Open Source

Back in the early days of Flex there wasn’t much for doing unit testing, automated testing, performance testing, etc. Thanks to the community there are now numerous open source testing tools for Flex. Here are some recent updates you should definitely check out if you are building production Flex apps:

• FlexUnit 4.1 Beta 1
• FlexMonkey (open source automated testing) now supports Flex 4
• PushButton Labs Profiler for Flex

It’s very exciting to see these community driven projects continue to improve testing for Flex apps.

Last week I was able to be a guest speaker on the RIA Weekly podcast. In the episode Coté and I talked about RIAs in Portals, Flex and Open Source, and other various topics. Give it a listen and let us know what you think.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be presenting at a few conferences:

GeoWeb - Map Based RIA Development Using Adobe Flex and AIR with Duane Nickull

OSCON - Flex: the Open Source SDK for RIAs also with Duane

LinuxWorld - Building Rich Internet Applications with an Open Source Stack

I hope to see some of you at those conferences.

Tomorrow night I’ll be presenting at the New York GNU/Linux Meetup Group about Adobe Open Source - including the Adobe Flex SDK, Mozilla Tamarin, Adobe AIR (pieces like SQLite and WebKit), and BlazeDS. More details here. Hope to see you there!

[Update: QVM was an internal Adobe codename. The new VM’s name seems to be “Tamarin-Tracing”. For more info on this new VM read the announcement by Edwin Smith. Edwin doesn’t explicitly state that the VM is for mobile devices but it is hinted at. However the research paper that Edwin references does state that this tracing type of VM is good for mobile devices.]

The mobile space has been heating up lately with Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, and Sun’s JavaFX Mobile. But what about all of us developing with JavaScript 2.0 / ActionScript 3.0 / ES4? While we have been able to build for Flash Lite with Flash CS3, those of us developing with Flex haven’t had an easy way to use our existing programming knowledge to build mobile applications. Part of the reason for this is that the core language of Flex (AS3 / ES4) isn’t yet supported on mobile devices. The good news is that Adobe has just contributed a new VM targeted at mobile devices, to the Mozilla Tamarin project. Tamarin is the open source core of Flash Player 9 and will at some point be the VM in Firefox that executes JavaScript 2.0. More specifically AVM2 is the VM piece of Tamarin which executes ActionScript Byte Code (ABC). ABC can be created using the soon to be open source Flex SDK’s ASC compiler which turns AS3 (or ES4) into ABC. Unfortunately AVM2 wasn’t written to work well on mobile devices. So Adobe built Tamarin-Tracing - a new VM in Tamarin which is much better suited for non-pc devices. This is very exciting stuff!

Just a quick note to say how excited I am that Evolution will be getting a MAPI Connector! I’ve been using Evolution with Exchange since 2003. Thankfully it works - but for me it crashes quite often. So I’m really excited about the prospect of a better Exchange connector. Screen scraping is just too brittle and too slow. This should also improve offline support. Currently before I get on a plane I sync Outlook in VMWare. That works but I don’t care much for Outlook and VMWare is a killer on my battery life. With this improvement to Evolution and the improvements that are happening with the video drivers on Linux, things are shaping up for Linux on the Desktop. Could 2008 really be the year of Linux on the Desktop? Just kidding. I’ve been happily using Linux as my primary Desktop since like 1996. It isn’t without some annoyances and required maintenance. But neither is any other OS. And at least with Linux it’s easier to fix stuff myself.

For close to a year I’ve been working (in my infrequent spare time) on an application that shows differences in data loading for RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), comparing Ajax methods, Ajax frameworks, and various Flex methods. The results are pretty surprising. The screenshot below is from a test run I did with the server running locally. (Note for the screenshot below: All tests except Dojo were 5000 rows, while the Dojo test was 500 rows.)

Flex is going Open Source! This is really, really exciting news! I’ve been looking forward to this moment since before I worked at Macromedia. This will certainly change RIA programming in a major way. But what does this mean for you:

1. There will be a formal process for contributing to Flex.

2. Your voice is important. Join the Open Source Flex Google Group.

3. You aren’t locked into a single vendor’s monetization strategy. So is Flex now part of the “Open Web”? I think so.

Yesterday was an exciting day! Bruce Eckel and I hosted an eSeminar about Flex & Java. We had a few technical difficulties, but overall it was very good. You can watch the recording here:

https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a227210/p16565134/

Bruce and I have a few more eSeminars coming up, find out more info here:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=462539&loc=en_us

Also yesterday the Open Source Buni Meldware Communication Suite joined the Java.net community. This is a great step forward for the project, which uses Flex for it’s Webmail client. More info from Andy Oliver:

Long ago I remember the first Flash site I ever saw-spinning gears replaced typically boring site navigation and sound illuminated a previously silent web. My jaw dropped and I said to myself, “I want to build these kinds of websites!” After playing with Flash Professional for days, I realized that my mathematically inclined brain just could not output the kind of beauty that I began to see all over the Flash powered web. I gave up and resorted to building very ugly HTML interfaces. Not because I didn’t want them to look better but rather, it was just too much work and I lacked the skill.