Google, as promised, put the Android SDK out in early access - along with a $10 million pot for the best apps written for its open Android mobile platform by third-party developers. It said the platform would be open and it's going about proving it. It also needs the buzz - and a killer mobile app - for Android to hit a homerun. The first $5 million will be paid out in $25,000 prizes for the continued development of the 50 most promising entries submitted between January 2 and March 3 2008 to the Android Developer Challenge I.

Oracle owns PeopleSoft and JD Edwards; they own SleepyCat; they own BEA; and of course they have their own enterprise database. This means they have the stack from top to bottom, with the exception of an operating system. They can take the CRM and banking and insurance and end-user apps that they now own, host them on an entire stack, and basically squeeze the middleware vendors out of existence.

Based on the calls I'm getting, it seems that people are confused by the word certified in the name of this program. So I'll try to provide some clarification here. But let me start by explaining what the title Adobe Certified Flex Instructor means. I'll start with my own story.

After Google's Android announcement, at least four big guys should be irritated: Sun Microsystems, Apple, Adobe and Microsoft.Google approaches telephony from the open source side - Linux-based platform, uses Java but does not care about sticking to Java ME - they are planning to use fast OpenGL libraries and are not afraid to be hardware-specific.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

It's hard to overestimate the importance of having a good logging facility when you develop distributed applications. Did the client's request reached the server-side component? What did the server send back? Add to this inability of using debuggers while processing GUI events like focus change, and you may need to spend hours if not days trying to spot some sophisticated errors. That's why a commercial-grade logger is a must if you work with an application that is spread over the network and is written in different languages such as Adobe Flex and Java.

If you use Adobe Flex Web applications that connect to Plain Old Java Objects on the server side, chances are you use a popular, robust, and freely available server called Apache Tomcat. If you use Eclipse-based Flex Builder, you can smoothly debug both Flex and Java code without leaving Eclipse. Flex Builder debugger does not need any special configuration. But we need to add a couple of parameters to the startup routine of Tomcat so it'll engage the Java Platform Debugger Architecture (JPDA), which will allow other applications attach to JVM that runs Tomcat and debug deployed Java classes remotely.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Dave Wolf, vice president, Cynergy stated, 'With the opening of our new Taipei office, we are building on the continued demand for Cynergy designed and developed rich Internet applications, as well as expanding our global presence. Business applications users have come to expect the same user experience they get as consumers of Web applications so the market for RIAs throughout APAC is exploding. Our new Taipei offices give our growing customer base throughout this region ready access to native speaking RIA experts who can quickly and skillfully address their business needs.'

Open source provides an incredible amount of technical leverage for small companies. No matter who productive your rock-star programmers are and no matter how much judo you apply to your problems, solid infrastructure takes a long time and benefits immensely from broad involvement. It really does take a village to raise great infrastructure. The Ruby on Rails framework of today is a lot more productive than the one I was using before it was open sourced. I use features every day created by others, enjoy polish done by others, evade bugs caught by others. All work I would otherwise have to do myself. So I simply get more done for less effort than it would otherwise have taken. The same holds true for the other open source projects that have been cultivated in 37signals, like Prototype and Capistrano.

This new site should become a one-stop shopping point for college professors, full or part-time students, and everyone who is studying or teaching Adobe Flex, AIR or any related products. There is a registration link where students and faculty can get their free copy of Flex Builder, and it provides links to various Flex tutorials.

Why is this new Google Web site important? You may not know, but for many years Google was a three-language company: Java, C++ and Python. The fact that they are starting to use Flex is important not because it's more proof that Flex is a solid technology for RIA, yada, yada, yada. What's really important - this can serve as a signal for a myriad of small software vendors that will now be inspired to work on what will possibly become the next killer application in Flex and maybe, just maybe, will get these small vendors on Google's radar.

The Web is evolving as an open platform with rich user interface capabilities of desktop clients. This has triggered user-driven management of service consumer ecosystems, expanding the reach of SOA with rich interactive controls and Web 2.0 tools to access the Web content and services. However the usability dimension of these Web 2.0-based service consumer ecosystems is often ignored, leaving doubt about whether present usability testing techniques in Web-based systems are capable enough to guarantee a usable experience in RIA-based service consumer systems.

FiveRuns Corporation, a pioneer of monitoring products for Ruby on Rails, described by some as the new Java, has gotten $6.2 million in funding from Austin Ventures. The money is earmarked for acceleration product development, sales and marketing and the company's partnership efforts. Since it kicked off a year ago August, FiveRuns has secured $9.2 million in funding. It claims a customer base of 65 organizations or so that it says are monitoring hundreds of servers, with 'hundreds' in evaluation.

Now that Leopard is out and everyone is, I suspect, feverishly reformatting their laptops and desktops to install the retail copy of Leopard, developers can finally start sharing their Leopard code samples. Rather than me sitting around making up stupid reasons why such-and-such code sample might be useful to you, I figured I would ask what code you want to see written in Leopard. Keep in mind that I will not write code samples that do not use garbage collection or the new property syntax, so you'll just have to suffer through that.

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks like to read - and not only programming books. Most of us read incessantly. Whether it's popular science, sci-fi or fantasy, a good thriller or an occasional popular history book or biography, it's a rare geek who isn't in love with books. And I am no exception, although I have to confess I am rather an extreme case since my love of books and eclectic tastes borders on the 'gentle madness' aka bibliomania.

Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don't work. In this case it's Google trying to undermine Facebook. And I don't think it's going to work. What would be exciting and uplifting, a real game-changer -- Internet companies giving users full control of their data.

'In keeping with our vision to provide 'any video, anywhere', our partnership with RipCode is a definitive step towards furthering this strategy,' said Bill Joll, president and CEO of On2 Technologies and featured speaker at the upcoming iTVCon - Internet Video Conference & Expo (San Francisco, November 12-13), as on2 and RipCode announced that RipCode has integrated the On2 VP6 codec, used in Adobe Flash Player 8 and 9, for the industry's first hardware accelerated 2-pass encoding appliance for VP6.

Mozilla Labs announces 'a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line between traditional desktop and new web applications continues to blur'.

I assume that you are already sold on using Adobe Flex for developing the front end of your next rich Internet application. As of the end of 2007, it's the best choice you can make, really. But after spending almost two years working on real-world projects that involve Flex, I can see a number of roadblocks that prevent Adobe Flex from being the only solution for RIA.

RadView Software Ltd. has announced that its WebLOAD Professional has become a full-featured product to load test applications developed with Adobe Flex 2 software and the AMF3 protocol. WebLOAD's support for Adobe Flex covers all phases of load testing and enables users to record, edit, parameterize and load test their Flex applications.

Adobe announced that it is offering Adobe Flex Builder 2 software at no cost to students and faculty at educational institutions worldwide. The Flex Builder 2 integrated development environment (IDE) is part of a toolset for designing and developing rich Internet applications (RIAs), an essential part of Web 2.0.

For security reasons (similar to the Java sandbox concept), Flash clients can only access the domains they come from, unless other servers declare, explicitly or implicitly, trust to SWF files downloaded from our domain by a corresponding record in a crossdomain.xml file. But our portfolio SWF wasn't loaded from finance.yahoo.com, and we aren't allowed to install crossdomain.xml on the Yahoo! servers. We'll use another technique called Flex proxy.

Since people's programming background varies in Flex, these are not facts, just my opinions based on my experiences using ARP & Cairngorm for over 2 years. Furthermore, there are alternatives to Cairngorm, I just cannot try them as much as I like. Now that I'm doing product work, I can't just 'try this framework on this new project'. I live in the same code base longer supporting existing clients, and can't do dramatic re-factoring without getting fired.

Creating reporting applications in AJAX is often more challenging process than development of 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 users an ability to customize the look and feel of the report, and you are facing a serious project. At the time of this writing, the AJAX frameworks do not offer advanced reporting capabilities.

Any complex screen, more or less, of a business application consists of a number of containers (Panel, Canvas, VBox) and controls (Buttons, DataGrids, Comboboxes). In the best case scenario, a UI designer gives you a nice-looking screen prototype that s/he put together without bothering too much about which Flex components you are going to select to implement the required functionality. Now what? Just look at this screen below that consists of a number of nested components and containers, which I numbered for easier reference. For simplicity (or should I say for better abstraction?) I didn't use the actual components such as panels and dropdowns, but I'm sure you can extrapolate this image to your real-world business application.

A study of the iPhone UI and rebuilding it in AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) using Adobe Flex 3. AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications to the desktop. With the WebControl component in AIR which is powered by WebKit it will allow you to build and test iPhone Applications. Also, I will be showing a component that will give the ability to make and receive calls, record/send and receive voicemail, as well as add and manage contacts.

Adobe has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Virtual Ubiquity and its ground-breaking online word processor, Buzzword. The acquisition furthers Adobe's commitment to foster a vibrant ecosystem for rich Internet application (RIA) development that delivers breakthrough experiences built on Adobe AIR.

In April 2007 Adobe and Salesforce.com announced the availability of the Flex toolkit for Apex, Salesforce.com's on-demand programming language and API for interaction with their hosted CRM solution. This toolkit makes it simple to build Flex applications that interact with your Salesforce.com database.

Media distribution developer PassAlong Networks and Cynergy Systems, Inc., have announced a series of media products based on Adobe Flex technology. The partnership includes PassAlong's OnTour concert information widgets and the Speakerheart artist-controlled music management and promotions platform; additional music showcase and playlist widgets are currently in development.

Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya Adobe was gonna buy that free Buzzword online word processing widgetry so it can finally get into the Office business. Adobe, which invented desktop publishing and saved one of Apple's nine lives, denies it's going up against Microsoft - and, if we're decoding the mutter from inside Adobe right, they're not just being cute - they think they're competing against Google's online software Docs - which is risky enough considering Google and its Toolbar are supposed to bring Adobe about $60 million-$80 million in Adobe Reader revenues every quarter.

Let's recap some major announcements made at MAX 2007 in Chicago that sound interesting from a Flex developer perspective. Flex Builder 2 (and 3) becomes cheaper. Just wait till November 1st and you?ll get it for $250 (formerly $500); Flex Builder with charting should cost $100 less than the list price, but even today Amazon.com offers it for $700. Maybe they'll also drop the price in November. Actually, each of these prices are one dollar less, but I'm sure Flex developers will be purchasing Flex Builder not because it costs $249, but because it make your work more productive. Flex Builder 2 with Charting will turn into Flex Builder 3 professional and will include new advanced datagrid component, which will have some really useful improvements. Looking forward to the production release of Flex Builder 3 with a hope that it'll perform better.

At Max 2007, Adobe has announced availability and the list of new features of the second public beta release of Flex 3 SDK and Flex Builder 3. Below is a quote of this announcement. 'Check out these important new features in Flex 3 beta 2

New packaging and pricing will be available for Adobe Flex 3 when it ships early in 2008. It'll become available in two editions: Adobe Flex Builder 3 Standard Edition and Adobe Flex Builder 3 Professional Edition.

Today is the first day of the MAX 2007 North America, the main Adobe event of the year. The conference was sold out - the registration has been closed at the mark of after 4300 attendees. Apparently, the conference organizers where caught by surprise - attendance of the previous MAX conferences was under 2500 delegates. Visit the blog of the conference for daily coverage and videos. There will be two more MAX reruns this year one in Barcelona and one in Tokyo, if you are planning to attend, register in advance. According to Ted Patrick, a technical evangelist from Adobe, the next year?s MAX will take place on November 16-19 in San Francisco.

WebService.swf is an invisible component (requires a Flash Player 9 enabled Web browser) that can be added to any Web page. A JavaScript function passes the URL of a SOAP-based Web Service to this component, which loads and caches the WSDL, and then performs the Web Service calls according to the WSDL specification and supplied arguments. The arguments can be passed to this component either in the form of XML or as a JavaScript object, and the result can be returned either as XML or as an array of JSON objects.

Adobe will release Flex 3 around February of 2008. It has a number of improvements and new features, in particular it'll bring Flash designers and Flex developers together. Creative Suite 3 will have an easy way to incorporate Flex content right into the timeline of Flash IDE. Containers created in Flash will be able to have content developed in Flex. Earlier this year I saw a presentation of Silverstream from Microsoft. I was impressed by the ease of developing fancy GUI applications by a Web designer who did not know programming. He?d just create fancy graphics (using the timeline) and effects adding the place holders for the code to be written by Sillverlight developers. Now Flash designers will also easily incorporate Flex code in their creations.

I will be attending the Ajax World Conference next week in Santa Clara. I will also be at the opening reception on Monday and the conference party on Tuesday. Over the weekend Jesse Liberty blogged about this as well 'If you are going to be at AJAXWorld, look for me on Twitter, and let's see if we can set up a meeting or a lunch.' Other faculty members, according to the Ajax World website, who will be at these parties include...

Flex has a short learning curve for Java developers, who will find that there are a lot of familiar language constructs and patterns. It also provides excellent remoting capabilities for Java programmers, allowing transparent data transfer between ActionScript and Java 1.4 data types. With Java version 5 and above in production for a while now you have a lot of Java data structures that use enum and need marshaling to/from the Flex applications. This article provides a working example of the ActionScript language extension for an enum data type.