Adobe Flex Web Design
I always look forward to Ben Forta coming to town. Not only does he always have something interesting to talk about, he is also a lot of fun to hang around with in general and he is a smart and charming fellow.
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For those of you not familiar with Ben, here is a quick bio: Many moons ago he was a cold fusion programmer and liked the language so much he joined the company (Allaire) that created it. He became the products evangelist and toured touting the wonderful capabilities of CF. Subsequently; Macromedia purchased Allaire and started integrating Flash and ColdFusion. You have probably heard of Flash, as it is probably the most downloaded piece of software ever created.
Something like 3.5 billion downloads at last count since its introduction in 1996. That`s a lot of mindshare. And I remember in the 90`s when people said "users won`t download a plug-in!"
End tangent, back on track. Ok so Macromedia enhances Flash`s Actionscript capabilities and integrates backend data manipulation with ColdFusion and flash remoting. You can probably see a pattern forming here.
Macromedia had the hottest client-side software around but no back end database muscle to tie it together and deliver a full development environment. With the acquisition of Allaire they now had the server-side and client-side connection.
I promise that I will soon get to all the juicy cool details about what you can do with Flex and Air, and just what the heck Flex and Air are, as I really should have already known but apparently just haven`t been paying enough attention over the past few years.
Ok, where were we?
Adobe.Adobe has, after some considerable time created the most ubiquitous piece of software around. From version 1.0 in 1993 they have created Acrobat Reader which allows for complex layouts to be ported to any OS. Hence the PDF file extension (portable document format).
Anyway I`m getting ahead of myself again. So in 2005 Adobe acquires Macromedia and takes over the entire suite and move into a whole new realm of the datasphere. Adobe has long been in the presentation layer business, starting with their first product, PostScript (circa 1982) for printer output, fonts, Illustrator and their most famous product (in 1990) which has itself become a verb, Photoshop.
So, graphic artists are already familiar with Photoshop and Adobe, the 800lb gorilla of image editing. Now with this latest play Adobe has positioned itself to become much more than just the presentation layer.
Coldfusion was already a powerful language when Allaire released version 4.0 back in 1998. Incidentally 1999 is the year I finally gave it a try and walked away from php and perl without even a backward glance.
So we have Coldfusion this really powerful backend server software, (technically middleware that works with a web server like IIS or apache, and a database like MySQL or Oracle). We now have ColdFusion version 8 which is a super powerful backend development environment that can do all sorts of cool things with integrated Ajax and webservices, Acrobat integration, captcha generation, rss and atom feeds, etc., etc.
Add to that a huge installed userbase of Flash client side interactive scriptable client applications. Combining the two allow for amazing things to happen, that is the entire bases of Flex and Air.
Now, before I do get into the guts and capabilities of these applications, I just want to fully express the position Adobe has achieved. It`s safe to say that every web designer in the world is well aware of, and probably uses on a daily bases Photoshop, Acrobat and Flash. Flex and Air will bridge the gap, and probably blur the lines between programmers and the designers.
Now, a lot of the capabilities that Flex has are not new. Flex is essentially a collection of technologies (as is Adobe Air) to create rich web applications. What`s new is the complete integration of backend logic data processing and front end user interface.
You can quickly create dynamic interfaces that can maintain connection to the server for live data interaction; this allows you to stream data like Java applets for stock tickers or instant messaging communication. You can create open sockets to eliminate page refreshes and load times.
The Flex SDK (software developer kit) is open source and available free from Adobe, this is a first for this company and has elicited a lot of excitement in the development community.
The beauty of this application is that you can knock out really complex data manipulation tasks very quickly, it gives a huge increase in development speed and easily integrates with XML. This essentially means you can build a complex database application in a day that would take a week using other open source (or commercial) languages such as PHP or ASP.
Flex gives you almost all the power of a desktop application (sans local file access) and it runs right in the users browser, it is the future of hosted applications.
So, naturally follows Adobe AIR which actually creates stand alone executable applications that can interact with the users local file system AND interact with a hosted database application. This allows developers to create hybrid applications which interact with the network and can also interface with users local desktop.
To really understand the power and possibilities that this technology opens up, you can take a look at some of the applications that have been developed.
Check out the Flex showcase http://flex.org/showcase/Download Flex http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/
See a Flex application being built http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/media/flexapp/
- Reporting from Atlanta
Wesley E. Warren
CEO Vexcom
From Adobe
Adobe� Flex� Builder� 3 software offers powerful new capabilities for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs).Full support for the Adobe AIR� runtime makes it easy to create RIAs for the desktop.
New integration with Adobe Creative Suite� 3 software helps designers and developers work together more efficiently.
New and enhanced data visualization features, including the new Advanced Datagrid, enable even richer presentation of business data.
New memory and performance profilers make it easy to optimize your application
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