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.
Almost a year ago I began working with Ron Hess and Dave Carroll from Salesforce on the Flex Toolkit for Apex - a port of the JavaScript libraries for Salesforce.com’s web services. Since that time the toolkit has matured and been used in numerous production applications. Today I am pleased to announce the new Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex. This new toolkit build on the Flex Toolkit for Apex and adds additional functionality for the new Adobe AIR runtime for desktop RIAs.
While I was at Dreamforce this year I had the chance to do a video interview with Peter Coffee from Salesforce.com. In this interview we discussed the industry momentum behind RIAs in enterprise software and how Flex, Adobe AIR, and Force.com are being combined to deliver much better user experiences in business applications. The recorded interview is below. You can also find the original post on Peter Coffee’s blog.
A few weeks ago I was able to participate in a Chalk Talk with Salesforce.com and StakeWare. The session focused on how Rich Internet Applications, Flex, and Adobe AIR relate to the Force.com platform. With this combination of technologies companies like StakeWare can quickly build business applications that have rich user interfaces that work the same across browsers and operating systems.
PodTech recorded the session and have split it into three parts [part1, part2, part3].
At Salesforce.com’s 2007 developer conference, called Dreamforce, I did a few minutes of demos during the day two keynote with Marc Benioff and Bruce Chizen. I showed three real applications built with Flex, Adobe AIR, and Salesforce.com. It was a fun experience and I only had a few minor demo glitches. Thanks to PodTech the video is below. My demos are about four minutes in.
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One of my old blogs has been turned into a full article on the Adobe Developer Connection and updated for Flex 3 Beta 2 & Adobe AIR Beta 2:
Building an Adobe AIR application on salesforce.com with Flex 3
Also a recording of the session that I hosted at Dreamforce has been posted on the Apex Developer Network:
Make Your App *Bling*: Build Amazing Salesforce Apps Using Adobe Tech. (click on “Apex & Beyond” then scroll down to the session)
Last week I attended Dreamforce, salesforce.com’s annual developer conference. It was exciting to see all the innovation going on with business applications. Much of that innovation is centered around Flex and Adobe AIR. In fact 18 of the 32 companies in the salesforce.com incubator are using Flex and AIR! Does that give you an idea of where the momentum is for companies building business applications?
At the Dreamforce Day 2 keynote, Workday CEO Dave Duffield gave a demo of the new Flex-based interface to their ERP software.
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.
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!