James Ward - RIA Cowboy

InfoQ.com has posted an old interview I did with Jon Rose at their QCon SF 2007 conference. In this slightly dated interview I talk about the usual Flex, Adobe AIR, and RIA topics. Makes me wish I still had my beard. Gosh I was sexy. ;)

I run 32-bit Linux but there is a very vocal group of people who really want 64-bit Linux support for Flash Player. Today there is a decent work around for running the 32-bit Flash Player on a 64-bit Linux system using the nspluginwrapper. From what I’ve heard it works fairly well on most distro’s but I haven’t heard yet how well it works with the new Flash Player 10 beta. Despite this potential work around eventually Adobe does need to natively support 64-bit Linux - and they will. This is not as simple as a recompile - otherwise there would be 64-bit support today. There is a bug already filed in the public Flash Player bug database for 64-bit support. I’d encourage you to not just go vote for that bug but also to get involved. As Tinic Uro points out in the bug comments, the missing piece for 64-bit support is open source - so you can help! Flash Player uses the open source Mozilla Tamarin VM. This VM does not yet support 64-bit Linux because all that machine code generation in the JIT compiler needs to be ported from 32-bit to 64-bit. The code is in Mozilla’s Tamarin Central Mercurial repo. This IS open source! You can help get 64-bit Linux support for Flash Player!

Tomorrow night I’ll be presenting at the New York GNU/Linux Meetup Group about Adobe Open Source - including the Adobe Flex SDK, Mozilla Tamarin, Adobe AIR (pieces like SQLite and WebKit), and BlazeDS. More details here. Hope to see you there!

Artima recently posted two interviews with me which relate to Flex. First is an interview about Adobe’s Open Screen Project. The second is called Rich-Client Misconceptions. Also Bruce Eckel recently posted a very interesting article on Artima called “Concurrency with Python, Twisted, and Flex“. Let me know what you think about those.

At JavaOne 2008 the daily edition of “JavaOne Today” features an interview with Sun’s Tor Norbye saying “Java and the Flex SDK are both open sourced. I hope they both benefit from community involvement at whatever level people choose to get involved.”

Funny thing is that this is actually a quote from Chet Haase of Adobe which was featured in yesterday’s JavaOne Today. Whoops.

See a picture from Tor’s interview below.

9,547 = Number of members of the FlexCoders Yahoo! Group.

That’s 9,547 more reasons you can Count on Flex!

“Count on Flex” is a series of blogs about the current state of the Flex ecosystem… by the numbers.

There will be numerous mini-sessions happening this year at the Adobe booth at JavaOne 2008. I’ll be doing a “Building High Performance RIAs” session and a “The Open Source RIA Stack” session. Chet Haase will be doing a “Filthy Rich [Flex] Clients” session. Bob Tierney will be doing a “LiveCycle Data Services” session and a “LiveCycle and BEA” session. Duane Nickull will also be doing sessions. We also have one guest presenter, Igor Polevoy from Exadel, who will be demonstrating Flex and Seam integration with Flamingo. Igor’s session will be at 1pm on Tuesday. Other session times are TBD - so stop by the booth on Tuesday to pickup a schedule. Also, make sure that you come to the Filthy Rich [Flex] Clients session with Stephan Jansen (of Parleys.com and JavaPolis), Chet Haase, and myself which precedes the Adobe party on Wednesday night. Stop by the booth to pickup an invite. See you there!

*** Quick Update: Duane will also be doing a hands-on Flex and AIR session at CommunityOne on Monday at noon. I’ll be doing a Lightning Talk at noon and hanging out with the RedMonk folks at CommunityOne. ***

In the past Open Web proponents have criticized Flash and Flex because the SWF specification - while being published and publicly available - limited what readers could do with the specification. More specifically the agreement to view the specification required that readers not build programs that would run SWF files. The intentions behind this were good - Adobe does not want Flash to have inconsistent and incompatible implementations.

Today Adobe Systems has announced that they are removing those restrictions on the SWF and FLV specifications! This is very exciting news and something I’ve been lobbying for since I started working for Macromedia (actually I think I began bugging Emmy Huang about this before I started working for Macromedia). Flash has become the standard for sexier web experiences with RIAs, video on the web, and interactive web content. Today that standard is truly open!

Adobe has also announced the Open Screen Project which aims to create an open and consistent layer on top of the countless small device platforms including consumer devices, phones, MIDs, and set top boxes. This is an extremely exciting project that will hopefully do for the world of small devices what the browser did for the PC world. You could also call this the “RIA Everywhere!” project. :)

Software keeps getting more exciting and the Open Web just got sexier and smaller!

326 = Number of Flex applications in the Flex.org Showcase.

Many Flex applications either require authentication or are behind firewalls. However the Flex.org Showcase lists publicly available Flex applications. If your Flex application is not listed, go add it today!

That’s 326 more reasons you can Count on Flex!

“Count on Flex” is a series of blogs about the current state of the Flex ecosystem… by the numbers.

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