Iorana RIA

This week Adobe announced that they will offer Flex Builder 2 to students and faculty at no cost. This great move will put fuel in the fire of the RIA battle. Microsoft has also in the past given away software to schools in hopes of gaining ground with their technology.  It’s the same as giving cigarettes to children; get them hooked early. Whether we like it or not, it puts us developers in a good position. They are battling for us. I think that Microsoft and Adobe know that whoever gets the most developers will win, or at least be at a great advantage. Silverlight seems to be attracting the .NET crowd, while Flex/Air is getting more people from the Java side and other technologies. The fact that Adobe made Flex Builder an Eclipse extension shows their intention and their target. It would seem like Adobe is now trying to get more new developers on board by giving away Flex to students. Your move Microsoft…

Oliver Merk who runs the Toronto Flex Usergroup has setup a discussion group at yahoo.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/torontoflex/

It is meant to ask questions, post opinions etc..so take a look and see you at the next meeting. (well …Flex Camp)

Might be a little late as it has been announced awhile ago, but The Toronto Flex User Group is hosting a Flex Camp November 15^th. Tor register and get more details visit the Toronto Flex User Group Website. Mike Potter from Adobe will be there with others for a full night of Flex demos and learning. It will be held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, see you there!

Adobe code name: Thermo
Since the start of our developing days, whether creating a website or application there has always been a gap between designers and developers. The back and forth can go on for awhile before the designer’s desired outcome is reached. This week in Chicago Adobe was holding their MAX conference where they showed an early preview of a tool code named Thermo. This tool’s goal is to bridge the designer/developer gap for Rich Internet Applications built in Flex. There have been several other attempts in other technologies to bridge the gap; it will be interesting to see how well this tool will perform. Peter Elst recorded the full demo at Max, and here it is.

When I started with flash it was at version 3. Very little scripting was involved with this animation tool. We were able to stop and start and animation, tell a target to do something and give a button actions. Basically, it wasn’t developer oriented and was used primarily for animations and “killer website Intro’s”. As the product evolved so did the demand for interaction such as forms, network connectivity and other features. Macromedia started evolving the language called ActionScript. By the time Flash reached version 6 we were using it to create full applications. ActionScript at the time was impressive and powerful but wasn’t really a full OOP language. As developers, we had to create applications following non-standard practices like for example using the timeline to create what we needed. Non-Flash developers wanting to explore the possibilities of flash were hard pressed to understand the timeline and how to append nibbles of code here and there on it. In contrast, designers were losing the battle against this language that was getting more and more complex. That is when Macromedia decided to separate the two and created Flex. Flex and Flash output the same; however these tools are used for different approaches. Flex is geared towards developers and Flash is geared towards designers. Although we could certainly create an application in Flash, a complex application is much easier to develop in Flex. On the other hand, Flex does not process any design tools other than simple layout tools for our application. The integration between the two products is well kept however; for example we can create flash objects and control them in flex. The two tools work well together to create rich internet applications.

To recap, the description of Flex as quoted from the Adobe Website would be: “A cross-platform development framework for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs). Flex enables you to create expressive, high-performance applications that run identically on all major browsers and operating systems.”

The list of good example applications is too long to list here, but here are few: Adobe share, Buzzword, Picnik, Flauntr, Scrapblog, Mattamy IFP and much more at the Flex showcase.
At MAX this week Adobe released the new Flex 3 Beta 2. New features of Flex 3 include: Data Wizard support for .NET, Persistent framework caching, Refactoring support, Advanced Datagrid and more.

Flex is one of many tools you can use to build your Rich Internet Application. If you choose Flex, here is what you will need:

Flex Builder 2 or Eclipse plug-in (Demo)
Free Flex SDK 2.0.1