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July 07, 2006
LiveCycle, PDF and Open Source
A few blog entries ago, I explained why I thought the release of Flex was good for open source developers. One of the comments, from Will Pollard, asked for clarification on how LiveCycle fits with Flex and open source. In particular, why would someone use LiveCycle as opposed to any of the free PDF creation tools that are out there.
To start with, LiveCycle is a bit more difficult to access than Flex... Unlike Flex, you cannot download trial versions of the Adobe LiveCycle server products. (You can download a trial version Adobe LiveCycle Designer and start building out PDF forms.) Currently you need to be a member of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program to download the LiveCycle software, including the very easy to setup LiveCycle Toolbox. (The toolbox is a pre-confirued install of all the LiveCycle software. For an explanation of LiveCycle, check out this Breeze presenation I did for Adobe Developer Week.)
We do want to make LiveCycle more accessible to developers.
To understand how LiveCycle competes with open source PDF creation tools, its important to understand that there are two types of PDF documents: what I call static PDF documents and dynamic PDF documents. Static forms are created in Acrobat, and are sometimes referred to as "AcroForms". The PDF file is static (it does not grow or shrink in size), but in Acrobat or Adobe Reader it may contain interactive elements that people can fill out electronically. For example, if you had an invoice, you would create the template with a set number of rows, and then hope that someone didn't order more items than the number of rows on the document.
On the other hand, dynamic PDF forms can grow or shrink in size depending on the data that is bound to the form. So, say you have an invoice for products, it could be 1 page for 1 customer, and 10 pages for another customer who orders a lot of items. To build that, you use LiveCycle Designer and create a PDF form, then use LiveCycle Forms to bind the data (likely in XML format) to the form. Most of the free, open source tools out there do not handle this type of PDF document. In fact, I haven't seen any solutions that do this, other than the Adobe LiveCycle set of products.
So, the question now becomes how does Flex fit into this? The idea is that you would use a Flex front end to gather data, likely on a website. At some point, you may want to continue filling in the form offline, or send the data to other people. When the time comes to take that data offline, you pass the data to a PDF form (which was created with LiveCycle Designer), and then users are able to access that data in a PDF document. They can send it to friends, do offline collaboration etc... When the time comes to send the data back to the organization's servers, a user would hit the submit button in the form and the data would be sent back to LiveCycle Forms, which will extract the data from the PDF form and allow the organization to process the data.
Once the data is in the PDF form, there are other LiveCycle pieces that may be of use as well. Digital signatures, policy protecting that information, managing the form's workflow are all services that the LiveCycle set of products provides. In the above example, I've focused only on taking the data off line, but once it is off line, the other LiveCycle products add additional functionality to the document / form.
technorati tags:livecycle, adobe, opensource, acrobat, flex
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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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August 16, 2005
LinuxWorld Wrap Up
Well, we've wrapped up our booth at LinuxWorld, and overall I'd have to say it was a great success. The booth staff was kept busy all week, answering questions about why we were there, what LiveCycle is, when Photoshop will be available on Linux... Our next event is the Intel Developer Forum, in San Francisco, in two weeks.
One of the most surprising things for me was the fact that people relate Adobe to Acrobat. Many people came up and said that they were running Adobe 5 or Adobe 6, meaning Acrobat, but at the same time, when they saw a big Adobe booth, they thought that Acrobat was available on Linux. (Its not, though Reader is, and so is the Acrobat SDK for creating plugins in Acrobat and Reader). We had many requests to port the Creative Suite over to Linux, as well as Acrobat, and will report back what was requested.
I didn't get to walk around the show floor too much, but was also impressed with BlackDog, a complete Linux server available on a tiny device that plugs into your USB port.
August 08, 2005
At Linux World
Well, I've arrived safe and sound here in San Francisco, after a fairly uneventful airplane ride from Ottawa this afternoon. I'm looking forward to a great show here. We'll be showing off all kinds of new software running on Linux, and last week the team at CodeWeavers got Designer and Acrobat running inside Crossover. I'm not sure its of demo quality, so I'll probably show Designer inside Windows instead, but its nice to know that it works, without too many major problems.
It will be interesting to see the crowd tomorrow. Obviously I'm expecting the standard "What does Adobe have to do with Linux?" questions, but I'm also interested to see if the rumours of a more business focused crowd are true. Time will tell...