Unless your Flex 2 project has to go to production this month, switch to Flex 3. Now. Flex 3 final Beta days are almost over and it brings you lots of goodies. If you are still thinking of using AJAX or JSF for your data intensive business application, just stop it, will you! Just take care of your business with Flex 3, AIR, and BlazeDS.

Google, which does not give guidance, missed both Wall Street's top and bottom expectations for its December quarter by a hair and the punters turned vicious pounding it down around 50 bucks after-hours. Consensus demanded non-GAAP earnings of $4.44 on revenues of $3.45 billion. Google came in with $4.43 on revenues $3.39 billion. Those revenues figures are net of what's called TAC, Google's traffic acquisition costs, the money it pays its partners, which it this case amounted $1.44 billion or 30% of its ad revenues.

Microsoft this morning made a $44.6 billion hostile bid for the floundering Yahoo, striking at a point when it has become evident to all and sundry that Yahoo doesn't have a pray of turning things around on its own let alone getting competitive. Yahoo's first official reaction was basically to say it'll think about it. It said it would evaluate the offer 'carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo's strategic plans.' It did not give a timeframe for a response. Although it looks pretty boxed in, it could of course try for more money.

Less than 10 years ago, still in its infancy, the Internet was a land of promise for businesses. Companies saw bright new ways to increase their agility, reach more customers and to deliver new, never-before-seen services. Unquestionably since then it has transformed the way consumers and businesses exchange information and has become a vital part of nearly every organization's communication and operational architecture.

I ran into an interesting blog written by a Flash programmer who feels that Adobe's promotion of Flex puts him and other Flash programmers at a disadvantage. And he knows how to resist!

Imagine you are a contestant on a TV game show and your grinning quiz master pops the question: 'Name the one thing you most associate with Google?' Think about your answer - write it on a card (don't show me yet). Turning your card over, it's likely to be one of the following...Great Internet search engine on google.com; Wicked share price, wish I'd bought some a few years ago; Powerhouse of innovation for Java

In response to the proliferation of other frameworks used to create rich Internet applications such as Flex from Adobe (formerly from Macromedia) and AJAX-based frameworks, Microsoft Silverlight was recently introduced. All three of these applications, as well as the others on the market, enable a web developer to create an interface on a web page that is much more robust than traditional HTML-based pages once were.

ASP.NET AJAX is a natural candidate for RIA development under the .NET framework. However, there are other complementary or even alternative technologies that are worth your consideration. This session will start with a brief market overview and outline the pros and cons of some of the emerging and established frameworks, particularly JavaFX, Silverlight, and Flex. We will then dive into hands-on labs for delivering applications using Flex and .NET. You'll see specific implementations utilizing web services, FlourineFX (open source Flash remoting) and WebORB (commercial Flash remoting). We will also discuss delivering desktop applications using Adobe AIR, streaming video over the web, and engaging your audience with audio/video chat. Basically all the must-have features of today's Rich Internet Applications.

There is now a spectrum of Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies - including Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, and Curl - that go beyond the traditional functionality that AJAX provides. These platforms provide distinct benefits for moving complex desktop and client-server applications to the Web. An independent study by Sonata Software compared the performance and ease of development of applications using Curl, AJAX, and Flex, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of each platform This session will look at the application characteristics that developers should consider before choosing a platform, as well as provide specific examples of the interactivity and performance that these platforms offer.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) run inside web browsers and provide a much more dynamic user experience than conventional web pages. While traditional HTML-based pages require a full reload of the page when the user clicks on a link, many modern web pages only reload parts of the page and provide animations to dynamically navigate through an information space. There are several platforms to implement such dynamic web pages, for example AJAX, Flash, Java FX, Microsoft Silverlight, OpenLaszlo, XUL.

Creating reporting applications in AJAX is often more challenging than developing data entry CRUD applications. Reporters usually need to process lots of data, preferably on the client side to minimize the amount of information that goes through the wire. Reporters need to know how to apply formulas, group the data, and calculate totals and subtotals. Add to the mix a requirement to give the end user an ability to customize the look and feel of the report, and you're facing a serious project.

The main concern of any project manager is if there are enough people in the pool of Flex developers to staff the project. Yes, there is a pool of Flex developers, but let's look at the creature called 'Flex Developer' under the microscope. If you are considering adding Flex to your set of skills, it?s still early in the game and you can join the fast growing Flex community. Decide which group of the Flex developers looks most appealing to you. Set a goal and go for it. Be what you can be.

Microsoft disclosed late Thursday that Jeff Raikes, the head of its Office operation, second only to Windows in bringing in revenue, was retiring and will be replaced by Stephen Elop, 44, Jupiter Networks' short-term COO. Before Jupiter, Elop was president of worldwide field operations at Adobe by virtue of Adobe's 2005 acquisition of Macromedia, where he was president and CEO. Elop also has experience as a chief information officer. The plan is for Raikes, 49, to hang around until September as a backstop as a member of the senior leadership team for purposes of transition.

JavaFX is a little-too-late response from Sun to the rapidly growing community of the languages, tools and techniques for development of the Rich Internet Applications. Fine, let's give JavaFX some time, it's still too young. But what can you expect from a scripting language built on top of Swing libraries? This is already outdated...even before its own release. I hope to see some real competitive sample applications showing the power of JavaFX rather than declarations that it's a Flash or Silverlight killer. This is not even funny.

Redmond Developer News has published an interview with Dr. James Gosling, creator of the Java language, where among other things, he talks about JavaFX and competing technologies. And he made a comment I can't agree with. Here it is: 'If you look at something like Flash, when you get to the much more advanced stuff - richer interfaces, more complex network protocols, more complex APIs - it really falls short.'

Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie is quoted as saying about Fleury, 'We believe the knowledge he developed building JBoss, to the point where it quickly became a true challenger to much larger competitors and a substantial industry force, will be invaluable to Appcelerator as we look to achieve similar dominance in our pursuit of the enterprise RIA development market.' According to Fleury the company delivers cross-platform functionality on the server side, supporting the .NET, Java, Ruby or PHP architectures. On the client side, its RIA widgets are standards-based and portable across browsers.

Is it easy yet to make AJAX applications that easily go offline? Are developers better off using an AJAX framework, a toolkit or just coding their own AJAX/JavaScript? Will JavaScript 2.0 be a success, or a dud? How can AJAX apps be made secure? Sessions on these and dozens of other topics have already begun streaming in to AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City on March 18-20, 2008.

Since the iPhone was first released, early adopters haven't stopped talking about what they think of the device. While the free promotion can be a great marketing tool for wireless carriers, it can be crippling if users have issues with session and network quality. This is the background to the iPhone Developer Summit session 'Early Adopters: The Key to Free Publicity or the Fall of a Technology,' to be given in March by Mark McIlvane, President & COO of Velocent Systems.

Front-end engineering rocks right now. The era of boring web sites is over and we're all into pushing the envelope, erasing boundaries and getting beyond whatever prevents us from building the next killer web application. New companies building quick-turnaround web products spring up like mushrooms and many an old convention of web design is cast aside to make way for quick prototyping and agile development.

Google's new-year special logo, which went live briefly as 2008 began, celebrated the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP - adopted by Arpanet on January 1st, 1983. While 'invisible' to most users, many of the layers built on top of TCP/IP are well-known even to laymen: HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), FTP (the File Transfer Protocol), SMTP and POP3, and IRC.

Time Magazine has published their version of the 50 best Web sites of 2007. Check it out. You may or may not agree with their ranking, but I'm sure you'll find some interesting sites there that you did not know about. It's good to see that Time has started using Adobe Flex too.

This started as a Skype chat room conversation between my colleague Anatole Tartakovsky and myself, and I thought that it would be a good idea to invite more Flex developers to join this discussion. Having said this, I'd like to make it clear that over my career, I've been developing frameworks myself and truly respect people who are capable of creating frameworks, and Anatole has huge experience in this area as well. Here we're just questioning the need to create frameworks not for a general-purpose language like Java, but for a domain-specific framework like Flex.

Adobe is open sourcing the remoting and messaging technologies in its commercial LiveCycle Data Services ES - Adobe's route to the Internet - as a new product called BlazeDS. The widgetry, along with the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification, is being sent into the wild under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL v3), making Adobe the first major company to use the little-used new license. Public betas are out at labs.adobe.com.

In Java world, the solution to this issue is pretty simple. A typical Java application consists of a number of .jar files (think libraries or swc) and there is a concept of a class path. If a program needs to use a class MyGreatCreation, the Java class loader tries to find it based on the classes or jars listed in the classpath. If there is more than one version of this class in the path, the class loader will grab the first one. This greatly simplifies deploying any patches in Java production applications. Just make changes to your class and place it in the jar that is listed first in the classpath. Then deploy just this jar in production, and the loader will be happy to pick up the brand new version of MyGreatCreation.

JavaFX is a scripting language that provides more powerful client applications in term of features for the user interface experience as well as being incorporated with server platform technology such as RMI, Web Services, and EJB. Its ability to reuse all Java libraries opens an opportunity for JavaFX to create flexibility and ease the integration and reuse of existing Java applications.

Adobe earned $222.2 million, or 38 cents a share, up 21%, on record fourth-quarter revenues of $911.2 million, up 34% year-over-year, exceeding the company's revenue target of $860 million-$890 million. It attributed the results to Acrobat, its Creative Suite 3 products and momentum in its enterprise business. Creative Suite 3, which started coming out in April, includes upgrades to Photoshop, Illustrator and software acquired with Macromedia like Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks. On a non-GAAP basis Adobe earned 49 cents in Q4, a penny more than Wall Street expected.

Just two of the text fields on your Flex window have to support the mouse wheel. The user turns the wheel, the numeric field in these fields is incremented or decremented. Let's do it.

Release of BlazeDS is a great help from the Flex enterprise adoption perspective. On the technical side, BlazeDS provides a lightweight replacement for LiveCycle Data Services ES. The remoting part seems to be identical to the LCDS offering. But how the LCDS implementation is different from BlazeDS? What's under the hood?

Adobe and Yahoo have launched a beta Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! so online publishers can stick context-based ads in a panel next to PDF content for incremental revenue from Yahoo. The context ads are dynamically matched to the content of the documents. Adobe does the inserting. The text ads, brought through Yahoo's self-service ad system, are only seen in Adobe Reader and Acrobat. The program is free in English and available only in the US.

There are different ways of connecting Web clients written in Flex with the server-side applications being that Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, ASP or anything else that can generate HTTP responses. Up till today, the least expensive way was by using Flex objects HTTPService or WebService. You did not have to purchase any expensive communication software to use these two Flex objects. Adobe has released Beta version of BlazeDS. This changes the market of the fast Web 2.0, but there other players here too.

In my opinion this is THE biggest announcement that I?ve heard from Adobe since the release Flex 2 in the Summer of 2006. This is bigger than open sourcing Flex. This is bigger than AIR. Here's the news: Adobe is open sourcing AMF protocol and messaging under LGPL V3. Christophe Coenraets, a Senior Flex Evangelist from Adobe, told me about this new free product called BlazeDS. While many people are using Flex for creating cool widgets that can make your Web page prettier, enterprise Flex developers have to deal with such boring things as bringing data to the client. And they want to do this as fast as possible. AMF3 protocol allows your Web application to send the data over the wire at lease 10 times faster than a regular HTTP.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

For building applications, BundleWorks includes ant tasks and command line tools to allow developers to build standard bundles for both custom and third-party applications. For testing, BundleWorks allows a developer to create and manage multiple environments to test multiple versions of applications. For deployment, BundleWorks supports local and remote deployment and provides a library of functions to handle common deployment tasks. For maintentance, BundleWorks tracks all bundle actions and configuration changes providing a complete history of activity.

VS 2008 can also be used to build AJAX-based web apps. It can be used to target multiple versions of software like existing .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 programs and continue to deploy them on .NET 2.0 machines. .NET Framework 3.5 supports Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). It can handle SOA, Web 2.0 and SaaS applications.

Within minutes of my blog entry, I received the strangest email notification, alerting me to another blog written by Alan Zeichick, 'co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times and Software Test & Performance, and which also produces the Software Security Summit, Software Test & Performance Conference, and EclipseWorld. Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates.' That's what his bio says.

My money is on targeting iPhones and WM devices until Android actually shows up live and in the wild on more than 500,000 devices. Also, don't be fooled about the Android developer challenge. That's not $10million in prize money, that's a $10 million bribe in order to obtain the critical mass of engaged developers they know will be required for anything useful to come out of the Android project. If they don't have truckloads of developers begging to get their apps onto the phone, their framework will fail and all the mobile partners will go back to business as usual.

There's a couple of things that I like about his sample, and a couple of things that worry me. First, I like the idea that there's an Ajax controller. I hope in the final bits it's simply called Controller and they don't make you distinguish between an Ajax controller and a regular controller - you should be able to pick and choose the functionality you want, and, well, quite frankly, I'm just sick and tired of seeing the word Ajax embedded in code. The Ajax controller should give you, as he demonstrates, the ability to render small bits of HTML. What I dislike about the Ajax nomenclature is that this functionality is useful even outside the realm of Ajax rendering and I think it should be included in the default controller.

Cynergy Systems, Inc announced the opening of its second European office in Central London. The company?s other European office is located in Copenhagen. Dave Wolf, Cynergy's vice president, shared, ?The European market is clamoring for the business benefits delivered by rich Internet applications. As the global leader in RIA design and development, expanding our European footprint is a natural progression in our company's continued growth.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

Looks like Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz should have waited for his boys to give Google's Android spec the once over before endorsing the thing last week expecting Java to get a 'massive endorsement' out of it. Oh, Java gets a 'massive endorsement' all right; it's just not standard off-the-shelf Java. Android calls for a special Google Java that now has Sun folk nibbling their fingernails and worrying out loud to the press about 'write once, run anywhere' Java ME/MIDP fragmenting.