Flex Archives
My day started at the Keynote. I have a few random thoughts about it.
- Bruce Chizen would be pretty bitter about being the rich and famous CEO of Adobe if he didn't enjoy it so much. He made me feel guilty though for continuously looking up his salary for one of my work projects. It's impressive.
- Scene 7 does some absurd stuff with dynamic imaging.
- Share looks promising
- Thermo will be absurd if it does all it promises. Photoshop Composition to Flex application in one click.
- Next version of ColdFusion is code named centaur. My supposition is that it is so named because if angered, it will shoot you with an arrow, and then trample you to death. It does make me feel a little afraid that they will strap a horse's body on a shirtless Ben Forta, ala "Scorpio Man." I am disturbed.
I sat through Sean Corfield's session on Design Patterns, it was simply tremendous. I tend to be a fan of Sean's but I'm not exaggerating. He did a great job of explaining the theory and the concepts behind patterns. Even though I thought I knew them already, he did bring a new perspective to the whole thing.
I also attended Ryan Stewart's session on Air and PDF integration. It looked interesting, but I have no idea why the hell you would ever do it.
If my day looks a little light, I had a minor problem with something back at home, so I had to skip my first session. I also had an opportunity to give an ad hoc demo of Squidhead, so I took it. If for any reason anybody wants a 5 minute demo, drop me a line. I'm always willing.
I finished up the day at Max Awards and Sneaks Session. The following really stood out to me:
- Visual Communicator is a niche product that will make video presentations very easily. I think it's going to be a very cool boon to the vlog space.
- Photoshop express is just beyond cool. Pretty much everything anyone would need to do to a photo can be done in an online client. The demonstrator completely retouched a photo in under 30 seconds. Crazy.
- Hemant presented on ColdFusion publishing to Air. This is something I really wanted for CF since I saw the Air Bus Tour. They've done more with it than I ever thought. You can do online and offline applications. Cooler than what I was imagining.
- Flash gets skeletons. Very cool.
- C++ on Flash leads to Quake on Flash. Tremendously cool.
- Adobe hired that guy who does the dynamic image content resizing.
I ended up skipping the Event, because it didn't really cry out to me, I had to prepare something for the CF Boot Camp tomorrow, and I'm beat from last night.
October 2, 2007 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 9:17 PM
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adobemax07,
I'd like to highlight a Max 2007 session: A Virtual Trading Floor: Bringing Wall Street to the Classroom. It's being given by a few of my co-workers here at Wharton (Charles Rejonis, Alec Lamon, and Erin Wyher). I'm not sure about the exact topics that they will discuss, but it's about a pretty hardcore application that simulates a trading floor. Consequently it deals in multiple transactions per second on large amounts of unique user data. This application was originally a desktop application written in Visual Basic and running in a controlled lab. After a few unsuccessful attempts (because the technology wasn't there yet,) the Learning Lab team managed to replace the old application with a RIA version using ColdFusion, Flex and Flex Data Services (or LiveCycle Data Services). They ran into a lot of challenges that truly tested the limits of all of the underlying technology.
I highly suggest this session to you all. It's a great story that responds to the argument: there are some things that RIA's can't do. Because here is at least one seemingly impossible thing they can indeed do.
September 20, 2007 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 12:58 PM
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ColdFusion,
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adobemax07,
Ryan's post, and the ensuing cry and hue made me finally put to pixels what I've been thinking for a while.
Ajax and Flex can both at a certain level be used to build web applications. Experts in each can probably get each to do most of what the other can accomplish. However, they work from different directions.
Ajax enhances a HTML website, and through enhancement after enhancement one can build a zippy web application that makes HTML do things it's not really imagined to do, but it works and that's actually a testament to the technology's flexibility, so no fault there. Additionally Ajax can be added in very small doses to enhance a site one little section at a time. Further I would go on to say that when combined with Web Standards, Ajax can build some very cool applications that can degrade but still work in less capable browsers.
Flex replaces the HTML interface with Flash, and focuses on building new interfaces for the data it's working with. It's really good at pushing bite sized chunks of data at a user, perhaps giving it a cool view like a chart or a customized display widget, and allowing the user to interact with it intuitively. It's also important to point out that Flex makes it really easy to do so. However, for maximum efficiency you need to write little self contained applications. You really shouldn't use it to enhance one drop down box or text box. (I know you can, but it doesn't mean that it is as easy as other things, or even the right way to do it.)
Sure you can make a complete web application in Ajax if you're one of the geniuses that work 37Signals, but for the rest of us, it's still a little daunting to do an entire application in Ajax. In my opinion, it's a little harder to write a full web application in Ajax than in Flex.
Sure you could write a blog in Flex. But even when you do, you admit that it's just proof of concept, and not really intended to be a real interface. In my opinion, it's not good idea to deliver content that has a significant text component with Flex.
If you were to show a spectrum of web applications from "content with some interactivity" on the left to "applications with small chunks of data", on the right... then as you traveled from left to right you would start using Ajax, and at some point switch over to use Flex. Where you make that decision really depends on your existing environment, and your comfort level with the technology. (Perhaps whether or not you are 37Signals has impact on it, as does whether or not you are philosophically opposed to spending any money on software.)
So use the right tool for the job. Use Flex for rapid development of full blown web applications. Use Ajax to enhance sites that contain a lot of text content or need to tolerate several levels of user interactivity. Both can exist without annihilating each other.
Anyway, that's my, possibly inarticulate, opinion on it... Yours will probably vary.
September 6, 2006 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 1:47 AM
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Thanks to a lot of hits today, I was able to refine the Flex 2.0 version of the Wikipedia Showdown , fix a slew of bugs, and comment the source. The source is now available. Thank you to all who tried it and got an error, you showed me a lot (but not all) of what was wrong with it.
Wikipedia Showdown - Flex 2.0 Source
February 22, 2006 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 2:06 AM
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Inspired by Ben Forta's appearance at PACFUG, I decided to Flexify an application that I originally wrote as an experiment: the Wikipedia Showdown. It didn't take that long to write in Flex 2.0. Most of the time was spent fine tuning the position of of the elements and what not. Check it out, I should post the source in a day or so.
Wikipedia Showdown Flex 2.0.
Note: Make sure you have the Beta version of the Flash 8.5 Player otherwise it won't work.
February 21, 2006 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 2:58 AM
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ColdFusion,
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