Recently in MAX2006 Category

At MAX2006, some of the Adobe Consulting team held a Birds of a Feather session that was tentatively titled "Flex Frameworks and Methodologies". Since the birth of Flex, I've been at 2 of the Birds of a Feathers held by (the then) Macromedia Consulting and a "Meet the Flex team". Both times, we drew crowds of around 20-30 people ... so imagine our surprise at MAX when somewhere between 150 and 200 of the Flex community at MAX attended the Birds of a Feather at 8.15pm in Las Vegas!

Given that there were talks on Cairngorm, we tried our best to not let the Birds of a Feather become a "Cairngorm" birds of a feather, or an "Agile RIA Development" birds of a feather. Instead, we called for topics that raised everything from feature requests for Flex 3, to using Flex with frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate, to modular application development, to rapid-prototyping in Flex and to the importance of user-experience design in developing RIAs, the structure and make-up of an RIA development team, the differing needs for user-experience focus depending on whether the project was customer or business facing (for the avoidance of doubt, I think the importance of user-experience design is equivalent irrespective of the type of user we are delivering to - but not everyone agreed).

I don't want to go into any of the topics in detail; most of all because I didn't keep any notes :) However, there was a *tremendous* interchange of ideas between the community, between the RIA, LiveCycle and User Experience practice members of Adobe Consulting, and by a significant yet impromptu presence and contribution from the Flex product management team and Flex engineering teams. That we have come this far in only 2 lightning fast years was a real testament to the growth in the RIA community we have had since the birth of Flex.

Something else that really inspired me as well, was the maturity of ideas, the diversity of expertise and the melting pot of skills that exists within our community. That we could jump from programmatic skinning, to the importance of user-interviews in a business-facing application and then to code generation of Spring adapters and explorations of Aspect Oriented approaches to Flex development, brings into sharp focus our success in creating a toolset and a technology that unites designer and developer. Personally - this is a deeply exciting trend of RIA development.

But I've got some blog-bait terms in my subject line - "Open Source Flex". So sorry, on the back of the Mozilla AVM announcement, I'm afraid we're not about to open-source Flex ... however, there was a real call to action to the community that occured around the topic of open-source Flex projects that I'd like to emphasise here.

Open Source your Flex Intellectual Property!

When I posed the question to the audience, "how many of you have reusable intellectual property within your company, that you or others have created, that is reusable between your projects and that could have value to the rest of the community if made publically available ?" there was an interesting show of hands - perhaps 20 or 30 different people considered themselves to have code of value to others in the community. These included logging frameworks, code-generation tools that would create all the backend and midtier code necessary to create CRUD (create/read/update/delete) applications from a database schema in Flex, Aspect Oriented Frameworks, extensions to FlexUnit to better support asynchronous testing, and many more.

However, there was reticence to release these projects to the community at large - in some cases, there was a desire for Adobe to pay something towards the release of these projects, in other cases people were reticent of the support or infrastructure they would have to put around supporting a project once it was out in the wild, others who worked for companies that were building products rather than providing consulting services, were challenged with board-approval on releasing aspects of their codebase as open-source, while for others they considered their intellectual property their competitive advantage that they didn't want to give away.

I can understand all of these concerns; at iteration::two we faced them with Cairngorm and we faced them with FlexUnit, 2 projects we open-sourced when there was nothing else similar in the community. However, to be clear - our reasons weren't all about "give back to the community", as altruistic as such a claim might be. There was commercial consideration in our decisions to open-source - for instance, when you are a services organisation (which we were) it is a very different ball game to start also producing and supporting products. Most importantly for us however, was the realisation that if we put out our intellectual property as open-source, and helped the community adopt the ideas they embraced, they would serve as a "statement of capability" to our customers and prospective customers, emphasising what we considered to be best-practice, and supporting such claims with community adoption.

So I offer the same challenge to our community, which is many orders of magnitude larger, harder to differentiate within, and ripe for the picking, compared to New Orleans in 2004.

If you have projects which would be of benefit to the community, consider ways in which you could make them available to the rest of the Flex community. Open-source them if that works best for you, monetise them if that enables you to justify development and support. Write articles about them, write books about them, record Adobe Connect presentations about them and use these projects and use your intellectual property to create the ultimate win-win situation for us all - fuelling the further growth of our RIA development community, and raising your own profile as a subject matter expert within that community.

Host these projects on your own company website. Take advantage of one of the excellent repositories for open-source projects, be it OSFlash or RIAForge.

But spend some time thinking about the intellectual property that you can make available to the rest of the community. Within Adobe Consulting, we continue to do so - the recent scheduling framework being another great example.

I'll close this blog entry with the same words I closed the Birds of a Feather:

"You're the same community that wanted Flex to be cheaper, and we made it free. Now show us what you've done with it."

I've just created a PDF of my MAX2006 talk, "Developing Next Generation Rich Internet Applications with Cairngorm 2". It's my full intention to Breeze record this presentation, as it makes much more sense with code walkthroughs and the demo applications - there are a couple of good reasons why I've not breeze recorded this yet though.

First and foremost - I'm on vacation, this week and next. However, the prime reason - and if you caught the second of my talks on the last day of MAX2006 you're probably laid up in bed by now with the same (along with half of flight BA248 from Los Angeles to London ... sorry 'bout that) chest/throat infection that robbed me of my voice the weekend before MAX and the last day of MAX for another 2 or 3 days. Tom Jones was spotted wandering around the Venetian during MAX2006 - rumour has it that he stole my voice. It's not unusual. (I don't think I ever thought I'd link to Tom Jones from my blog). If you were at that second talk, I hope that the impromptu support from Alistair McLeod and Peter Martin were sufficient to get the talk across with what scraps of voice I had left ! Matt Chotin has no idea how close he was to being asked by the conference organisers to present my talk...

I'll be blogging a great deal more on my return on my thoughts from MAX - not a report of talks as such, but more my sense of the growth and maturity of the Flex community, the way that Flex is drawing in a tremendous amount of leadership in design as well as a tremendous amount of enterprise software expertise, helped in a large part by the emergence of a LiveCycle community at MAX.

My talk had to appeal to both the growing number of newcomers to Flex, RIA and Cairngorm - providing a reinforcement of the fundamental patterns and principles, problems and solutions that Cairngorm advocates, as well as offering some insight into how we are using Cairngorm in enterprise applications, how we are encouraging correct usage of application container security models, how we are embracing Flex Data Services and Message Services in our Cairngorm architectures, and how we are fulfilling the platform play that Adobe offers with the Flash Player, by targetting Cairngorm applications not only at the browser, but at the desktop via Apollo, and at the mobile via Flash Lite. There was a tremendous buzz at MAX2006 around Apollo and Flash Lite, so I'm pleased that so many of you are excited about Cairngorm helping you migrate your expertise to other areas of our platform development.

My talk was a broad one, with one goal being to give everyone a glimpse behind the curtain at Adobe Consulting, and give you insight into the kind of challenges we're facing in our day to day engagements, and the practices that are emerging from these challenges. Furthermore, the maturity of the Flex community over the last few years means that many of you are wrestling these challenges also - it really felt this year that for the majority rather than a minority, Cairngorm was a solution for many of your problems, rather than a solution for which you hadn't yet experienced problems.

As we move towards the goal of a Cairngorm 3 release, I look forward to us being able to share further insight on building Apollo applications, leveraging Flex Data Services both in the browser world as well as the desktop/Apollo world, in understanding how Flex, Cairngorm and LiveCycle can work together, and leveraging some of the forthcoming Flex features that solve challenges such as how to modularise your applications as they become ever more ambitious in the scale of solution you are delivering.

It was great to meet with so many of the community at what I think was the best MAX yet.

If you have had a chest or throat infection, no voice, have been sleeping 20 hours a day and shared a flight or a presentation with me, then once again my apologies.

Who'd have thought, that I'd be able to give people a lump in their throat with Cairngorm ?

And then help them cough it out at such high velocities.

I'm chairing a Birds of a Feather session tomorrow evening titled "Flex Frameworks and Methdologies". Joining me on the panel will be a number of my colleagues from the Adobe Consulting team. Our hope for the BoF is to have some spirited discussion on the use of frameworks and microarchitectures (such as Cairngorm) as well as the different methodologies (such as Agile Development, User-driven Development, Rapid Application Development) that can be employed to deliver RIA solutions with Flex.

We're having our BoF on Tuesday at 7pm; check the daily newsletter for the venue.

But for now, it's the Pool Deck for the Welcome Reception....

If you haven't yet registered for MAX2006, or if you have registered but not yet signed up for your talks, then I want to share a little about what I'll be presenting in my talk, "Developing RIA Solutions with Cairngorm 2".

First and foremost, we are using MAX2006 as an opportunity to blend many of the best-practices and techniques that Adobe Consulting have been leveraging across a number of projects over the last year, with community feedback to Cairngorm 2, to create a dot-release of Cairngorm that we know will make it even easier and quicker to build scalable, secure and robust enterprise Rich Internet Applications upon Cairngorm.

I'll be presenting the new additions to Cairngorm 2, and showing how we leverage these through the delivery of a sample online banking application, that has been developed by Yaniv de Ridder, one of the consultants working in our EMEA Rich Internet Application practice.

We've also been gaining tremendous productivity gains, and delivering some state-of-the-art user-experiences with Flex Data Services in our solution architectures. I'll be spending some time during my talk presenting how we can use Flex Data Services within a Cairngorm 2 application, touching briefly on how we've rolled up a great deal of Peter Martin's work on Securing Flex Applications - that he'll be presenting in deeper detail at MAX - into the Cairngorm architecture.

There's a great deal of buzz about Apollo; and the more time I spend time with customers understanding their business challenges and how we can deliver innovative design-led solutions that embrace these challenges, the more excited both customers and I are getting about the value proposition that Apollo and Flex offers. I believe that developing applications upon Cairngorm will offer a rapid transition from the browser to the desktop with Apollo, and will be demonstrating how we can deliver value-added features to an online banking experience by re-deploying a Flex 2 and Cairngorm 2 application to Apollo. I'll be showing Cairngorm 2 and Apollo integration during my talk, and will speak of our roadmap for further Apollo support in Cairngorm 2.

The multi-platform and multi-channel strategy is another piece of our "Engagement Platform" value proposition that resonates strongly with the customers we are delivering visions and solutions for. Providing a rich, consistent user-experience to the right device at the right time is a reality with the Flash platform, and I'm excited about the contribution that Cairngorm will be making in this regard.

Matt Jacobi - one of the consultants in our Mobile and Devices practice in London - has been involved in a number of the innovative Flash Lite solutions that Adobe Consulting have been delivering to clients. Matt has been internally championing the use of Cairngorm for Flash Lite 2.x development, has back-ported Cairngorm to Flash Lite, and has created a lightweight presentation-tier framework that allows Flash Lite developers to create Cairngorm applications for devices using the same patterns and practices advocated in Cairngorm web-development. I guess this is the first place we're announcing that we'll be making a mobile version of Cairngorm available for everyone under the same terms as the Cairngorm 2 download, so that everyone will be able to apply their Flex 2 best-practices to Flash Lite application development using the same best-practices as our MAD (Mobile and Devices) practice.

And guess what -- I'll be showing Cairngorm mobile during my talk as well, playing it's part in an integrated multi-channel self-service banking example that reaches out to the browser, the desktop and the device in your pocket.

Oh and before you all ask "what about the sample application, the multi-channel online banking demo that will target the browser, will offer different experience in Apollo and that will be delivered upon Cairngorm's new mobile framework for Flash Lite ? Are you going to make the code available".

We're Adobe Consulting. You should know better. Of course I'll be making the code available...

I've been speaking about Cairngorm at MAX since New Orleans in 2004 - and I'm really the most excited about this forthcoming talk. The original strapline for iteration::two, was "Pervasive. Interactive. Agile". It was our vision on founding, that we'd be delivering richer user-experiences that reached out across all devices, and applying agile software methods in these deliveries. There's a real sense of convergence of the desirable and the possible, and the presentation that I'm giving at MAX is exciting to me not just for the further evolution of our Cairngorm framework, but for the fact that we are now extending our RIA development skills to the desktop with Apollo, and to the handset using Flash Lite, while leveraging all our skills, techniques and best-practices that we have honed while changing the face of the web with Rich Internet Applications.

If there's anything else you'd like me to cover in my talk, drop me a note in the comments -- but I've got hours left to finish my presentation (you think the deadlines YOU get for your MAX presentations are tight, you want to work for Adobe...) so get 'em in quick.

And if you're going to be at MAX, or even better are going to be at my talk, please come and introduce yourself - truly the best thing about the conference for me, year on year, is the opportunity to meet with those who are as passionate about delivering state-of-the-art solutions with RIA technologies as we are.

See you in Vegas.

With the agenda for MAX2006 online today, I'd like to draw attention to some of the talks that will be presented by the Adobe Consulting team.

I'm presenting on Cairngorm once again; however, things have moved on a great deal since I first announced the open-source Cairngorm at MAX2004 in New Orleans, and then walked people through developing with Cairngorm at MAX2005 in Anaheim. At MAX2006, not only will I recap for those new to the Flex platform, but I'll be unveiling some of the work Adobe Consulting has done to build Cairngorm solutions that leverage other Engagement Platform technologies such as Flex Data Services, Flash Lite and Apollo.

From the EMEA RIA Practice, I'll be joined by Alistair McLeod, Peter Martin and Alex Uhlmann.

Alistair will be presenting on all things testing - from unit-testing and test-driven development using FlexUnit, to the continuous integration environments we are using within Adobe Consulting (using FlexUnit, Ant and Cruise Control) and functional and regression testing with automated testing tools.

Peter Martin has become quite the J2EE security guy in our practice, and is presenting on Securing Flex applications; I know that Peter will be basing his presentation on some material he is presenting internally within Adobe Consulting to our worldwide consulting team, so this will be a great presentation for sure.

And talking of great presentations, Alex Uhlmann already did an internal presentation to Adobe Consulting, which drew crowds from the Flex product team as well. Alex was showing off some of the tremendous work that has been done on Flex 2 projects of late, leveraging his AnimationPackage experience against his experience developing highly-fluid user-experiences conceived by our User Experience (UX) practice. I've not seen many push the envelope of Flex 2 effects as much as Alex has (I can hear cries of objection from Ely Greenfield, who has been quietly scheming to usurp Alex), and I know he can't wait to be able to make his experience available to the development community.

Talking of our User Experience (UX) practice, I notice that Albert Poon is lined up to present "Designing More Usable Applications with Flex UI Capabilities". Albert hails from our San Francisco office, and is deeply enthusiastic and talented around all things UX. I've really enjoyed the UX presentations in the past at MAX - from Brad Becker, John Bennett, Andrew Borovsky and Jerry Knight - and am really looking forward to catching Albert in action.

From our RIA Practice on the East Coast of the US, I see that my colleague John Bennett is presenting "Accesible RIA Development with Adobe Flex" alongside Andrew Kirkpatrick. Andrew is an Accessibility Engineer with Adobe, and our EMEA practice have also been working closely with him on solutions that we're delivering within EMEA with Flex 2.

And from our RIA Practice on the West Coast, Scott Dreier will be talking about some of the work he has been involved in integrating a number of our technologies from the Engagement Platform - Flex, Live Cycle, Document Services, Acrobat 3D and Flash Media Server - to create compelling customer service applications. Should be another great presentation.

Kevin Ku of Adobe Consulting is also presenting on Flex and Live Cycle integration; expect to hear a lot more from us on how these 2 technologies can interplay and deliver significant value in doing so.

From within the rest of the Adobe team, there's a venerable who's who of presenters - Roger "you wanna know how the linker works, then buy me a beer" Gonzalez, Ely Greenfield and Jeff Vroom, Christophe Coenraets, as well as Dave George and Alex Harui.

A quick peek at the number of presentations on Apollo, from numerous members of the Apollo team such as Mike Chambers, Ethan Malasky, Brent Rosenquist, Chris Brichford and Stan Switzer, suggests that the community thirst to hear more detail about Apollo will be quenched in the arid desert of Nevada!

And that's not to mention some great names from the community as well; it's great to see both Joe Berkowitz of Allurent, and Dirk Eismann (among others) speaking as well.

I'm deeply excited about MAX2006 - it's certainly shaping up to be another industry-shaping and information packed conference, and a great opportunity for us all to share in what we're creating with the Adobe technologies comprising our Engagement Platform.

I hope to see many of you there!