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November 28, 2006
Building Applications for Apollo - Its not rocket science
Mike Chambers gives a great overview of Adobe Apollo in this online Acrobat Connect session. The 45 minute presentation gives an overview of the upcoming runtime from Adobe, including information on APIs that Apollo will provide to developers and several sample applications, including a very cool Flex / Google Maps application that was written by Christian Cantrell (demo at 8:02).
Developing applications for Apollo isn't rocket science. Web developers who are building solutions today with HTML and JavaScript can build applications easily, as will Adobe Flex and ActionScript developers. Apollo will be completely cross platform, and support HTML, Flash / Flex and PDF content natively. The difference between Apollo and regular web applications is that it provides additional APIs to do things that you can't do today, like access to the local file system, working offline etc...
In the session, Mike gives a very cool demo of an advanced music player, that not only plays music and MP3s from your local computer, but integrates with Flickr to display photos for artists from Flickr and with a Lyric wiki, to display lyrics directly in the music player. (Check out the demo at 25:41 to see this in action).
You can find out more about Adobe Apollo from the Developer FAQ on Adobe Labs.
technorati tags:adobe, apollo, ajax, flex
July 06, 2006
Adobe Developer Week Recorded Sessions
In case you missed the sessions we had during Adobe Developer Week, they've all been recorded. There's information on Adobe Apollo, LiveCycle, Flex, ColdFusion, Flex and LiveCycle, security, Ajax, and more. Check them out at your leisure.
technorati tags:apollo, adobe, livecycle, ajax, flex2, coldfusion
Blogged with Flock
June 29, 2006
Why open source developers can be excited about Flex
The goal of open source software has always been to create software that can be free, not in price but in terms of restrictions for use. The availability of source code and the the ability to modify that source code, are important parts in the free / open source software movement.
There is lots of good news with respect to today's Flex launch for open source developers. First of all, the free Flex SDK includes the source code for the Flex components, and allows anyone to compile a Flex application at no cost. You are free to modify the Flex components as you need to. As a developer, you can now build a Flash application in VIM, run it through the compiler in the SDK, which works on Linux and Mac OS X, and build a .swf file. (In fact, if you're using VIM, you might want to check out actionscript.vim by Manish Jethani to highlight your ActionScript source code in VIM). For debugging, you can use fdb, part of the Flex SDK.
The Flex Builder tool is built on top of Eclipse, and we have published the source code for Flex Builder that is derived from Eclipse.
You can create open source Flex applications, and host them over at osflash.org. As a Flex developer, you can enable users to see your source code when they right click on your application ("View Source"). (To enable this, in Flex Builder, choose Project -> Publish Application Source...).
You Flex application will work well with a Java backend system or PHP backend system. For PHP integration, you'll want to download and use the open soure project AMFPHP. You can read my tutorials on how to integrate Flex and PHP on the Flex Developer Center.
Once you've built your application, you can then deploy the file as you would any other web application (likely to an Apache web server), and end users can interact with that application using the free Flash player. Now, the story would be much better if that Flash player was available on Linux (and if it were open source), but its not, at least not yet (available on Linux that is). However, there is a team of talented engineers working on Flash Player for Linux, and you can follow their progress on their blog. Apparently a beta version of Flash Player 9 for MacTel machines should be out soon, with a beta for Linux sometime later this year.
One of the benefits to web applications for Linux enthousiasts has always been the fact that web applications are not tied to a specific operating system - they simply need a web browser to work. The main problem to this model has been the the client: web applications today cannot replace desktop applications, there are too many limitations: local file access, no vector drawing APIs native in the browser, rich media integration isn't supported, JavaScript execution speed isn't the same as compiled code... Flex applications solve most of these problems (a drawing API is available in the Flash player, it can integrate rich media content easily, and it now has a JIT compiler for better performance), and we hope to have a better solution for local file access when we release Apollo (a beta version is expected later this year).
The development of more advanced web applications will continue to help adoption of operating sytems where the Flash Player is available, including Linux. And yes, some developers are working on an open source Flash player.
No, the story isn't perfect, but I think its pretty good. The Flex SDK includes the source code to Flex components, you can build and debug Flex applications on Linux, those applications can interact with an open source backend system (PHP), and end users can interact with those applications at no cost (and in a little while on a free operating system).
BTW: I'm always interested in your feedback on how Adobe can contribute to the open source community.
technorati tags:opensource, php, adobe, ria, flex, web2.0, flash, eclipse, flexbuilder
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June 28, 2006
Flex 2 and Future Web Application Development
Flex 2 has been released (CNET coverage here, TechCrunch coverage, Digg the story). You can buy it from the Adobe online store for $499, or $749 with the charting components included. The SDK for Flex is free, as in beer, and there's a free version for Flex Data Services included as well.
This release marks an important milestone for Adobe, as my colleague Bill McCoy has discussed in his blog. Some great web applications have been built with Ajax, but increasingly a number of them are using Flash in areas that the browser cannot handle: rich media integration (You Tube, Google Video and others use Flash to stream video), saving data locally (using the Flash Shared Object), applications that demand higher performance from the client (Flash code is compiled as opposed to Ajax / HTML code). Google Finance is a great example of using Flex and Ajax together, and using Flash where it makes sense (rich graphics drawn on the client).
Yes, you can do some very cool things with Flex right now. However, future development looks even brighter from an Adobe perspective. Apollo will provide additional APIs to web applications that will allow them to integrate into the operating system - users will launch web applications just as they would a regular desktop application (with icons on the desktop / dock / taskbar), the ability to save large amounts of data on the local machine (not limited to the 100K default for the shared object), and perhaps most importantly the ability to develop an application once and then have it run on multiple operating systems (we've committed to making Apollo cross platform). Watch a developer week session about Apollo.
Take that view of the future along with the ability to create mobile applications that run on FlashLite using the same set of technologies. Plus, unlike other languages, building a mobile application for FlashLite will work across a variety of devices - anywhere that the FlashLite player is installed. (Did you miss the announcement of the FlashLite deal with Verizon?) Can you see why JD was so excited about this deal earlier this year?
Here are a few other links about the release:
The source code derived from the Eclipse code is available for download.
A version of Flash Player 9 for Linux is underway. Follow the Penguin.swf blog for more information.
Flex.org is a new site that launched today as well, with resources for the community related to Flex.
FlexCoders.net has a list of Flex developers, if you're interested in building out a Flex project and need some help. If you need work, register there.
For historical Flash designers / developers, Adobe Labs now has a preview of Flash Professional 9 with ActionScript 3.
technorati tags:adobe, flex, ria, ajax, opensource, flashlite, mobile, apollo
Blogged with Flock
June 23, 2006
Sys-Con Announces Real-World Flex Seminar in August
Sys-Con will be hosting and producing a day-long event about Adobe Flex. The event will take place in New York on August 14th. If you're interested in Flex or building applications with Flex, this is definitely something that you'll want to attend.
From the webpage, "The list of topics at the Real-World Flex Seminar includes:
Registration for the event is only $395, and includes breakfast, lunch, a 12 hour DVD of the seminar, a t-shirt, a laptop back-pack and future access to on-demand video presentations of the seminar.
technorati tags:flex, ajax, seminar, adobe, actionscript, coldfusion, apollo, mxml
Blogged with Flock
May 11, 2006
Wondering About Apollo?
I've talked to more than a few people over the past few months about Adobe Apollo... If you haven't looked it up, CNET's News.com.com.com.com has a piece running now that gives an overview of what Apollo will be. The key parts:
"Apollo is client-based software that will run Flash applications separately from a browser, whether online or offline, he said."... "Microsoft and Java specialists are also building slicker Web development tools. But Adobe remains the incumbent when it comes to front-end design, said Peter O'Kelly, an analyst at the Burton Group."... "Apollo is designed to give developers a way to create applications that can render Flash animations as well as HTML and Acrobat files (PDF). That approach preserves the benefits of the Web but allows room for programs that can't be included now, Lynch said."