Peter Elst

I’m excited to announce that I’ve finally got my training curriculum worked out and will start delivering courses on ActionScript 3.0, Flex and Adobe AIR in early 2008.

As many of you know I’ve spent most of last year traveling and speaking at various conferences. I saw this as a great opportunity to try out different ideas, get feedback and fine tune my training material. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and constructive and would hereby like to thank everyone that sent in their thoughts.

I’ve joined forces with training partners SkillsMatter (UK, Ireland and Scandinavia) and Multimediacollege (Belgium, Luxembourg) to deliver these courses and am available for custom training and consultancy worldwide.

More information as the courses roll out, in the meanwhile I’ve got a first event happening at Multimediacollege:

» AfterHours, January 17th - An indepth look at AIR API’s

I look forward to the first training events kicking off in the next few months. If you’d like more information on the various courses and training solutions feel free to get in touch!

Just two weeks ago Ted Patrick launched a wonderful initiative where he auctioned some rare bags he had lying around for charity. He pledged to personally double the proceeds and Adobe has a program whereby it doubles any gifts to charity by employees.

I managed to get the winning bid on the “Platform Evangelist Team” timbuk bag and look forward to showing it off at conferences in 2008. I figured, if you can’t get the job at least get the bag and do your bit for charity.

In total the auction raised $5774.76 USD for the San Francisco Food Bank which is pretty impressive! If you still like to get your hands on one of these bags, there are two more Flex bags being auctioned and another 24 hours left to bid.

In this holiday season we can all do our bit to help those less fortunate, I’ll be donating proceeds from amazon affiliate purchases for this quarter to my favorite charity and urge everyone to contribute in their own way.

 

Need inspiration? Here are some projects that I personally support:

www.premahome.org

PremaHome offers orphans and children from poor and broken families a new home where they receive free food and accommodation, medical care and an education. They are presently looking after 600 destitute children and teaching 750 children in its school in Tamil Nadu, South India.

www.theforgivenessproject.com

www.oxfam.org

www.amnesty.org

Some more good news coming from Adobe with them contributing a new virtual machine to the open source Tamarin project. This new VM - internally called QVM - known to the outside world as Tamarin-Tracing essentially brings the power of AVM2 (ActionScript 3.0/ECMAScript 4) to mobile devices.

It wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to see this as a first step into bringing AS3 Flash content and eventually Flex/MXML to mobile and devices. Exciting times ahead, given the current restrictions of a technology like Flash Lite I hope for widespread adoption of this new engine.

Read more
http://www.onflex.org/ted/2007/12/meet-qvm-new-tamarin-vm-contributed-to.php
http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/2007/12/18/qvm-mozillas-new-mobile-vm-for-ecmascript-4/
http://hg.mozilla.org/tamarin-tracing

[update] Turns out it isn’t quite as bad as I thought — the pay as you go is 0,26 Eurocent or 0,0026 Euro vs 0,00099 Euro buying the extra monthly blocks. Still wish Telenet had better package options and did something about those ridiculous download limits.

Read the rest of this entry »

We all heard the rumors that something big was coming. Last night Shantanu dressed up as Santa and left the following goodies on labs for us to play with:

Flex Builder 3 beta 3
The long awaited beta 3 has been made available, one step closer to a release — be sure to check it out!

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder3/

Adobe AIR beta 3
Along with Flex Builder 3 a new beta for Adobe AIR is now out with some interesting changes and additions.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

AMF3 specs
AMF, the Action Message Format, is a binary format used in Flash Remoting to communicate native ActionScript objects between a back-end and your applications.

They’ve now released the specification for AMF3, the latest version which is used in Flex, and have committed to work with the community to get implementations for every major server platform.

http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/amf/amf3_spec_121207.pdf

BlazeDS
This is huge news, Adobe is open sourcing (under LGPL v3) the messaging services that are part of Livecycle Data Services, along with the AMF3 spec and they’ve wrapped it in a Java server.

What this now means is that we can build multi-user real-time data-driven applications (wow, say that ten times), with data push and conflict handling. You’ve probably all seen the LCDS demo’s and I for one am really excited there is no longer a barrier of entry to start using it in projects.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/blazeds/

 
Thanks guys, great job in getting it all out!

It was my first year attending the annual FeWeb event and have to say it didn’t disappoint. I signed up for the RIA track which started out with Christophe Herreman talking about the Eduma-tic e-learning tool they develop at IndieGroup, more so than walk through that project he talked about the workflow within their team, how they use SVN, unit tests, Apache Ant, continuous builds with CruiseControl and the XP practices within IndieGroup.

I have to say it was one of the most practical and useful talks I’ve heard in a long time, you get to hear about code practically everywhere but an inside look at building an extensive application is really invaluable.

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My first session of day 2 at JavaPolis was “Thinking in Flex” with none other than Bruce Eckel and James Ward. Despite some issues with the internet connection they managed to pull off a very informative and enjoyable presentation and I think the content was pretty spot on for a Java crowd.

Overall the session wasn’t as technical as I thought they’d make it but they did walk through a cool little demo of the DisplayShelf component hooked up to the Flickr web service. From what I heard during the break a lot of people were excited about what they saw and will no doubt soon be playing around with Flex.

One thing that I found lacking in the presentation was a simple example of how you’re able to use RemoteObject to connect up to server-side objects (Java Beans, EJBs, POJOs). Sure, it wasn’t an LCDS session but its not too hard to put together a quick demo or at least talk them through the process.

The next session was “JavaFX in Action” by Jim Weaver, which I was really looking forward to. Lots of good information but I have to say I really overestimated the current state of the technology. Basically JavaFX comes in two flavours: JavaFX Script (which Jim talked about) and JavaFX Mobile. There were several examples that covered JavaFX Script and how to set up panels, motion etc. In my understanding it boils down to an easy to use implementation of Java Swing on steroids.

For Java developers this might be revolutionary, but with every example I couldn’t help but sigh and count my blessings at how easy it is to implement in Flex. In terms of competition I think JavaFX is still miles away, behind even on Silverlight. If I had to put my money on something I’d say watch out for JavaFX Mobile — that could really take off given their already extensive user base on mobile and devices. I hope the Flash Lite and Flash Home teams are hard at work to make Flash a viable option in this growing market.

One thing that became clear to me attending JavaPolis is that user experience and front-end development is becoming more and more important in the Java world.

 
 www.javapolis.com

I arrived about an hour late at JavaPolis thanks to some impressive traffic jam on the way to Antwerp but am glad I did manage to catch most of Sang Shin’s “Introduction to AJAX“.

He discussed several frameworks and did a demo for each — from Dojo through jMaki and DWR (Direct Web Remoting) to GWT (Google Web Toolkit).

Each of these has its own benefits and flaws I was thoroughly impressed with binding in Dojo and how you could very easily capture events for browser back and forward button navigation. jMaki was interesting in that allows you to leverage widgets from different toolkits and ‘normalizes’ the different API’s. DWR generates JavaScript front-end code from your Java classes and takes care of the remoting, essentially an RPC/RMI type situation. GWT goes one step further and actually translates Java classes to AJAX, interestingly it has both a web and hosted mode — the first just runs in the browser as traditional JavaScript/XML, the other in a Java client which is great for debugging as it supports breakpoints.

After lunch I attended Dick Wall’s “Google API’s” session which was another eye opener. Unfortunately he didn’t talk about OpenSocial as it said in the schedule but he did give a great overview of some insanely cool functionality in the Google Collections Library (BiMap, MultiMap, ReferenceMap, Constraints,…). I really need to read up on this and see how it applies to my Flex development and if there are any similar implementations out there.

The second part of his session covered the Google Data APIs, another great project and the demo’s gave us a good idea of how to connect up to Google Spreadsheet, Calendar etc. which was surprisingly easy. Also worth noting is that the client library is not just in Java but the community has it ported to Ruby, PHP, Lisp etc.

I called it a day after those sessions, will be heading out again tomorrow morning to catch the “Thinking in Flex” session and some other great presentations.

 
 www.javapolis.com

Looks like I’ve got another conference marathon coming up this week. I’m really excited I get to go to JavaPolis thanks to Christoph Rooms. Last year was amazing and am looking forward to catching some sessions on Adobe technology from a Java perspective.

Truth be told I’m a real noob when it comes to Java . While a lot of Java developers are now starting to look at Flex and AIR for me its actually the other way round, looking at how I can leverage Java as a backend for Flex applications.

Some sessions I’m hoping to catch at JavaPolis include:

Introduction to Ajax - Sang Shin

Google API’s - Dick Wall

Thinking in Flex - Bruce Eckel, James Ward and Christoph Rooms

JavaFX in Action - Jim Weaver

Developing Software like a band plays Jazz - Erich Gamma

Then on Wednesday I’m attending the annual FeWeb event where I’ll see the following sessions:

New generation e-learning software with Flex - Christophe Herreman

Rich client experiences with MS Expression & Silverlight - Wim Verhaeghen

The new Adobe technologies - Wim Vanhenden

What are Google’s plans for 2008? - Matthew “Chewy” Trewhella (Google UK)

Haven’t had a lot of exposure to Silverlight and JavaFX yet (the first unfortunately crashed my Mac first time I tried installing it and has reinforced my skepticism about Microsoft and cross-platform solutions, the second I haven’t had time to research yet).

I’m going with an open mind and will be taking lots of notes so as soon as I have some time I should be writing up a blog post on emerging technologies for the online, desktop and mobile space.

I just had an interesting discussion on Twitter with some friends about the French speaking Flash community in Belgium and the apparent lack of them at our local Adobe User Group events. That’s actually a very good point and never really understood why that is the case or if we’re simply not reaching them.

They must be out there but I’m afraid to say I personally know very few of them (Stéphane Bebrone, Gilles Bertrand, Cyril Hanquez — sorry if I’m forgetting someone I know) and would tend to say I’m generally pretty clued in on the scene.

Would love to get some links to personal blogs, community sites, courses, events etc. to follow up on what’s happening there and hear what would help to get our French speaking colleagues involved.

For those new to the Adobe User Group Belgium it might be worth noting that — except for one or two presentations in the past — sessions are always done in English, events are free of charge and its an excellent place for networking (usually with free drinks and great raffle prizes).

www.adobeusergroup.be

P.S. if there are any Flash/Flex or other Adobe software users in the German speaking community in Belgium please don’t hesitate to post a comment or get in touch either and let us know what you’re up to!