The Real-World Flex Seminar

Aug 27, 2006

by Tobe Goldfinger

On August 14, 2006, six weeks after the official launch of Adobe Flex 2, Sys-Con Events held its first Real-World Flex Seminar. It was an intensive all-day event, attended by approximately 200 individuals from various business and technical backgrounds. I met individuals from the Java world, the ColdFusion world, and the Flash development world, representing Fortune 500 companies as well as small web development/design firms. People traveled long distances to New York City to attend this event, clearly indicating a strong interest in the new Flex and what it could mean for their software development efforts.

The keynote address was given by David Mendels, Adobe Senior VP for Enterprise Solutions. David focused his talk on two critical areas that managers often want addressed before committing to Flex-based development for their organization: a growing Flex Ecosystem and Adobe's vision for the future of Flex.

The Flex Ecosystem is gaining momentum at a rapid pace. Flex-specific books, training, web sites, blogs, and user groups are all starting to appear. Large numbers of developers are downloading Flex 2. Several large ISV's have already shown their commitment to integrating their products with Flex. Flash Player 9 is also being adopted world-wide at an unprecedented rate.

The key themes for Adobe's plans for Flex include: facilitating broad adoption, Flex/Ajax integration, the creation of truly great experiences, embedded collaboration, support for mobile/non-PC devices, and Adobe's Apollo initiative (more on that later.)

David supported his talk with many good demos of Flex-based apps and laid the groundwork for what we would hear and see the rest of the day.

Yakov Fain and Victor Rasputnis, of Farata Systems, spoke next on the topic of Flex and Java, both in terms of how Flex helps Java and how Java helps Flex. They made compelling arguments for why Flex makes a great front-end for server-side Java applications. Then they demonstrated their DAOFlex component, which automates away the tedious aspects of Java/Flex CRUD development. It was a real treat when they demoed their FlexBI (Flex Business Intelligence) toolkit and supergrid control, which enables end-users to design their own, banded reports. The really exciting news is that Farata Systems is releasing both DAOFlex and FlexBI as open source components.

Christophe Coenraets, Senior Tech Evangelist for Adobe, continued the Adobe message with How Flex Transforms User Experience on the Web. He demoed many strong examples across five themes:

Expressiveness of the interface
Ability to present Real-Time information
Performance enabled by the Flash Player and compiled/JIT compiled code
Integration of Rich Media
Ability to sometimes work Offline (aka occasionally connected computing)

Many client-server applications have yet to be migrated to the web, due to the former limitations of the web platform. It's clear that Flex opens up interesting possibilities for application migration of old client-server applications as well as traditional Web 1.0 applications.

Eric Anderson, Adobe Product Manager, spoke about Flex in the Enterprise, with an emphasis on the benefits enabled by Flex Data Services (FDS). We saw demos of portals, a data visualization interface, a product configurator, financial calculators, and a consumer banking application with integrated video help. Eric explained the various components of Flex, clarifying the role of FDS for data push, data syncing, and data paging.

David Wolf, VP of Cynergy Systems, spoke next about Front to Back Development, guidelines for how to successfully approach a Flex development project. He particularly emphasized the need to work closely with end-users to plan the interface portion of an application first, before jumping in to tackle the back-end. While we have followed similar strategies in many of our own web development efforts over the years, I could easily see how with Rich Interface development like Flex, it's even more critical to nail down user expectations for the interface early in the process. In Rich Internet Applications development, interface cannot be an afterthought. The interface in many ways is the application!

Jesse Randall Warden, a senior consultant from Universal Mind, spoke about Flash and Flex, a winning combination. Jesse gave a highly animated presentation illuminating how Flex applications can benefit from the use of Flash elements. Flash can help with fonts, animations, and video. Even more important, Flash can be used to create a look for your Flex application that supports your brand. Not all Flex applications need to look the same. While the interfaces generated out-of-the-box by Flex are clean and highly usable, I'm sure that many Flash designers will be happy to hear that there's plenty of exciting work ahead in the creation of compelling interfaces and experiences.

Fumi Matsumoto, Co-Founder and CTO of Allurent, spoke on the topic of RIA's for E-commerce. We learned of many of the challenges Allurent faced building their E-commerce tools using earlier versions of Flex, challenges that have been resolved by the more powerful and flexible Flex 2. Allurent is working on several components for the shopping experience, both for the buyer, and for the merchant-merchandiser. They provided interesting ideas for how to merge dynamic interface components created by product merchandisers with the pre-compiled core shopping engine. It's clear that big changes are on the horizon for the world of E-commerce.

Mansour Raad, Senior Architect at ArcWeb Services (ESRI), next presented some fairly mind-blowing Great Map Mashups. While we're all quite familiar with the idea of plotting some location points on a map, Mansour demonstrated mapping at a whole new level. He was able to show us the power and performance enabled by Flex's vector-based graphics. His stunning application extracting location and timeline information from a web page of current news headlines gave us the ability to visualize and understand the news in a powerful new way. I'm sure that after this presentation, many people will be thinking hard about where map mashups might be of value in their organization.

Luis Polanco, Adobe Senior Product Manager, really piqued everyone's interest with his introduction to Apollo: Adobe's Next Generation Client. Although people came to this Flex Seminar already quite aware of what Flex is, I believe that many were not aware of Adobe's Apollo initiative. Luis dangled in front of us the idea that with an Apollo run-time engine, we'll be able to leverage our existing skills for HTML, PDF and Flex development, to create cross-OS applications that run and interact with the desktop. If you weren't already excited about Flex development based on what you had seen all day, news of Apollo surely got your attention.

The day wrapped up with a Flex Power Panel discussion. The panel consisted of David Mendels of Adobe, Dave Wolf of Cynergy, Shlomy Gantz of BlueBrick and the New York Flex User Group, and Mark Piller of Midnight Coders, and was moderated by Sys-Con's Jeremy Geelan. Many interesting points were discussed with regard to general industry trends, the competitive landscape, and the role Flex can play in our software development arsenals.

Overall, it was a day jam-packed with highly valuable information. We saw an incredible amount of great demos, which I found particularly helpful in percolating my own ideas about what type of applications we might be building. Great speakers, clearly subject matter experts, made the event truly worthwhile.

The theme of the day could well be summarized as It's an exciting time to be a Flex developer! For those who did not attend this seminar, I highly encourage you to catch the available webcasts on Sys-Con's web site.

Tobe Goldfinger is founder and President of JDT Technologies, a New-York based web development company specializing in E-commerce, E-business and Ebay Solutions. Tobe is also Co-Manager of the New York ColdFusion User Group.

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