My notes on Adobe's Flex 3 presentation: D-Flex UG kickoff meeting

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:54:00 GMT

Last night was the kickoff meeting for D-Flex which is the Dallas Flex User Group. This meeting was planned in conjunction with the Flex 3 Launch and featured a presentation by local Flex guru Mark Pillar, of Midnight Coders, Inc who delivered a presentation that was created by Adobe. As he went through the presentation, I took some very high level notes in bullet point format.

One thing of note specific to ColdFusion - Not *once* in Adobe's presentation materials did they even give the slightest mention to CF and how gracefully it natively interacts with Flex. As a CF developer, I find this a bit troublesome and makes me wonder a bit about Adobe's commitment to promoting ColdFusion outside of the ColdFusion community itself.

Here are my notes...

Mark Piller - Midnight Coders, Inc

General demo of features of Flex Builder
- Design view
- Descriptions of XMXL & AS
Adobe RIA technology principles
- Deploy consistently no all browsers, and now on the desktop
- Engaging, highly interactive, expressive experiences
- Highly productive environment
Description of Adobe's stack of tools
Adobe reaches 700+ million PCs and 200+ devices
99% reach on connected PCs. 8 million installs per day
250,000,000 PDF Files on the internet
Discussion of the Designer Developer Workflow - Fw, Fx, Ps, Fl, Ai
- Thermo
Some interesting Flex implementations
- Buzzword - very cool web based Flex word processing app (url: http://www.buzzword.com )
- Small Worlds - Virtual 3d world written in Flex (url: http://www.smallworlds.com/beta/ )
Rich library of common UI Controls
- video playback components
- datagrids, date, controls, etc
- charting components
Extensible model
- CSS support
- skinnable components
price for Flex Builder - $249 standard, professional $649 (upgrade pricing: Standard - 99 plugin, 249 standalone... I may have recorded the upgrade pricing incorrectly as I was still typing when he changed slides)
Import Skin Assets into Flex Builder
- CS3 makes it easy to create custom skins, then use the Flex Import Wizard
New in Flex 3
- visual CSS editor
- view all component states in one view
Design view enhancements
- Enhanced Constraints Model
  - align components with edges of any vertical of horizontal coordinate
  - support for basline alignment
- Skinning Model Improvements
  - New skin states simplify styling
  - Enhanced control over individual components
- OpenType Font support
Advanced Data Grid
- New "Grouping" including multiple grouping in datagrids in Fx3. Looks like an expandable folder tree view
Charting enhancments
New list and detail enhancements
Working with Data
- Web Services Introspection
  - Generate client proxy classes from wsdl signatures
  - Includes support for complex types returned from web services
  - enables complete code hinting for service methods and custom types
- Introductory Data Wizards
  - generates crud, etc but is mostly only useful to those just getting started
AIR
- Previously named Apollo
- Cross-OS application engine that enables hybrid desktop-internet application
  - New capabilities
    - Native OS drag and drop support
    - multi-windowed apps
    - access local file sys
    - local database storage
    - complete rendering support for html
- Flex Builder support for AIR apps
- Platform evolution
  - Reduced application size
  - users only need to download the Adobe-signed F3 platform component once
  - Flash player cache stores it for use by any flex-enabled site
  - enter flex apps can no be as small as 50K (used to be around 250K)
  - Flex 3 RSL - runtime shared library
  - RSL is potentially pulled from any Flex app.
    - question about the case where someone might modify the RSL on their site? Handshake from the player maybe? No answer
Example of the Flex Builder profiler that allowed visibility to bottle necks & high memory spots in the application. Also shows how many instances of objects have been created.
JavaScript and Ajax Wrappers
Deep Linking
- updates browser URL to represent application state
- enables user to bookmark particular points in the app or share urls
- standalone web-tier compiler modules for IIS and Apache
- Mark questioned how usable it is in its current state and insinuated that there may be some issue with using this
AIR application stack
- walk through of Seamless install (after you have AIR runtime installed which makes this a bit less than "seamless" for first timers)
- web launcher
- AIR installer contans
- Privileges - AIR apps have full desktop application privileges
  - read/write files, background execution, network access
  - There is apparently some setting in the AIR runtime environment to limit this... (an operating system where the default user doesn't have admin rights is my personal suggestion)
- Window Chrome
  - use native OS window chrome
  - use custom chrome implemented by application
- Local File Access
  - create delete copy move, list directoreis, get system info on files, dirs
- Local database
  - SQL Lite
    - supports ACID transactions
    - zero-config allowing for embedded solution
- AIR desktop integration
  - install/uninstall
  - task manager or process list
  - application shortcuts, drag/drop
  - clipboard
  - app can run in background, can show on taskbar
- Adobe Reader integration
- AIR limitations
  - limited hardware accessibility
  - no access to native libraries/executables
  - no USB or serial port
  - limited support for accessibility,
  - limited printing support
  - limited localization
    - English only for 1.0
    - Japanese, German, French for 1.1
Flex Remoting, Data Management and Messaging
- Java,.NET, PHP and Ruby solutions... no ColdFusion in your preso Adobe???
- first connectivity for Java was FDS,
  - JAVA -open source on elater Granite Data Service, Red5, WebORB ***matches LiveCycle features***, BlazeDS
  - .NET - WebORB for .NET, Flourine, AMF.Net
  - PHP - WebORB for PHP, AMFPHP, SabreAMF
  - Ruby - WebORB for Rails, RubyAMF (*stronger than WebORB for Rails*)
- Introducing Open Source BlazeDS
  - Capabilites
    - Easily connects FLex and AIR apps to existing server logic
    - high performance data transfer
    - real-time data push over standard http
    - full pub/sub messaging that extends existing messaging infrastructure
    - publication of AMF3
- bottom line: there is a free connector for almost every solution
- Remoting performance example - significant performance with remoting vs http/web services - james ward google "Blaze Bench" ???
ILOG Elixir Components (charting)
- advanced charting components
Thermo - Convert Artwork to Functional Components

Nice new usability feature in Flex Builder for Linux Alpha 2

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:40:00 GMT

OK, I say "new" because I am almost certain that this wasn't there before...

I just installed the Alpha 2 release after realizing that my Alpha 1 installation had expired. As I opened up one of my AS files in the Action Script editor, I noticed that when you single click on a string, it highlights all matching strings in the file. That is pretty cool, and it immediately helped me out when looking for a place where a value was being set in that file. Now, this may become annoying, but for the moment that seems like a pretty cool addition. I have a feeling a bunch of Windows/Mac people are probably rolling their eyes going "Whoopdee dooo, we have had that all along". Well... now I do to! :)

Free themes and skins for Flex and AIR

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 18:15:36 GMT

This link came across the Adobe user group manager email list this afternoon and I wanted to share in case anyone had missed it. Scale Nine has some really sweet looking themes.

Check them out here

We have landed

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 05:00:00 GMT

Well, I have installed my blogging software. Time to play. :)

RSS feed for InstantSpot site Dave Shuck's InstantSpot

My notes on Adobe's Flex 3 presentation: D-Flex UG kickoff meeting

Nice new usability feature in Flex Builder for Linux Alpha 2

Free themes and skins for Flex and AIR

We have landed