JavaOne 2008 begins in just over a week! Adobe is a sponsor again so you will find me in the booth when I’m not out at the many JavaOne parties. On Wednesday night Adobe will be hosting their party at Jillian’s. Preceding the party Chet Haase and I will be presenting a quick, fun session about Flex. More details at http://flex.org/javaone
Also on Monday at CommunityOne I’ll be doing a Lightning Talk and participating in a panel.
Over the next few months I’ll be going around the world (literally) speaking about Flex and Adobe AIR. Here’s a quick rundown on where I’ll be:
Wednesday March 25 in Las Vegas: TheServerSide Java Symposium - Co-presenting with Eddie O’Neil from BEA
Thursday March 26 in Philadelphia: Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise - Porting from Web 1.0 to RIA in the Enterprise
Thursday April 3 in Bangalore, India: Adobe RIA Architect Summit 2008 - Best Practices for Building Flex/AIR applications
Today Adobe launched Flex 3 and Adobe AIR 1.0 – the most mature and comprehensive platform for Rich Internet Applications in existence.
The news of the launch is everywhere but I wanted to point out a few of the most exciting things related to this launch.
The Flex SDK and BlazeDS are now officially open source.
InfoQ has published an interview with me on the Flex 3 launch. They have also posted an interview with Kevin Hoyt on the AIR 1.0 launch as well as an overview of today’s announcements.
An article titled “From Tags to Riches: Going from Web 1.0 to Flex” which I co-authored with Shashank Tiwari has been published on InfoQ. In the article, Shashank and I walk through the steps needed to port a traditional HTML-based application to Flex. We use the Java-based Pentaho BI Dashboard as our example application. Our goal in writing the article was to make the process easy for anyone to try on their own. It should be easy to try it yourself — just download the code and other necessary pieces. Also, if you want to play with the end result, you can access the Flex application here. Let us know what you think.
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
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.
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.
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.
Admittedly I know very little about concurrent computing. But the consensus seems to be that it’s the future. We can’t keep building faster CPUs so we are just going with more of them. This presents a problem for software that can’t easily be split into pieces. If some CPU intensive piece of code can’t be chopped up to run in parallel then it is constrained by the speed of a single CPU. So what is the solution? Some think that the programming models need to change to better accommodate parallel computing. The problem is that no matter how smart the programming model is at splitting stuff up you are always going to be blocked by IO operations - memory, ram, network, etc. Others think that one solution may be Transactional Memory. This can potentially alleviate the problem of threads waiting for locks.