James Ward - RIA Cowboy

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.

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. ***

JavaOne 2008 begins in just over a week! Adobe is a sponsor again so you will find me in the booth when I’m not out at the many JavaOne parties. On Wednesday night Adobe will be hosting their party at Jillian’s. Preceding the party Chet Haase and I will be presenting a quick, fun session about Flex. More details at http://flex.org/javaone

Also on Monday at CommunityOne I’ll be doing a Lightning Talk and participating in a panel.

I hope to see you there!

Over the next few months I’ll be going around the world (literally) speaking about Flex and Adobe AIR. Here’s a quick rundown on where I’ll be:

Wednesday March 25 in Las Vegas: TheServerSide Java Symposium - Co-presenting with Eddie O’Neil from BEA

Thursday March 26 in Philadelphia: Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise - Porting from Web 1.0 to RIA in the Enterprise

Thursday April 3 in Bangalore, India: Adobe RIA Architect Summit 2008 - Best Practices for Building Flex/AIR applications

Tuesday April 15 in Atlanta: BEA Dev2Dev TechDays - Developing a Rich UI with Flex in Eclipse & Connecting a Flex UI to the back-end SOA (The Dev2Dev Tour is also going around the world with many other great Adobe speakers.)

Wednesday April 16 in New York: Salesforce.com’s Tour de Force (Also going around the world with other Adobe speakers.)

Friday April 18 in New York: Flex Camp Wall Street - Offline Reporting in Rich Internet Applications & From Tags to Riches with Shashank Tiwari

May 5 in San Francisco: CommunityOne - Hanging out with my Redmonk friends and possibly a session

May 6 - 9 in San Francisco: JavaOne - On Wednesday Chet Haase and I will be doing a late afternoon session at the Metreon followed by drinks and pool at Julian’s. Also you won’t want to miss Stephan Janssen’s presentation “Parleys.com: An Adobe Flex/AIR and JavaFX™ Case Study”

June 25 in Zurich, Switzerland: Jazoon 08 - Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Java

There are also a number of other great events going on that other Adobe people will be speaking at, but unfortunately I couldn’t fit into my schedule:

onAIR Europe Tour

360|Flex Europe April 7-9, 2008 in Milan, Italy

And others…

I hope to see you somewhere along the way!

Today Adobe launched Flex 3 and Adobe AIR 1.0 – the most mature and comprehensive platform for Rich Internet Applications in existence.

The news of the launch is everywhere but I wanted to point out a few of the most exciting things related to this launch.

The Flex SDK and BlazeDS are now officially open source.

InfoQ has published an interview with me on the Flex 3 launch. They have also posted an interview with Kevin Hoyt on the AIR 1.0 launch as well as an overview of today’s announcements.

Salesforce.com and Adobe have launched the Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex.

Not really related to the launch but also very exciting – Chet Haase, Java Swing guru and co-author of Filthy Rich Clients has joined the Flex engineering team.

This launch is the biggest RIA launch ever! I can’t wait to see what you build with these awesome technologies!

An article titled “From Tags to Riches: Going from Web 1.0 to Flex” which I co-authored with Shashank Tiwari has been published on InfoQ. In the article, Shashank and I walk through the steps needed to port a traditional HTML-based application to Flex. We use the Java-based Pentaho BI Dashboard as our example application. Our goal in writing the article was to make the process easy for anyone to try on their own. It should be easy to try it yourself — just download the code and other necessary pieces. Also, if you want to play with the end result, you can access the Flex application here. Let us know what you think.

[Update: Shashank's blog post about the article made me realize that I forgot to mention I will be presenting on this topic at JBoss World this week but using the JBoss JMX Console as the example application. Thanks Shashank for including that!]

Today I leave for Europe where I will kick off my first few stops on the Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR Pre-Release Tour - Paris, Milan, London, Amsterdam, and Brussels. Then next week I take a week off the tour to speak at the Tampa Java User Group. The following week I resume the tour in the Midwest - Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, and St Louis. Find out more details about the tour at: flex.org/tour

I’m looking forward to meeting more of the Flex community over the next few weeks and hopefully you! (If you happen to live near any of those locations.)

One of the most exciting Flex-related announcements in 2007 was the BEA Workshop and Flex Builder bundle. In case you missed it you can find coverage here, here, here, and a bunch of other places. It was big news! This was further validation that Flex is the standard for Enterprise Rich Internet Applications.

As a long-time Java developer I’ve always respected BEA. They build solid software that is the backbone of many large and mission critical systems. Their stuff just works. And their development tools are no different.

When we first began meeting with BEA about Flex it became evident very quickly how well the two technology sets fit together.

Flex Builder + Workshop = Amazing tooling for Enterprise RIAs

With BlazeDS the stack gets even better.

BlazeDS + Weblogic = Solid back-end for Enterprise RIAs

But how do you fit all these pieces together? An article I wrote was recently published on just this:

Using BEA Workshop Studio and Java to create Flex-based RIAs


(Note: I used Tomcat instead of Weblogic in the article so that there wasn’t one more prerequisite for readers to download. However the steps to use Weblogic are identical - just setup a Weblogic server instead of a Tomcat server.)

Also if you would like to purchase the Workshop and Flex Bundle check out Pieter Humphrey’s Blog for an amazing promo discount code.

I hope that this combination of technologies allows you to build some amazing applications! Let me know how it goes.

Today Adobe released BlazeDS, an open source Java implementation of AMF based remoting and messaging. This is huge news for the Flex, Flash, Adobe AIR and Java communities! I can’t wait to break the news with Bruce Eckel in a few hours at the JavaPolis day 2 Keynote! Check out the press release. And go download the bits. And take a look at my new BlazeBench application which shows why you want AMF and BlazeDS. Right-click on the application to find the source code on SourceForge. I’ll roll out a binary and source build in the next week or so. We have also officially published the AMF spec!

[Please note that my server is probably going pretty taxed for the next few days so the results you see might vary from normal results. When I publish the binary version of this app you will be able to run it locally and see more accurate results. Notice how much time it's taking my server to create those large data packets and gzip them? One more reason that AMF is great! Super fast without the need for gzip!]

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