Posts Tagged ‘flex’

How Flash Builder 4 Changes the Designer-Developer Workflow and More

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

As you may have seen Adobe released Flash Builder 4 today, the successor of Flex Builder 3. Why the name switch? The change was designed to create a clear distinction between the free open-source Flex framework and commercial solution. Flash Builder 4 comes in two flavours, a Standard version and a Premium Version. This release is great for companies like us that develop rich internet applications with a strong user experience component, as it introduces significant enhancements in the way developers work.

The most obvious change in Flash Builder 4 is in the designer-developer workflow. In previous versions, the workflow was one-way – the designer would create a layout and hand it off to the developer for implementation. Now, this process has been opened up and there’s a two-way exchange. Designers can still work with the tools they know and love but now they can work in parallel with the developers. Designers can directly make modifications to the design of an application and implement them easily in the mxml files without breaking the logic a developer is working on, as the components are now separate. This makes it easier for designers and developers to deliver well-integrated applications that are driven more by the user experience than by technical requirements.

Another great feature that makes improves development with Flash Builder 4 is the new wizard-based connection for communications with the server. Before this version, developers needed to manually configure server connections based on the code returned from the server. This new pre-coding makes connections to a variety of different web servers and web services much faster and easier.

Handling text within an application is also greatly improved, as Flash Builder 4 leverages all the text enhancement features that came with Flash Player 10. The text rendering engine performs better and faster, and there’s now native support for anti-aliasing, so fonts no longer need to be embedded into the application. It also supports right to left text, a feature that’s been requested for several years now.

Flash Builder 4 also integrates Flex Unit, which was previously a separate tool used for unit testing. This integration makes it easier for those following Test Driven Development (TDD) methodologies.

The bottom-line is that Flash Builder 4 makes it easier to build quality, design-driven applications and opens up a new level of cooperation between developers and designers.

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Posted in Rich Internet Applications, Software Engineering, User Experience/User Interface | 2 Comments »

INM Presenting at Webcom Montréal

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Next Thursday October 22 at 2:10 pm, I will be speaking at Webcom 2009 on the topic of “Repairing the Broken Shopping Cart” in collaboration with Stephane Lesieur from Adobe Canada. I will illustrate my point with a highly demanding consumer application, show an elegant solution using Adobe technologies such as Flex, Air and LiveCycle DS, and discuss best practices to implement such a solution.

Full details at: http://www.webcom-montreal.com

My colleague Benoit David and myself will spend most of the day at Webcom and will be delighted to meet you there. Please let me know if you plan on attending too.

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Posted in eCommerce, Rich Internet Applications | 9 Comments »

Adobe Announces LiveCycle ES via Amazon Web Services

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Adobe Systems Incorporated has announced “the immediate availability of Adobe® LiveCycle® ES Developer Express software,a full version of Adobe LiveCycle ES hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing environment. Using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) technologies, Adobe’s offering provides a virtual, self-contained development environment where enterprise developers can prototype, develop, and test Adobe LiveCycle ES applications without needing to install and configure Adobe LiveCycle ES themselves.”

By combining Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF), Adobe Reader®, Flex® and Flash® technologies with the Amazon Web Services (AWS), developers now have an instant, ready-built sandbox to work in. The upfront costs, installation fees and maintenance hassles that traditionally follow when development teams begin work with a software package are eliminated with this offering.

LiveCycle ES via Amazon Web Services can also be very useful for the rapid prototyping of a solution that otherwise would require the installation of a LiveCycle server. The costs associated with the set up of a development environment or test lab are also greatly reduced. By taking a pay-as-you-go on a per-use basis approach, LiveCycle ES ensures that businesses don’t need to invest in large infrastructures on day 1 of their project.

We blogged about PaaS (Platform as a Service) a while back and praised the ability of this technology to offer on-tap applications available on an as-needed basis via a programmable environment presented as a rich Internet application (RIA). This Adobe / Amazon partnership is part of this kind of service offering. By making development tools and extensions available “on tap” is helping businesses such as INM integrate these offerings to better deliver rich user experiences. LiveCycle ES allows for a-la-carte use that scales up instantaneously to a large number of CPUs and provides plenty of storage space to deliver a rapid response (crucial to the delivery of a great User Experience).

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Posted in Rich Internet Applications, Trends and Technology | No Comments »

The State of The RIA Nation

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

I figured I’d post a quick summary on the “state of the nation” in regards to RIAs since it has been a very active couple of months.

Kevin Whinnery has an interesting blog titled Which RIA Tools Give Us the Best Bang for Your Buck?. Interesting because I agree with his analysis: there is no best RIA tool out there, only trade-offs.

As I had mentioned in Spry 1.7 is Coming Soon AJAX and Flex are now considered complementary: the former specializes in moderately rich interfaces, but may lead to expensive Write Once, Debug Everywhere projects, whereas the latter allows for more expressive interfaces at the cost of surrendering part of your [software's] freedom to private interests.

On the topic of MVC-ish frameworks (as referred to by Kevin Whinnery), it is worth noting that Flex too can be a very efficient MVC development framework with Cairngorm, but most particularly with PureMVC which Laurent Brigaut, INM’s Director of R&D, will speak about at Webmaniacs tomorrow.

RIA War Is Brewing is another interesting and recent article by Jim Rapoza. Although I perceive this competition as more of a Socratic dialectic applied to the business world than a true battle, Jim converges on the same conclusion as this Blog consistently promotes: real competition is now between Adobe and Microsoft. Whether other RIA tools can be categorized as Lada‘s or Aston Martin‘s, one way or another, they are marginal and only suited for niche applications.

Once online and offline environments are mastered for desktop computers, laptops and kiosks, the next natural step for RIA technologies is the propagation to mobile devices. Tablet technologies have a very promising future but are still embryonic. Thus the smartphone is the next logical platform of choice.

Very interesting plans are unfolding on this new frontier with Microsoft demonstrating serious progress with Silverlight and Adobe coming out of its 20th Century bi-standard policies (Flash Player and Flash Lite Player) with the Open Screen Project. Google fosters the Open Handset Alliance with the Android project, and Sun is behind its JavaFX developers, but neither will deliver truly rich applications, at least not in the foreseeable future. But this is a topic for another day, and another posting.

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Posted in Rich Internet Applications | No Comments »

Spry 1.7 is Coming Soon

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

Would it be wrong to say that just a few years ago when rich internet applications (RIAs) were starting to make serious strides on the market, Adobe was confronted with a dilemma: they would either need to promote Flex as an alternative to AJAX solutions, which would polarize the market, or to just embrace (and potentially lead) the AJAX market.

Adobe settled on the latter, and brought forth Spry, a framework for AJAX. This was a good move, as it seems clear today that Flex and AJAX have a symbiotic relationship. Google (author of the famous Google Web Toolkit for AJAX), Yahoo (author of the equally famous Yahoo! User Interface Library toolkit), and many other mainstream players consistently use AJAX and other tools, such as Flex, in their projects.

In retrospect, Spry was an excellent investment for Adobe not only because of the great value it brings to the developer community and to Adobe itself, but also because it saved them from a potential public relations nightmare.

I think the lesson to be learned from this, is that not all communications come in the shape of a formal press release, a blog posting, or a hosted event. Spry is a very successful communications vehicle disguised as a product.

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Posted in Rich Internet Applications, Trends and Technology | No Comments »

New Public Betas of Adobe Flex and AIR

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

Today, Adobe released the Beta 3 versions of both Adobe Flex and AIR. You may ask “Why should I care about beta software”? Well, both of these applications will be impactful if you are building, or considering building, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). While not the only solution on the market, Flex is one of the most widely used technologies for enterprises RIAs.

What makes this release interesting? It delivers:

  • Great tools for data aggregation and for visually presenting metrics that will contribute to decision making.
  • More freedom for end-users to access tools and information without necessarily being connected to the internet.
  • Great economies of scale in creating online and offline applications in from a single effort.

We suspect that this release is a feature-complete version of what we will see in the final on which is anticipated to be available in early February 2008. If you are looking for a copy, it’s available on the Adobe Labs site.

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Posted in Rich Internet Applications, Software Engineering | No Comments »

Google Analytics Now Tracks Rich Content

Monday, October 22nd, 2007

The difficult task of generating some meaningful and accurate numbers to justify your investments in rich content on your site has just gotten easier. Google Analytics, a popular website analysis tool amongst small to mid-sized businesses, has just been updated to now track user engagements that include elements common with Web 2.0 services, including Javascript, Ajax and Flash applications, widgets and gadgets, and downloadable pages.

This not only allows companies to better track their website numbers as a whole, it also allows them to offer advertisers alternate numbers to page views for gauging the success of an ad. New figures such as time spent on a page or the length of time an ad is visible may become more valuable to advertisers in the future.

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Posted in Rich Internet Applications, Trends and Technology | No Comments »

New Flex Magazine Launched

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

There’s a new magazine about to hit the racks. Late last week, Sys-Con Media announced the launch of Flex Developer Journal, the first and only independent magazine serving Adobe Flex developers. Yakov Fain, a noted RIA and Java expert and the co-author of the best-selling book Adobe Flex & Java, was named editor-in-chief of the publication.

Flex Developer Journal will cover all the technologies around the Adobe Engagement Platform, including AIR, Flex, Studio, Creative Suite, Contribute, Acrobat, LiveCycle, CF, and Flash Lite. It should be an interesting read.

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Posted in Rich Internet Applications, Trends and Technology | No Comments »

Web 2.0 Needs Adobe

Monday, July 30th, 2007

Thomas Yager, a senior analyst at InfoWorld, recently posted an interesting piece entitled Web 2.0 Needs Adobe. This piece looks at how HTML and AJAX have reached their respective limits, particularly in regard to mobile devices. He provides a great example of how enterprise level applications keep reverting back to Adobe technology, precisely for their mobile needs.

This sentiment is echoed by a number of clients we’ve spoken to lately. The majority of new inquiries for RIA development, particularly enterprise caliber applications, have leaned toward Adobe technology. So much so that we are now working toward having several of our developers Flex Certified.

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Posted in Rich Internet Applications, Trends and Technology | No Comments »