Collaborative Methods

Just wanted to take a second to highlight that our team is looking for a Flex rockstar to come join us. We're growing, and building some *very* cool new features, both in ConnectNow (the product), as well as Cocomo (the PaaS we built ConnectNow with).

So, if you're into Flex, AIR, "Cloud Computing", Real-Time Collaboration, multi-user social apps, client-server architecture, and are generally into pushing the envelope, we'd love to hear from you - apply here!

Also, for those of you contemplating MAX registrations, don't miss the 2 sessions we'll be giving on Cocomo.

nigel

MAX San Francisco is quickly approaching, and it's one of the highlights of the year for project teams like Cocomo and Acrobat.com. Schedules get set in anticipation of the event, with BIG REVEALS planned and features added in support of the BIG REVEALS. Basically the last half of our year ends up viewed through MAX-colored glasses.

So, it's pretty much guaranteed that by the time we get to MAX, there will be new stuff worth talking about in the Cocomo world. If you check out the MAX session locator, you'll see 2 new Cocomo sessions listed there :

Real-Time Collaboration Apps with Flex and Cocomo

Explore Cocomo, Adobe's new Platform-as-a-Service for developing real-time, multiuser Flex applications. Learn how any Flex developer can use Adobe's services infrastructure to build stunningly rich real-time social apps, including robust data messaging and streaming live video and VoIP. In this session we'll be showing live coding with the Cocomo Flex SDK and Adobe's services. Bring a laptop and be ready to join in.

Cocomo Deep Dive: Building Social RIAs with Flex + Adobe Hosted Services

Learn to build your first multiuser Adobe AIR application using the new Cocomo Flex SDK. In this session, we'll walk you through the philosophy and design considerations of this new breed of application, all the way to the nuts and bolts of coding, debugging, and deploying it. Follow along as a real-time collaborative AIR app is built from scratch and deployed on stage. There will be code — bring a laptop!

The first session is going to be more of an overview, really highlighting the scope of functionality offered by Cocomo, along with a few simple sample apps to get the audience started. For the second session, we're choosing one big sample AIR app that ties a bunch of functionality together, and using it as a framing device for diving into some slightly more advanced topics. Both should be a lot of fun - multi-user apps are so much more interesting to build than single-user apps, "cloud computing" is a pretty hot topic these days, and you'll likely walk out of either session with something.. actually working.

So, go and register for these sessions early - we're hoping for full houses!

A couple of quick items to pump -

First up, eSeminar! If you'd like to hear more about Adobe's platform services, specifically Cocomo, our Platform-as-a-Service for building multi-user Flex apps, come by at 8:30am PST this morning (11:30 on the East Coast, and I'll let you do your own personal timezone translation..), to http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/aclearn/. Anyone's welcome. That's like, an hour from now (prolly less, by the time this hits the aggregators..).

A couple of quick links to share that I thought were relevant :

• Redmond Developer News seems kinda interested in what we're up to.


• Cloud Computing Journal has some interesting thoughts about what it means to do business in "the cloud". Point #4 was especially resonant to me.

Anyhow, hope to see you in there!

UPDATE: If you missed the eSeminar, the recording is available here.

Come join us for a seminar on Tuesday, July 22nd @ 8:30am PDT to learn more about Acrobat.com's developer web services and our progress with “Cocomo.” We’ll discuss the APIs available today and where we are headed, including when everyone will finally be able to try out “Cocomo.”

To join the seminar, simply go to http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/aclearn/. Enter as a guest and you will be taken to a Connect Pro room. The room will be opened 15 minutes before the start of the session. Conference call information will be provided inside the Connect room.

It's really been a wild month for us on the Cocomo team. First, on June 2, a little project called Acrobat.com went live. I got to get up early to watch logs as the East Coast woke up, read about us, and started using ConnectNow. Watching a service you helped design handle its first big test is exhilarating and terrifying, but we managed to fumble through pretty durn well, actually.

Today is another milestone for Cocomo - our second *real* application (not dissing YahooMaps or YouTube Livingrooms, just saying) goes live today. From here on out, every PDF file created in Acrobat 9 will have the potential to use "Collaborate Live". If enabled, anyone who opens the PDF can log in, and get real-time presence, chat, and the ability to co-navigate the pdf, with anyone else who has that PDF open.

Check out a video here (sorry for the browser resize!), and a feature overview here.

Essentially, Acrobat uses a Flex app embedded in its chrome to connect to our Cocomo service, and uses a sharedModel in order to keep the view of the document in sync. No server code needed, and the service is always-on, with nothing for the Acrobat development team to maintain.

Obviously, Acrobat is a pretty big deal, so I'm up again at 6am PST to watch the East Coast start using the feature. I'm really excited to watch the work we've done getting used in multiple products across the company. Which one will be next?

Stay tuned; we're still doing a lot of work, with an eye towards opening this platform up to even more developers.