Ben Forsaith’s Blog

Hi All,

I've been a reader of Reg Developer for some time.  So it was nice to meet Tim Anderson when I ran a Flex 2 workshop for the Press last month.  Tim posted an article today on Flex and Apollo which you can read in full here.

The subtitle is "Why Flex and Apollo will shake up client application development" which immediately got my attention because I believe they will.  In fact I would be as bold as to suggest that they already have.  Flash based Rich Internet Applications have steadily grown in popularity for years, and now Flex 2.0 has added a complete toolset for building these applications.

Tim goes on to reference the fact that "Apollo adapts Flex for the creation of desktop as opposed to browser-hosted applications and it promises to be well suited for offline use, providing access to the local file system".  He concludes that "my hunch is that Flex and Apollo will make more impact than previous attempts from Adobe (or Macromedia) at cracking the market for rich internet-connected application", and I believe he is right...

...Why?

Well check out this demo of an Apollo app given by Mike Downey and tell me if you don't think its cool.

Ben

Posted by Ben Forsaith at 03:25 PM | Permalink

Hi,

So I hope that folks are familiar with the Labs site at Adobe where most of our latest projects are published.

I wanted to highlight some cool additions for Ajax / Flex developers that were posted this week. The first is AJAX Data Services. 

“AJAX Data Services is a JavaScript library that lets AJAX developers access the messaging and data management capabilities of Flex Data Services directly from JavaScript. It lets you use Flex clients and AJAX clients that share data in the same messaging application or distributed data application.”

The second is an update to previously published Flex-Ajax Bridge.

“The Flex AJAX Bridge (FABridge) is a small, unobtrusive code library that you can insert into an Adobe® Flex™ application, a Flex component, or even an empty SWF file to expose it to scripting in the browser.”

I think this is a hugely powerful way of extending Ajax applications.  This makes it really easy to add pub/sub messaging and real-time data push to your applications.  I’ll certainly be adding some samples to my demo collection.

Cheers

Ben

Posted by Ben Forsaith at 12:51 PM | Permalink