Blog of Dave

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