Last week I visited Zend headquarter and I have an interesting talk over there. One effect of this meeting is this: we will start to do webinars together with Zend.
If you want to find more about Zend Studio and other products related to PHP from the Zend Company, or about the integration between the Flash [...]
Over the last couple of years I’ve had the pleasure of being part of the Platform Evangelism team at Adobe – a smart, diverse and unique group of people who care passionately about Flash and who genuinely like helping others learn about new technology.
A big part of that role has been spending time out on the road talking about the Flash Platform and showing how to use Flex, Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder to create rich Internet applications. An equally important part of being an evangelist is listening to feedback, suggestions and constructive criticism from designers, developers, technical architects, press & analysts and channeling that information back into the product teams so that we can fix bugs, add new features and improve workflow between tools.
I’m hoping to use some of that experience, gained from talking with many of you, in my new role at Adobe, as Senior Product Manager for Flash Builder.
I’m really excited about taking on this new position – there are lots of great additions in the upcoming version of Flash Builder 4 (currently in beta), including the data centric development tools, the network monitor, support for Flash Catalyst projects and enhancements to core code editing, refactoring and debugging features. But there is a whole lot more that we can do to enhance developer productivity, enable a more fluid design/develop workflow and, with the availability of Flash Player on smart phones and the upcoming mobile version of the Flex framework, to support multi-screen application development.
Whilst the engineering team continues working hard on completing Flash Builder 4 for a release in the first half of 2010, I’ll be joining with more of a view on future versions of Flash Builder and be part of the team planning out what’s important to developers building applications on the Flash Platform.
If you are interested in some of the directions that we’re thinking about and didn’t attend MAX, I’d encourage you to watch the Flash Platform Tooling & Framework Roadmap presentation on Adobe TV.
I’ll be relocating to San Francisco with my family in the New Year and am looking forward to the many new experiences that will come from living in California. I will of course miss being in Europe (although maybe not the winter weather so much), working with all my friends on the European evangelism, PR and marketing teams and being close to the many people I’ve met at conferences, user group meetings, Flash Camps and other local events. I do hope however that I’ll be back during the year to support some of the European events/conferences and to get feedback on our plans for future versions of Flash Builder.
I’m going to do my best to continue blogging here, I’ll continue to be on Twitter and more than ever I welcome your comments and thoughts on how you’d like to see us develop Flash Builder.
Cheers,
Andrew
Today we announced an interesting partnership between Salesforce.com and Adobe. As Tim Anderson noted, there has always been a surface integration because Flash Builder could consume WSDL’s and Salesforce.com has always exposed them. But this goes quite a bit deeper. One, we’re working with the Salesforce.com team to make sure their IDE is completely integrated into ours. You’ll be able to get a combined Force.com and Flash Builder tool so you never have to switch environments to create Flex applications on top of the Force.com platform. The new tool exposes a new project type, the Force.com stratus type, and lets you automatically connect to the Force.com platform using a WSDL file. Then you can use the data features of Flash Builder to connect your data in the cloud with Flex components. It also has support out of the box for creating AIR applications that support online/offline synchronization.
The new tool and the partnership really simplify the process to connect to the Force.com platform so that you can focus more time on building a really great user interface that exposes those services. A “consumer-link” user experience is becoming more and more prevalent in the enterprise and is seeing a lot more demand. As ReadWriteWeb notes this is going to do a lot to help merge the consumer world of Flash with the enterprise back end of Force.com as well as some of our enterprise functionality in the form of LiveCycle Data Services. I think there are also some cool use cases here for integrating LiveCycle Collaboration Services. And of course the Force.com platform now gets access to over a million Flash developers who can target the cloud.
You can check out the video below for some getting started information. There is also a fantastic Force.com quickstart on Adobe’s Developer Connection and a lot of other information on the Force.com section of Devnet. Finally there will be a live webinar on November 3rd with James Ward and Markus Spohn where you can get a demo and then ask questions about how it all fits together.
Today we announced an interesting partnership between Salesforce.com and Adobe. As Tim Anderson noted, there has always been a surface integration because Flash Builder could consume WSDL’s and Salesforce.com has always exposed them. But this goes quite a bit deeper. One, we’re working with the Salesforce.com team to make sure their IDE is completely integrated into ours. You’ll be able to get a combined Force.com and Flash Builder tool so you never have to switch environments to create Flex applications on top of the Force.com platform. The new tool exposes a new project type, the Force.com stratus type, and lets you automatically connect to the Force.com platform using a WSDL file. Then you can use the data features of Flash Builder to connect your data in the cloud with Flex components. It also has support out of the box for creating AIR applications that support online/offline synchronization.
The new tool and the partnership really simplify the process to connect to the Force.com platform so that you can focus more time on building a really great user interface that exposes those services. A “consumer-link” user experience is becoming more and more prevalent in the enterprise and is seeing a lot more demand. As ReadWriteWeb notes this is going to do a lot to help merge the consumer world of Flash with the enterprise back end of Force.com as well as some of our enterprise functionality in the form of LiveCycle Data Services. I think there are also some cool use cases here for integrating LiveCycle Collaboration Services. And of course the Force.com platform now gets access to over a million Flash developers who can target the cloud.
You can check out the video below for some getting started information. There is also a fantastic Force.com quickstart on Adobe’s Developer Connection and a lot of other information on the Force.com section of Devnet. Finally there will be a live webinar on November 3rd with James Ward and Markus Spohn where you can get a demo and then ask questions about how it all fits together.
Today we announced the partnership between Salesforce.com and Adobe. The new offering, Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com is a jointly developed IDE that provides a single, powerful tool for building cloud-based RIAs, which can easily be deployed to end users through the browser using Adobe Flash Player or directly to the desktop via Adobe AIR. This tight integration enables client-side data management and synchronization between cloud and client, simplifying the development of applications that seamlessly run online or offline across operating systems and devices, while taking full advantage of the proven scalability, security and reliability of the Force.com platform.
As a developer, you'll be able to get a combined Force.com and Flash Builder tool so you never have to switch environments to create Flex applications on top of the Force.com platform. The new tool exposes a new project type, the Force.com stratus type, and lets you automatically connect your applications to the Force.com platform using a WSDL file. Then you can use the data features of Flash Builder to connect your data in the cloud with Flex components. It also has support out of the box for creating AIR applications that support online/offline synchronization and LiveCycle Data Services integration.
You can check out the video below for some getting started information. There is also a fantastic Force.com quickstart on Adobe's Developer Connection and a lot of other information on the Force.com section of Devnet. Finally there will be a live webinar on November 3rd with James Ward and Markus Spohn where you can see a demo and then ask questions about how it all fits together.
The new tool and the partnership really simplify the process of connecting your Flex apps to the Force.com platform so that you can focus more time on building a really great user interface that exposes those services. We're looking forward to seeing what kinds of applications you create with the Flash Platform and Force.com.
We just launched a developer preview for Flash Builder for Force.com; it allows you to create Flex applications that connects to services and data in the cloud (Force.com platform). You can read more here.
The press releases just crossed the wire and we have a ton of news coming out of MAX. Plus more surprises in store for tomorrow. For those of you not here you can still check the keynotes out. I’m hosting the online side of the MAX keynotes and we’re doing some fun stuff before and after the keynotes to give you a sense of what’s going on at MAX. As you can tell from the rundown, there’s some fun stuff today.
We’ve been saying all year that Flash on mobile devices is a push this year and we’ve made a lot of progress. Today at the keynotes we’re going to be showing off Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones. This is the version of the Flash Player that we’ve been working on so hard this year. We’ve been working with some great partners including Nvidia and ARM to optimize the player for those devices and create a quality mobile experience.
Possibly more important is that the number of companies committed to the Open Screen Project continues to grow. Today we announced that RIM is joining the Open Screen Project which means that Blackberry will be supporting Flash Player 10.1. Google is also on board. We’ll have public versions of Flash Player 10.1 for Palm, and Windows Mobile later this year with Google Android and Symbian following shortly. Developers will have mobile bits in their hands soon.
We also announced AIR 2.0 which is going to give Flash developers a lot more native hooks into the operating system. A lot of the developers I talked to wanted it and so that’s what the team did. Mike Chambers talked about some of these features at Flash on the Beach. Another cool feature of AIR 2.0 is the ability to record from the microphone without going to a server. getMicrophone can now be a reality
We also have public betas of both Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst that are available today. I’ve been really impressed with how far Flash Catalyst in particular has come from Beta 1 to Beta 2. It’s a lot more polished, has more functionality (including video) and feels a lot more fun to use. If you checked out Beta 1 and found it lacking, you should check out Beta 2. We’ve also made big progress on Flash Builder and I’ve been a very happy camper using the tool full-time.
Some very cool stuff is also happening on the server side. We’ve released ColdFusion 9, a spectacular release with some great features including the ability for you to consume ColdFusion as a service from inside of your Flex application without writing ColdFusion code. I’ve also been playing with the LiveCycle Data Services release and it’s modeler plug-in for Flash Builder. The team has focused on model-driven development making it easy to generate and create a model, then linking that model directly to your Flex application. It helps by generating all of the assemblers and you can directly modify the user interface just by changing the model.
Finally we’ve got some Flash Media Server news. We’re adding support for HTTP streaming which will include support for content protection. We also have released the Collaboration side of Flash Platform Services and announced pricing so you can jump in and start adding collaboration to your application.
If you guys have any questions (sorry I don’t have more fleshed out info, it’s a lot of news), feel free to drop me an email – ryan@adobe.com and I’ll try and answer what I know.
One of the most requested features for both Flash Player and AIR is definitely a spell checker. Grant Skinner released a spell check engine about 2 years ago and it has been used in number of different applications. While it was totally worth the cost, I did hear from some people that they thought this [...]
As I talk to more and more designers and developers one of the things that comes up is whether or not Catalyst makes it easier or harder to do iterative design on a project. The workflow most people have seen is you start in a tool like Illustrator, Photoshop, or Fireworks; create a high fidelity visual design in that tool and then import that into Flash Catalyst where you can start turning that artwork into visual components. I think that’s a pretty powerful workflow for designers of all stripes.
The issue that comes up most is that not everyone starts that way. In a lot of cases people create a skeleton application first in Flash Builder and then want to apply visual designs later. Themes are one option, and we’ve got a new Theme chooser in Flash Builder to help that, but one of the great things about Flex 4 is that it’s easy to create very customized, unique skins for components. So without the ability to do round-tripping between Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder in the 1.0 version of Catalyst, what can designers to to iterate on a design alongside a developer? The answer is the Flex Library project.
I realize this is far from an ideal workflow, but I think for Flash Catalyst 1.0 and Flash Builder 4 it works okay and provides a way for teams of designers and developer to iterate together without stepping on each others toes.
So lets say a developer has an application that they’ve created with the default components. I’ll start with something really basic:
<s:Button x="19" y="78" label="Button"/> <s:HSlider x="210" y="31" /> <s:List x="152" y="108"> </s:List> <s:TextInput x="10" y="31"/> <s:Button x="152" y="77"/>
Clearly a great RIA in the making. But I take a lot of pride in my work and I want to use the power of Flex 4 to create a unique set of skins and components that stand out. In the ideal workflow I would be able to give this to my designer, they would open it in Catalyst, create some great components, and send it back to me. I can’t do that, but I can do some design in Catalyst and then bring those designs in a special way. First I’ll create some great looking components in Catalyst by starting with a blank project and importing Illustrator/Photoshop assets then converting them to components.
After I turn all of my artwork into interactive components I am going to pop over to the library panel and start giving them usable names. By default Catalyst calls the created components “Button1″, “Button2″, “ItemRenderer1″, etc. I give them names that will mean something to the developer and help differentiate components.
Once I do that, all I have to do is export my library file into an FXPL file by right-clicking anywhere in Catalyst’s Library panel. Once I can do that, I have the ability to import that FXPL file as a new Flex Library project in Flash Builder.
That library file contains all of the assets and skinned components I just created. In order to use those, all I need to do is add that project to my main Flex project from the project Properties->Flex Build Path and I can start changing the skinClass attribute for my components to point to those new files.
<s:Button x="19" y="78" label="Button" skinClass="components.BlackPushButton"/> <s:HSlider x="210" y="31" skinClass="components.MetallicSlider"/> <s:List x="152" y="108" skinClass="components.GreyDataList"> </s:List> <s:TextInput x="10" y="31" skinClass="components.MetallicTextInput"/> <s:Button x="152" y="77" label="Button" skinClass="components.GreyButton"/>
But now the client tells us they want that black button to be an interstate sign (who knows). I have that asset in Illustrator so I can open my original Flash Catalyst file that I created the library project in and I have a couple of options. I could create a new button with a unique name or I can change the original button component using the round-tripping between Illustrator. I’ll do the latter.
Once that’s finished toggle back to the Library panel and re-export the assets making sure to overwrite the original file. Then switch back to Flash Builder and go through the import process again. By default, it will try to create a new project and just append “_1″ to the project folder. Make sure you overwrite your project by removing that. You’ll get a warning, but that’s fine.
This is where the magic happens. Without doing anything, you can run your application and you’ll automatically have those new assets. Any event handlers you’ve wired up to the button or any code you’ve created that use that button will remain unchanged; only the button graphics will change. Because the projects are linked, any change we make to our imported assets filter down to our core project.
The designer can use that original Catalyst file and the re-export process to make modifications to any asset we want. They can also create new components from artwork, create custom components, or add image assets and all of those will be available to the developer inside of that main Flex project.
This is all still kind of a work in progress, but I think this will work for some of the design-develop problems people need to solve. While the 1.0 version of Flash Catalyst will have some limitations around the Flash Builder workflow, there are still a lot of basics there that can be built on. If you’ve tried this or have other ideas on how this could work, definitely drop me an email. I’d love to hear feedback.
An article I wrote on Flash Catalyst best practices for the Adobe Developer Connection site went live yesterday.
One of the things I’ve found with Flash Catalyst is that the quality and usefulness of the assets and component skins that you’ll make available for the developers you are working with can vary depending upon how you’ve organized your project, as can the amount of rework and restructuring required on their part when they receive your FXP file. By thinking about naming, structure and being organized throughout the design phase of the project, you’ll help to ensure a smooth flow of assets from design into development.
If you’re considering using Flash Catalyst for creating the user interface for a rich Internet application then I hope the hints and tips shared in the article will help you to make the most from Flash Catalyst and ensure that you’re structuring your projects with the eventual output to the developer in mind.
The article is posted here.
If you have any feedback on the article or additional hints & tips then please do share them using the comments.
Not so long ago I wrote an article on how to enable data paging for a data grid using Flash Builder and a PHP backend. Today, I added a screencast for those of you who prefer to watch instead of read.
Enjoy!
or view in HD
Not so long ago I wrote an article on how to enable data paging for a data grid using Flash Builder and a PHP backend. Today, I added a screencast for those of you who prefer to watch instead of read.
Enjoy!
or view in HD
A new tutorial video, featuring Duane Nickull, has just been released by Adobe Developer Connection on Adobe TV. This 7-minute step-by-step tutorial will show you how to quickly set up web services, specifically SOAP-WSDL in Flex Builder. Check it out and let us know what you think.
Even though there are some signs of economic recovery, the job market continues to get worse. With the offer of free Flex Builder 3, we'd like to make it easier for unemployed developers to add Flex skills to their skill set, which even now remains in high demand. For details and to apply for the program, please visit https://freeriatools.adobe.com/learnflex/
The beta version of Adobe LiveCycle Data Services 3 delivers many new features and improvements. One particularly exciting feature is a new technology, code named Fiber, which enables Flex developers to use a model-driven development approach for faster and easier data-driven application development. With Fiber, data management is implicitly supported and does not require developers to create custom assemblers or employ complicated LiveCycle Data Services specific configurations. And as part of Flash Builder 4 beta, Flex developers can easily create a fiber Model to simplify development and enhance productivity of data-driven Flex applications.
For an overview of the features included in the next release, view the Getting Started videos or read Anil Channappa’s What’s New in LiveCycle Data Services 3.
As part of our weekly content launches in the Adobe Developer Connection, we’ve recently published some new articles for Flash Platform developers.
The new skinning architecture in Flex 4 beta makes it easy to completely change the look and feel of an application. Follow Ryan Frishberg to learn about the new improvements by writing a basic skin for a button and then delving into skinnable components. Building on what you’ve learned there, Evtim Georgiev addresses a number of pain points in skinning, CSS, components, states, animation, text, and graphics tags. He also shows you how to create a custom layout in his article, Spark layouts with Flex 4 beta. Meanwhile, read Tim Buntel's article to learn how a brand new approach in Flash Builder beta can simplify the development of data-centric applications.
If you are working with web video, you'll want to learn how to customize the ActionScript 3 FLVPlayback component, the built-in solution in Adobe Flash CS4 Professional for displaying video on the web. Also be sure to download two updated templates: spokesperson presentation with synchronized graphics and showcase website for personal video.
Flash animators: Dig into Chris Georgenes' popular series covering the entire process of creating a digital animated character in Flash CS4 Professional. And there's a bonus: a killer animation technique that creates convincing 3D effects while remaining in the 2D realm. Also be sure to check out Tom Green's article on Integrating Flash CS4 with After Effects CS4.
To get e-mail updates of our new content, subscribe to our newsletters: News Flash, The Edge, and the ADC update. You can also visit the Adobe Developer Connection to check for new content.
The Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 betas have now been out for a few weeks and we're very excited to see so many folks playing with them, asking questions on the forums, and posting examples of what they've done. From the time we first started showing Gumbo we've been monitoring feedback, especially around the experience of using the Spark and Halo components together. While we know that in general using both models together is possible, we've decided that there are a number of smaller things that we can do (many suggested by you) to make the experience that much better for both new and existing users.
We've therefore decided that we need some more time to take your feedback into account, and are going to release a second public beta this fall. This will give us an opportunity to make the enhancements required, and get additional feedback from the community. Given the second beta, we anticipate the release of Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 to move from late 2009 to early 2010.
On the Open Source Flex SDK side, we're planning to host another open iteration meeting in the next few weeks to discuss all of the changes that we're considering. We'll also be looking for feedback on things we can do in our docs and messaging to make sure that users from all backgrounds are successful in adopting Flex 4. Stay tuned here for the announcement of that meeting. And keep using the beta, filing bugs, and communicating with us via the forums!
It took me more that I would have liked but here’s a screencast on how to debug flex and php applications using Flash Builder 4 and PDT.
If you've had a chance to play around with the Flex and Flash Builder betas, we'd greatly appreciate getting your feedback on your experience. Please take 15 minutes to fill out our survey. Thanks for your help!
One of the issues you may encounter when updating an AIR project in Flash Builder is what appears to be corruption of your Encrypted Local Store. This might manifest itself as a vague "general internal error" when your application attempts...
