Tag: Flex

Adobe Day – Washington DC

Adobe Days are free events designed to introduce you to various players on the Flash platform. Next week in DC we’ll be doing one focusing on Flex and ColdFusion.

I’ll be attending, lending moral support to Ryan Stewart. And by “lending moral support to” I mean “learning the ropes from”.

So if you’re in DC and are looking for a good and free overview of what Flex can do for you, c’mon down.

Adobe Day Washington, D.C.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
9:30 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. EST
Agenda

Grand Hyatt Hotel
1000 H St NW
Washington DC 20001

Registration is free.

Link: Adobe Day Washington DC

DMD Project at Carnegie Mellon University

I got to see a very cool use for Flex and AIR in Higher Education today. It’s the DMD Project from the Masters in Human-Computer Interaction Program at Carnegie Mellon University.

It’s a prototype RIA for patient management at dental offices. It was designed for touch screens, but also can be used with the traditional keyboard and mouse interface as well. It shows everything dentists, hygienists, and front office staff would need to manage the entire patient interaction.

I got a chance to talk with one of the developers, Jaanus Kase, about it. He told me that they spent most of their time upfront researching how exactly dentist’s offices would need to interact with a system. That yielded a few custom interfaces, including the “radiograph view” which the rest of us just know as “an x-ray of all of your teeth.” The other cool thing I noticed was the high emphasis they place on important information like “Severe Penicillin Allergy.” Clearly, this program really does focus on quality computer-human interactions.

The project itself is a prototype; don’t expect to see it in your dentist’s office anytime soon. But the app is available as an AIR application for your review.

Jaanus is done with the Masters program now, and is working with an startup in New York named World Evolved.

…Hello Adobe

Wow that took less time than I thought… So yeah, I’m joining Adobe. Specifically I’m joining Adobe’s Platform Evangelism group. I’ll be working under Kevin Hoyt with the team that includes Ryan Stewart, Lee Brimelow and Danny Dura amongst others and ultimately headed by Ben Forta. So it will take all of my composure to not, you know, break down into an Adobe fanboy in my first staff meeting.

What does that mean? It means that I will be working with the rest of the team to spread excitement about the Adobe Platform Products:

  • Flash
  • Flex
  • Air
  • ColdFusion
  • LiveCycle
  • Flash Catalyst
  • BlazeDS

I’ll be promoting the entire platform, but considering my experience to date, I imagine that I’ll start with a slight focus on ColdFusion and AIR.

However in addition to that focus I will have an overriding goal:

Get Adobe Platform Technologies taught in the classrooms of Higher Ed.

It’s a big goal, and not a trivial challenge. I see a lot of different paths to achieving it. I can’t wait to work with all of you to accomplish it.

And as my first act of Evangelism I will remind you once again that both ColdFusion and Flex Builder are available free to Higher Education. All you have to do is go to one of their respective “freeriatools” sites, fill out a form, and upload a picture of your Academic ID.

2009 Predictions in Higher Ed

Spurred on by Kevin Hoyt, who commented on my last post I have some predictions for technology in higher education as a whole.

First, a quick background. The economy sucks. This is good news and bad news for higher ed. Enrollment and applications will be up. Bad news, is that most institutions arenapost entirely funded by tuition. Money comes into schools from state governements and the federal government in addition to money from their endowments and donations. All of those sources will be down in the next two years at least. Also in the picture is that fact that because of institutional culture of tenure, and the compliance issues that come from taking federal money, most higher ed institutions cannot cut budgets by trimming employees from the books. Good news, you’ve still got your job, bad news, remember Ed who quit, you’ve got his too.

Cost savings will be sought elsewhere. This is going to lead to a contraction of commitments. Upgrades will be postponed. Technology investments (big virtual machine hosting hardware, SAN’s) will not be pursued.

So what will all this lead to…

Hosting
Up until now, a penchant for open source technology, and educational discounts have made schools prefer to host their own services a little longer than the rest of technological community. However, that was before the financial craptaculon. External hosting will be considered for applications which would never have been outsourced before. It’s already started for student email, IM, web sites, and storage. It will accelerate and be targeted for smaller burdens like staff email, intranet sites, and public websites.

Virtual Classrooms
Virtual classrooms where schools could sell an unlimited number of seats to an audience for a set cost has been a holy grail for a few years now. With cut travel budgets hitting continuing education dollars, and the rise in applications coupled with the pressure to bring in revenue, they will have no choice to squeeze every dollar they can. Expect a lot of activity here.

Development Language free for all
Because of the rise of hosting for previously unhosted solutions, there will be no lock in for particular platforms or languages. Want to try Ruby or make the switch to .NET? No worries, you don’t have to build an environment, just rent it. It provides opportunities for highly productive languages and solutions to re-argue their case to the higher education world.

Students
Students are going to be looking to either stay out of the job market for as long as possible, or get trained in skills that will more likely get them hired. Any schools out there have Flex or Ajax content in their program, congrats, your students are still marketable. Expect more focus on vocational skills, like specific languages to be the rage.


Max 2007 Day 2

My day started at the Keynote. I have a few random thoughts about it.

  • Bruce Chizen would be pretty bitter about being the rich and famous CEO of Adobe if he didn’t enjoy it so much. He made me feel guilty though for continuously looking up his salary for one of my work projects. It’s impressive.
  • Scene 7 does some absurd stuff with dynamic imaging.
  • Share looks promising
  • Thermo will be absurd if it does all it promises. Photoshop Composition to Flex application in one click.
  • Next version of ColdFusion is code named centaur. My supposition is that it is so named because if angered, it will shoot you with an arrow, and then trample you to death. It does make me feel a little afraid that they will strap a horse’s body on a shirtless Ben Forta, ala “Scorpio Man.” I am disturbed.

I sat through Sean Corfield’s session on Design Patterns, it was simply tremendous. I tend to be a fan of Sean’s but I’m not exaggerating. He did a great job of explaining the theory and the concepts behind patterns. Even though I thought I knew them already, he did bring a new perspective to the whole thing.

I also attended Ryan Stewart’s session on Air and PDF integration. It looked interesting, but I have no idea why the hell you would ever do it.

If my day looks a little light, I had a minor problem with something back at home, so I had to skip my first session. I also had an opportunity to give an ad hoc demo of Squidhead, so I took it. If for any reason anybody wants a 5 minute demo, drop me a line. I’m always willing.

I finished up the day at Max Awards and Sneaks Session. The following really stood out to me:

  • Visual Communicator is a niche product that will make video presentations very easily. I think it’s going to be a very cool boon to the vlog space.
  • Photoshop express is just beyond cool. Pretty much everything anyone would need to do to a photo can be done in an online client. The demonstrator completely retouched a photo in under 30 seconds. Crazy.
  • Hemant presented on ColdFusion publishing to Air. This is something I really wanted for CF since I saw the Air Bus Tour. They’ve done more with it than I ever thought. You can do online and offline applications. Cooler than what I was imagining.
  • Flash gets skeletons. Very cool.
  • C++ on Flash leads to Quake on Flash. Tremendously cool.
  • Adobe hired that guy who does the dynamic image content resizing.

I ended up skipping the Event, because it didn’t really cry out to me, I had to prepare something for the CF Boot Camp tomorrow, and I’m beat from last night.

Max 2007 – A Virtual Trading Floor

I’d like to highlight a Max 2007 session: A Virtual Trading Floor: Bringing Wall Street to the Classroom. It’s being given by a few of my co-workers here at Wharton (Charles Rejonis, Alec Lamon, and Erin Wyher). I’m not sure about the exact topics that they will discuss, but it’s about a pretty hardcore application that simulates a trading floor. Consequently it deals in multiple transactions per second on large amounts of unique user data. This application was originally a desktop application written in Visual Basic and running in a controlled lab. After a few unsuccessful attempts (because the technology wasn’t there yet,) the Learning Lab team managed to replace the old application with a RIA version using ColdFusion, Flex and Flex Data Services (or LiveCycle Data Services). They ran into a lot of challenges that truly tested the limits of all of the underlying technology.

I highly suggest this session to you all. It’s a great story that responds to the argument: there are some things that RIA’s can’t do. Because here is at least one seemingly impossible thing they can indeed do.

Flex versus Ajax Fight doesn’t exist

Ryan’s post, and the ensuing cry and hue made me finally put to pixels what I’ve been thinking for a while.

Ajax and Flex can both at a certain level be used to build web applications. Experts in each can probably get each to do most of what the other can accomplish. However, they work from different directions.

Ajax enhances a HTML website, and through enhancement after enhancement one can build a zippy web application that makes HTML do things it’s not really imagined to do, but it works and that’s actually a testament to the technology’s flexibility, so no fault there. Additionally Ajax can be added in very small doses to enhance a site one little section at a time. Further I would go on to say that when combined with Web Standards, Ajax can build some very cool applications that can degrade but still work in less capable browsers.

Flex replaces the HTML interface with Flash, and focuses on building new interfaces for the data it’s working with. It’s really good at pushing bite sized chunks of data at a user, perhaps giving it a cool view like a chart or a customized display widget, and allowing the user to interact with it intuitively. It’s also important to point out that Flex makes it really easy to do so. However, for maximum efficiency you need to write little self contained applications. You really shouldn’t use it to enhance one drop down box or text box. (I know you can, but it doesn’t mean that it is as easy as other things, or even the right way to do it.)

Sure you can make a complete web application in Ajax if you’re one of the geniuses that work 37Signals, but for the rest of us, it’s still a little daunting to do an entire application in Ajax. In my opinion, it’s a little harder to write a full web application in Ajax than in Flex.

Sure you could write a blog in Flex. But even when you do, you admit that it’s just proof of concept, and not really intended to be a real interface. In my opinion, it’s not good idea to deliver content that has a significant text component with Flex.

If you were to show a spectrum of web applications from “content with some interactivity” on the left to “applications with small chunks of data”, on the right… then as you traveled from left to right you would start using Ajax, and at some point switch over to use Flex. Where you make that decision really depends on your existing environment, and your comfort level with the technology. (Perhaps whether or not you are 37Signals has impact on it, as does whether or not you are philosophically opposed to spending any money on software.)

So use the right tool for the job. Use Flex for rapid development of full blown web applications. Use Ajax to enhance sites that contain a lot of text content or need to tolerate several levels of user interactivity. Both can exist without annihilating each other.

Anyway, that’s my, possibly inarticulate, opinion on it… Yours will probably vary.

Wikipedia Showdown – Flex 2.0

Inspired by Ben Forta’s appearance at PACFUG, I decided to Flexify an application that I originally wrote as an experiment: the Wikipedia Showdown. It didn’t take that long to write in Flex 2.0. Most of the time was spent fine tuning the position of of the elements and what not. Check it out, I should post the source in a day or so.

Wikipedia Showdown Flex 2.0.

Note: Make sure you have the Beta version of the Flash 8.5 Player otherwise it won’t work.