Flex

While at Dreamforce 2009 I was able to see some amazing enterprise Flex RIAs. Here is an RIA Cowboy Video of Right90‘s Sales Forecasting application. Let me know what you think.

UPDATE 1: Flash Builder 4, BlazeDS 4, and Spring 1.0.3 have all been release so you no longer have to use beta or nightly builds of these products. Use the production versions!

UPDATE 2: I’ve done a second part to this screencast that combines Flex 4, Flash Builder 4, Spring 3, BlazeDS 4, and Hibernate 3.

UPDATE 3: A Refcard on Integrating Spring 3 and Flex 4, which I co-authored, is now available! It provides a step-by-step tutorial for setting up everything I show in the video below.

Integrating Flex into portals has always been an interesting topic for enterprise developers. Other than a blog I did a while back there hasn’t been much information out there about how to get Flex apps into portals. But I just read a great article on IBM developerWorks about Integrating Adobe Flex with IBM WebSphere Portal. It’s a great read for enterprise developers looking to combine Flex and WebSphere Portal.

Edit: Whoops. It’s on the 14th not the 24th!

Intuit’s Cloud / Platform as a Service (PaaS) technology called the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) has quickly matured into a first class Client + Cloud solution. Building a custom user interface with IPP is done through Flex. This is a perfect combination and opens many opportunities for developers to build and sell apps into Intuit’s extensive ecosystem. They are doing a Webinar on January 14 about what’s new in IPP v2.4. This is a great opportunity to learn more about how you can build apps for the IPP with Flex. Definitely a session not to miss!

At the Rich Web Experience 2009 conference, Matt Raible presented a very insightful comparison of “kick-ass” web frameworks including Flex, Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Ruby on Rails and Grails. I appreciate his “right tool for the job” approach which moves beyond technology dogma towards real solutions. He includes some very revealing charts comparing jobs posts, StackOverflow posts, mailing list traffic and other stats. Check out the slides from his presentation:

On Thursday December 17th I’ll be doing an eSeminar about Salesforce.com and the Adobe Flash Platform. This is a great opportunity to learn more about how to build Flex RIAs on the Cloud using the new Flash Builder for Force.com tool. Sign up and see more details. Hope to see you there!

Adobe has posted an update for Flex Builder on Linux which was scheduled to time-out on December 1, 2009. While the Flex SDK has always worked on Linux, development is certainly easier with Eclipse support for coding, compiling, and debugging. This alpha 5 release of Flex Builder for Linux allows us Linux folks to continue building Flex applications in Eclipse for another 401 days. However, Adobe has still not announced any plans to create a full Flex Builder (or Flash Builder) product for Linux. If that is something you want then please go vote for FB-19053. This update still doesn’t support Eclipse 3.5. If you want Eclipse 3.5 support then you will need to apply patches created by Danyul and myself.

This week I’m in San Francisco at Dreamforce - Salesforce.com’s yearly conference. It’s amazing to walk around the expo hall and see how much Flex is being used in enterprise products and services. Like last year I’ve been recording some videos of some of the great enterprise Flex apps here. Also Greg Wilson has been tweeting a few pics of some of these apps including right90 (update: now a video instead of a pic) and PivotLink with more to come.

Here are some upcoming Flex presentations I’ll be giving:

• Thursday November 12 in Dallas - Java and Flex
• Friday November 13 in Plano, TX - Flex and the Cloud @ TexFlex09
• Monday November 16 at Flex Camp Wall Street (New York) - Flex Stuff I’m Excited About
• Monday November 16 at the Web 2.0 Expo (New York) - Connecting RIA’s to Services
• Tuesday November 17 at the Web 2.0 Expo (New York) - Best and Worst Practices Building Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) from Adobe and Microsoft (with Josh Holmes)
• Thursday November 19 at Dreamforce (San Francisco) - Building Force.com Apps with Adobe Flex/AIR

I hope to see you somewhere along the way!

The web’s success has been partially due to the sandbox it provides users. Users do not generally have to entirely trust every website they visit because malicious web sites should be sandboxed from doing the user harm. One way that web sites are sandboxed is through a same-origin policy. By default any code that runs inside a web browser can only access data from the domain in which the code originated from. So if code (JavaScript, Flash, etc) loads from the foo.com domain then it can’t access data on the bar.com domain. The code may be able to make requests to bar.com but the code from foo.com shouldn’t be able to read or access the results of those requests.