adam Gross and Parker Harris from Salesforce took the stage to present even more Flex applications! It felt for a second like I was at Max!

This week I’m in Vegas for a few presentations. First one is at the Interop conference on Wednesday. Interop is a fun place for me because I get to hang out with networking / sys admin folks. In a past life I was a sys admin (thus the reason why I love vi). :)

On Thursday night I am presenting at the Vegas Adobe User Group and really looking forward to meeting some of the Flex friends I’ve only known via email, blogs, twitter, etc.

It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling when the guy I learned Java web programming with starts saying things like:

“For me, Flex is clearly the way to go.”

The whole article is a great read for those evaluating the Rich Internet Application landscape.

Jon, we are glad to have you “Thinking in Flex” and can’t wait to see what you build!