The Joy of Flex

9:06 am. Ted Patrick is taking the stage now. Wants to talk about Flex! The market has changed since we started working on Flex 2, the bar has been raised higher since we started. Great time to be developing in Flex, deploying to Flash Player and soon AIR.

Customers want better experiences, more compatibility, desktop-like experiences. Walt Mossberg just reviewed picnik.com but never mentioned Flex at all. He doesn’t care about the technology, just the experience. Walt Mossberg gets it about RIAs.

He’s showing screen shots of Buzzword now. What does better mean? Better means Buzzword. The keyboards in the room stop clicking.

Next up is SlideRocket. Ted is talking about the collaborative aspects of having documents (in this case slideshows) on the web: he posted a SlideRocket deck, then Mitch (the developer of SlideRocket) came in and fixed a bunch of problems with it. It sounds like they have access control at the slide level? Not sure if I’m getting that right, but he’s talking about having Emmy Huang update the Flash Player adoption slide in a deck.

Showing a slide of Picnik, says it has the best use of the back button in an application to date, I assume he means in an RIA app. They are using the pound sign (URL fragment) approach to manage state.

Flash player adoption. Says they think they are at 92% adoption of Player 9 now. They have 8 million installs per day, 2.44 billion installs and rising. I assume this is really just the download rate, and I’m sure lots of people download it repeatedly, but it’s still a very big number!

Real growth for Flex is arriving, not only in the Internet but also in the intranet. Interesting effect this will have on developers, pulling them into big companies. He thinks that this growth is phenomenal for 13 months into Flex 2.

Ted Patrick is bringing Chuck Friedman up on the stage to show something called Ribbit, technology for routing and managing phone calls in Flash.

“The app is 100% Flex, it’s the only technology we could use to deploy an app like this.” Sounds familiar. Developer.ribbitphone.com is the URL. You can apply to be part of the prerelease there. Unfortunately the demo isn’t working, due to problems with the WiFi.

Ted’s back on stage, talking about Kapow Technologies. It’s an API generation tool that lets you generate a REST-based API against an existing web site. It is essentially a robot that goes out and looks at the site, analyzes the form, and creates an API from it. Allows integration with sites that don’t have public APIs. He’s showing how you can use Kapow to create an API for LinkedIn and then write an app that uses it.

I’m noticing that most of the things Ted is talking about have appeared previously on his blog. I wonder if that’s a common problem for people talking at conferences — they want to talk about new cool stuff, but they’ve already posted about it on their blogs.

Ted’s talking about the solitaire card game he is developing for AIR. The deck is shuffled on the server, then allows lots of people to play at the same time and compare their results having used the same deck. He’s showing how you can set the background alpha to 0.0 and make the cards float on top of everything else running on the desktop. He also just dropped a hint about shipping AIR for Linux.

He’s showing AIR Chat, which he developed for the AIR bus. They are using Amazon EC2 on the back end. They used the WebKit browser control <mx:HTML> to display the chat log. It is pointed at a local .html file in the assets directory, and whenever a message comes in, a Flex event is dispatched, and it calls into JavaScript through the DOM integration to update the <div> with a standard appendChild() call.

The history of Flex. Started out in 2000 creating a developer paradigm for SWF. In 2001 they were trying to figure out a declarative language for creating a SWF. This became MXML. In 2002 “Royale” begins development, and in 2004 Flex 1.0 arrives as a J2EE server. Also in 2004 they start researching how to integrate Flex as an Eclipse plug-in. in 2004 they ship Flex 1.5, again J2EE server, but they realize that the Flash Player performance is the bottle neck. In 2005 Flex 2.0 alpha comes out at MAX, and starts to address performance. In 2006 Flex 2.0 ships with SDK and data services, and in 2007 we get Flex 2.0.1, LCDS 2.5, and Flex 3.0 beta.

Where is Flex going? They have delivered on the component model but not on the graphics model. Coming next is graphics tags to make graphics definitions more declarative. Application performance will improve, since rendering speed of player is critical. ActionScript performance is also going to improve. Tamarin (open source ActionScript 3.0 engine) is going to be the ECMA4 runtime and Adobe is relying on outside open source engineers to help make this happen. Text is also going to improve: it’s unacceptable not to be able to control glyphs, kerning, sizes and heights, script direction, etc. More skinning and styling with graphics is coming.

Flex news. New Flex 3 beta is shipping in October, before trial expires. Pricing/licensing jump from Flex 2 to Flex 3 is going to be “gentle.” There are 1000 community bug base accounts, everyone can log bugs at bugs.adobe.com/flex and help the team make the product better: the better the bug report, the better the product will be. This is along the roadmap to open source. Flex 3 will ship as open source with full governance at the same time that the commercial product is released, not afterwards but right at the same time. Ship date is early 2008 for a number of reasons, partly to raise the bar on quality and actually respond to more feature requests and fix the bugs that are coming in from the community.

AIR news. They are really focused on customer API feedback to make the APIs better. Again, submit bugs through labs. They added SQLite into the AIR runtime to allow running local databases when offline, as well as sync to a server when connected. Adding application signing and security. The onAIR Bus Tour leg 2 begins tomorrow: onair.adobe.com. AIR 1.0 will ship in early 2008, in parallel with Flex 3, designed to ship at the same time. I can’t tell for sure but it sounds like this is a schedule ship: “we’re taking the time.”

MAX 2007. Ted was pulled onto the MAX conference planning team. Chicago, Barcelona, Tokyo over two weeks. Over 60 Flex sessions, mostly given by Flex engineers themselves. Bootcamp with Dev Team, Flex “Meet the Team” session. Registration for MAX 2007 has already surpassed the 2006 total. There will be a 360Flex discount code for MAX.

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