James Ward - RIA Cowboy

I had the great opportunity to be the star of a new Duane’s World episode! In this episode Duane and I share some fine scotch and discuss all of the good reasons to attend MAX Europe. Check it out!

Conferences

At Dreamforce 2008, Salesforce.com’s annual conference, I co-presented a session about integrating Adobe AIR and Flex with Force.com. A recording of that presentation is now available. Let me know what you think.

Adobe AIR, Flex, Salesforce.com

Jon and I have posted Episode 3 of the Drunk on Software video podcast. In this episode we talk about some of the real world performance issues with Flex’s ArrayCollection. We’ve also created a few demos which illustrate how in some cases ArrayCollection is 26 times slower than Array:

Let us know what you think.

Drunk on Software, Flex

eWeek.com is reporting that Oracle has released five new CRM Gadgets built using Adobe AIR and Flex! At Oracle OpenWorld 2008 I had the chance to record a video of these new gadgets. Check it out:

This is a great innovation in the usually boring CRM software space. Great job Oracle!

Adobe AIR, Flex, Oracle

Tomorrow at 3:30 at Adobe MAX 2008 there will be a session on building rich Internet applications in the cloud using Salesforce and Adobe Flex. They will even be giving away a new Macbook! The combination of Flex and Force.com (the platform side of Salesforce) is a fantastic way to build RIAs in the cloud. If you are at MAX this is a session not to miss!

Flex, Salesforce.com

Over the past few months Greg Wilson, Christophe Coenraets, and myself have been hard at work on a secret project. So today we are proud to announce the new Tour de Flex has just gone live! Tour de Flex showcases the capabilities of Flex, BlazeDS, LCDS, Adobe AIR, and Flash Player (now collectively called the Adobe Flash Platform).

Like the old Flex Component Explorer, Tour de Flex can be used to find components. But it goes way beyond just out-of-the-box Flex components. This first release contains 217 components and samples including popular Cloud APIs like Salesforce.com and Intuit, numerous community components from people like Doug McCune and Tink, commercial components from companies like ILog, and numerous other goodies. If you find something missing you can submit it!

Also in this release is an Eclipse / Flex Builder plugin which allows you to find components from inside Flex Builder!

We hope the Tour de Flex will provide an easy way for you to find components and see what is great about the Adobe Flash Platform. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Adobe AIR, BlazeDS, Flash Player, Flex, LCDS

Getting Flash Player working on 64-bit Linux systems has been a challenge. But not anymore! Today Adobe Systems released a beta of native Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux! Check it out and report bugs to the open Flash Player bug database. Here is a short video I shot of me testing the new Flash Player 10 plugin for 64-bit Ubuntu Linux. Let me know what you think!

Flash Player, Linux

While at AjaxWorld 2008 I had the chance to record another episode of the “RIA Cowboy Videos”. This time I talk with Lightstreamer about their AS3 / Flex APIs for streaming data to the client. Check out the video and let me know what you think.

Flex

IntelliJ IDEA 8.0, the popular Java IDE, has been released and now supports building and debugging Flex applications. This is great validation of Flex’s momentum in the Java community. For more information on how to get started see “Creating Flex Applications with IntelliJ IDEA“. If you are a Java and Flex developer you should definitely download the trial version and check it out.

Flex, Java