James Ward - RIA Cowboy

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!

Revolutions may be enabled by technology, but they are driven by people. Adobe’s recent announcements about Flex, Flash, and Adobe AIR on Linux are the most recent technology enablers for the software revolution that is currently underway.

Usually I’m one of the first to post about Adobe’s Linux related announcements. My trip to Bangalore, India, however, made me a little late to the party this time. In case you haven’t seen the announcements, on March 31, 2008 Adobe released an alpha version of Adobe AIR on Linux and an update to the alpha version of Flex Builder 3 for Linux (which supports building AIR applications on Linux). On the same day Adobe also announced that we joined the Linux Foundation.

In a post about the announcement, JD points to one of my old blog posts, which still accurately echoes the significance of this announcement - “… for the first time EVER, nearly everyone in the world has access to a FREE, ubiquitous application runtime, and a FREE application development toolkit for that runtime! Of course I’m referring to Flash Player 9 and the free Flex 2 SDK.” Now I can update this statement “For the first time EVER, everyone in the world has access to a FREE, ubiquitous web runtime, a FREE cross-OS desktop runtime, and a FREE, open source, and mature development toolkit for those runtimes! Of course I’m referring to Flash Player 9, Adobe AIR, and the Flex 3 SDK.” This is huge. We can now build real software once and have it run on every major OS and in every major browser – and we can do it using open source tools!

Why the excitement? Haven’t we had this for years - with Java? QT? GTK? True… in theory. We’ve had the technology; but we always lacked a critical mass of people that were actually using it for wide reaching, real software. There are now countless companies - including Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, Intuit, E*Trade, eBay, AOL, NASDAQ, Yahoo!, and numerous startups – that are using Flex to build real software for Flash Player on the web and Adobe AIR on the desktop. This kind of software revolution is reminiscent of the transition from client-server to web applications. The movement is real. The technology is mature (even the new Adobe AIR desktop runtime consists primarily of mature, proven technologies like Flash Player, Tamarin, SQLite, and Webkit). Software is changing for the better, especially for those of us on Linux.

I now have several desktop applications installed on Linux - such as the eBay Desktop - which I would never have had before AIR worked on Linux. Most companies simply do not invest time and money building or porting their software for such a small customer base. With AIR it doesn’t matter. Companies build the software once and it works on the web, on the desktop, on Windows, on Mac, on Linux. This is a software revolution not because the technology exists, but because people - lots of people - are actually using it.

Today we call the products of this software revolution “Rich Internet Applications”. In ten years it’ll just be “software”.

Adobe recently released an alpha version of Adobe AIR for Linux and a updated alpha 3 version of Flex Builder for Linux. I wanted to show everyone how easy it is to build and run desktop RIAs with Flex and Adobe AIR so I recorded a quick video. In the video I use Papervision3D and a component I created called “TurbulentApplication” to turn an ordinary AIR Application into an application which pitches and rolls in response to the accelerometer values on my Ubuntu laptop. While most AIR applications work on Windows, Mac, and Linux, this one only works on Linux because as far as I know Windows and Mac don’t have a way to read the accelerometer values from a file, like Linux. If you have Linux (and an accelerometer) and want to run the application you can download it here. If you want to download the source code for the TurbulentApplication component, you can get it here.

Check out the video (and let me know what you think!):

Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime for deliverying rich Internet applications on the desktop. Developers using Flex, Flash, HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax can easily build applications for the desktop using Adobe AIR. As of today there have only been releases of Adobe AIR for Windows and Mac but Adobe is committed to also delivering a version for Linux. This is great news for developers like me who use Linux as their primary desktop operating system. The Adobe AIR team is now in the phase of development where they need a handful of additional testers to begin testing initial builds of AIR on Linux. If you are interested please answer the questions below in an email to helptesterairlinux at adobe dot com.

1. Are you comfortable working with prerelease software that is not yet feature complete?

2. Will you be able to submit bug reports on issues that you find back to our development team?

3. How many hours a week can you spend testing on Linux?

4. What is the primary distribution of Linux that you’re using? If you are using more than one distribution, please list.

5. Will you be developing applications on your Linux machine (as opposed to writing on Windows and testing the applications on Linux)?

6. What other operating system are you using, if any (Mac, Windows)? Can you compare the behavior of AIR for Linux with AIR for Windows and AIR for Mac OS?

7. Are you working on an AIR application today? If so, please describe.

8. Are you primarily a Flash, Flex or JavaScript developer?

9. What is your name, company name and email address?

Unfortunately at this point not everyone will be accepted into this pre-beta program however there will be public betas when the pre-beta has been sufficiently tested. And at that point maybe we will finally know whether penguins can fly when given AIR.

I’ve been using Alpha 1 of Flex Builder for Linux since it shipped back in October and it’s been working great! It’s great to see Alpha 2 out the door! More info here:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/releasenotes.html

Just a quick note to say how excited I am that Evolution will be getting a MAPI Connector! I’ve been using Evolution with Exchange since 2003. Thankfully it works - but for me it crashes quite often. So I’m really excited about the prospect of a better Exchange connector. Screen scraping is just too brittle and too slow. This should also improve offline support. Currently before I get on a plane I sync Outlook in VMWare. That works but I don’t care much for Outlook and VMWare is a killer on my battery life. With this improvement to Evolution and the improvements that are happening with the video drivers on Linux, things are shaping up for Linux on the Desktop. Could 2008 really be the year of Linux on the Desktop? Just kidding. I’ve been happily using Linux as my primary Desktop since like 1996. It isn’t without some annoyances and required maintenance. But neither is any other OS. And at least with Linux it’s easier to fix stuff myself.

I love vi. I’ve been doing Flex development on Linux for about three years - mostly with vi. But to be honest when building complex applications it is nice to have things like code hinting and integrated debugging. I’m sure you *could* make vi do that with Flex but I am not brave enough to attempt to figure that out. So I’m extremely excited that Adobe is releasing a version of Flex Builder for Linux! You can download Flex Builder for Linux from the labs.adobe.com site right now!

Having Flex Builder for Linux really empowers us Linux geeks to easily build Rich Internet Applications. Flex 2 & Flex 3 applications can run in the browser via Flash Player 9 which has been available for Linux for more than a year. To run Flex applications as Desktop applications we need the Adobe Integrated Runtime, AIR. Adobe AIR isn’t yet available for Linux. But I’ve been having pretty good success testing / debugging Flex based AIR applications on Linux over the past few weeks since I discovered that you can use Wine and adl.exe to run AIR applications on Linux.

This is great news for developers - especially developers that use Linux! But do I miss vi? I really do. I really wish there were vi key bindings in Eclipse (and there probably is but I haven’t found a project that does that yet). Go give the new Flex Builder for Linux a try and let us know how it goes! Please file bugs and feature requests on the public Flex bug database.

*** WARNING - THIS IS TOTALLY UNSUPPORTED, UNENDORSED, AND A COMPLETE HACK ***

I tried for a while to get the actual Adobe AIR runtime installed via wine on Linux. But I wasn’t able to get it to work. Then I realized that I don’t really need the whole runtime to just test my AIR applications. All I need is ADL - the testing tool for AIR applications. So I gave it a try on a Salesforce.com project I’m working on:

jamesw@dos:~/projects/mavericks/examples/air/AccountTracker/bin$ wine ~/flex_sdk-3_b1/bin/adl.exe salesforceTest-app.xml

And to my total surprise the AIR application loaded and ran on Linux! Sweet!

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