My message to Flex team is simple, 'Guys, you did a great job with Flex framework, but it's out of the cage now, and people are actually using it as a foundation for their professional work. You can't just change API whenever you fill like it. This is not a green field situation anymore. Look at Java - there is tons of deprecated API that's carried over from release to release. Of course, it leads to a lot of unused code in JDK itself, but at least it gives third-party developers a chance to plan upgrades of their software accordingly.

Adobe and BEA have announced partnership across four products. Under the terms of the agreement, BEA will bundle Adobe(R) Flex(TM) Builder(TM) 2 software with BEA Workshop(TM) Studio, empowering developers to rapidly build cross-platform RIAs that integrate with SOA and Web 2.0 infrastructure for high-performance enterprise mash-ups. Further, every Workshop Studio developer will now have access to Flex technology for building RIAs.

BEA will bundle Flex Builder 2 with BEA Workshop Studio. Adobe will distribute evaluation licenses of WebLogic Server, with Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite. LiveCycle can be deployed with WebLogic in a wide range of applications, from mission critical clustered environments to single server departmental deployments and developer desktops.

Flex has gotten popular lately because of its rich GUI capabilities. It also comes in handy with HTTPService and Web Service components connecting to back-end servers to fetch and update data. But using this mechanism to talk to the back-end server requires formulating a unique service object from the Flex side, making a request, and getting back data from the back-end either in XML or plain text format. The response data then has to be parsed and fed to the Flex objects to update the UI. For small to medium-size Flex projects it's a viable solution, but for enterprise projects with thousands of external service calls it will get quite repetitive and could result in a lot of unmanageable, buggy code.

Yesterday, Microsoft has released Silverlight 1.0, its tool for creation Rich Internet Applications. I've seen the Silverlight demos at Redmond, WA earlier this year, and they are very impressive. Now we are talking about some competition to Adobe Flex and Flash Player. I use the word 'some' because as of September 2007 Adobe is far ahead when it comes to maturity of Flex platform and the penetration of Flash Player. Microsoft will be playing catch for a while, and they need to deliver on the promise of Silverlight availability an all major platforms.

AJAX developers brought Web 2.0 to the browser. Now they can leverage their JavaScript and HTML skills - as well as the IDEs they are familiar with and already use - to build the next generation of desktop applications that span platforms. Scott Fegette of Adobe will demonstrate how to extend rich Internet application (RIA) development outside of the browser using AJAX with Adobe AIR Adobe's cross-operating system application runtime. The concepts that will be introduced include native windows, native drag-and-drop, native clipboard support, local file IO, and persistence to a local database.

With the recent rise in popularity of web technologies such as Ajax and Flash, it has become possible to create richer user experiences on the web. Even though these technologies are not actually new, we are now seeing their widespread adoption. One of the hallmarks of this experience is the move away from the neccessity of always having to refresh the page for interaction. Instead of a standard page-to-page experience, we now have the opportunity to more closely model the real flow of the user.

SYS-CON Events announced today that 'AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West' main sponsorship opportunities are now sold-out! Limited number of expo and event sponsorship opportunities that are still available are expected to be completely sold before the end of the month. The new sponsors who joined the conference this week, and are not yet listed on the conference Website, will also be announced later in the week.

I will be teaching a one day Bootcamp course on Ajax at the AJAXWorld Conference in Santa Clara, California on September 23, 2007. Details are at http://aja xbootcamp.sys-con.com I will be expanding the Ajax construction tools section from the Ajax Bootcamp I taught in New York at the SOA World conference. I am very impressed with TIBCO GI and Sun jMaki

'The new Flex SDK was requested by several of our customers, to leverage Lightstreamer Server for both AJAX and Flash/Flex applications, and we are now glad to publicly release it,' said Alessandro Alinone, CTO of Lightstreamer, as the comapny released today a new client SDK for Adobe Flex.

The inaugural iTVCon - Internet Video Conference & Expo (November 12-13, 2007) is building out its program and the Conference Advisory Board is busy sorting through the hundreds of proposals for technical and strategic sessions that have been coming in. Final deadline for proposals is September 10, 2007.

Adobe has published statistics on the penetration of Flash Player 9 as of June 2007. The numbers look pretty good - over 90 percent of the users in mature markets have it already installed. 90% is not a 100% and not even 98% that Flash Player 8 already enjoys. Since the penetration speed looks pretty similar for the version 8 and 9 of the player, it?s safe to assume that Flash Player 9 will reach its 98% mark in the Summer of 2008.

The need to support off-line capabilities has driven some RIA providers back to the fat client platform. For example, Adobe AIR, Google Gears, and Slingshot are all examples of this trend. The fat client offers a lot of advantages over RIA technologies such as AJAX, but there are also some serious drawbacks. Is history repeating itself? Will the surge of interest in fat clients be disruptive to the Web and RIA technologies? This presentation will examine those possibilities and provide advice on when, if ever, developers should use Fat Client technology.

A Real-World AJAX Project Presenting richly formatted or legacy documents in as part of a rich internet application can be challenging, particularly when there is a large volume of information to present. Using a real-world project as an example, this session will discuss how Flex was used to build a rich media eLibrary designed to deliver large volumes of PDFs seamlessly to clients on multiple devices and platforms without the need for client-side software. We will discuss the project requirements, stakeholder needs, and technical challenges and will focus on the user experience as it applied to the creation of this eLibrary.

Reporting is one of the most important but complex to implementation aspects of enterprise AJAX applications. This session covers several major reporting challenges and will offer a solution to those challenges. It's not a trivial task to create an AJAX application that would allow end users to customize their reports on the fly by applying styles, grouping, filters, formulas and exporting reports to Microsoft Excel. In this presentation you'll see a live demo of a rich reporting component that can be used with any AJAX application.

'This is great news as it means yet another excellent Flex resource,' blogged Rich Tretola on his 'Everything Flex' blog in response to the announcement by SYS-CON Media last week of the launch of Flex Developer's Journal as an online technical publication for developers that are using or considering Adobe Flex.

There are three ways of creating PDF documents from Adobe Flex applications: by using the forms/LiveCycle designer,by treating PDF printing as one of the features of your Flex application, and by using Snapshots available in LCDS, which uses bitmaps to represent Flash content. This article shows how to treat PDF printing as a feature of your application.

So how do you write Flex Builder Tracer Bullets knowing that Flex can be a RAD tool and Tracer Bullets are good to do? Flex Builder can render MXML components pretty accurately, whereas ActionScript components are not so accurate. This means you can see, in the Design View, your application as it's coming together. This includes GUI controls and your use of states. Having to compile your app just to see one component visually is slow. Build in MXML because it's faster to write, and faster to see.

We've created an editorial advisory board for Flex Developer's Journal that includes well known members of Flex community. Our goal was to bring together people who work with Adobe Flex in the trenches and are specializing in Flex best practices, enterprise development, mobile devices, Flash, and Flex communication protocols. Being a Flex coder was one of the main requirements to be included in the editorial advisory board of FDJ.

On August 16, 2007 SYS-CON Media has launched Flex Developers Journal, an online technical publication for developers that are using or considering Adobe Flex as a technology for creating rich front ends for Web applications. While in the past SYS-CON was publishing Flex-related articles here and there, now we've got the critical mass of interest required to have an independent publication covering this solid platform for creating Rich Internet Applications (a.k.a. RIA). You can have lots and lots of people screaming and shouting 'Flex is cool', but publishers of technical magazines are very pragmatic people, and they would not start a new publication unless the software has already some serious following and good growth potential from the business perspective. Today, Adobe Flex has both.

SYS-CON Media launched today its newest developer title, Flex Developer's Journal, (flex.sys-con.com), the first and only independent magazine serving Adobe Flex developers worldwide. Yakov Fain, the well-known RIA expert and the author of the best-selling book Adobe Flex & Java, was named the founding editor and editor-in-chief of Flex Developer's Journal.

There's been a lot of talk in the ColdFusion community lately about the newly released Flex 2. If you're new to Flex or haven't tried it yet, this article provides an introduction, from a ColdFusion developer's perspective, to what Flex is and is not.

Some things that I learned early in my career that originally helped me succeed, I believe are now hurting me in job interviews. One of the pros to typing via dynamic languages and forgiving compilers such as ActionScript 1.0, Ruby, JavaScript, and others is that you can quickly code things that work. In a lot of the early agency, multimedia, and small software company work that I did, these technologies were great. They didn't get in your way, and they empowered you to quickly create programmatic solutions that were enhanced or even driven by good designers. You could hit insane deadlines, recompile changes quickly for a client, and react flexibly to ever-changing, almost fluid requirements...if any.

'The world is changing,' Flex Developer's Journal editor-in-chief Yakov Fain told the audience at SYS-CON Events' Real-World Java Seminar in New York City today. 'Financial institutions are starting to hire Web designers.' The world of rich Internet applications has made it to Wall Street...and Adobe Flex is well placed to allow Java developers to ride the RIA wave.

AJAX developers brought Web 2.0 to the browser. Now they can leverage their JavaScript and HTML skills - as well as the IDEs they are familiar with and already use - to build the next generation of desktop applications that span platforms. Kevin Hoyt of Adobe will demonstrate how to extend rich Internet application (RIA) development outside of the browser using AJAX with Adobe AIR Adobe's cross-operating system application runtime. The concepts that will be introduced include native windows, native drag-and-drop, native clipboard support, local file IO, and persistence to a local database.

Adobe's LifeCycle Data Services ES offers developers powerful capabilities. Some of this software's capabilities, specifically server push, can be developed with relative ease using a utility class that has been around in the Flash APIs for a great while, and without having to pay licensing fees for LifeCycle Data Services ES. The utility class spotlighted in this article is flash.net.XMLSocket, and it provides all the client-side plumbing required for implementing server push.

Several months ago I posted some articles on my blog about Flex 2 components and accessing/modifying their BitmapData. In one example, I sent the BitmapData to the server and saved it as a JPG file, and I've been asked numerous times since...

Some people take the dog for a walk, others go play a round of golf. Not Christophe Coenraets. His idea of a good time is to illustrate Flex 2 / JMS integration by extending a simple 'realtime feed' application that he built a while back! Web Developer's & Designer's Journal is proud to bring you each month two of the month's best tips from Adobe's intrepid Flex Hero.

Flex 2 and the Flash Media Server are a match made in heaven. By combining the two technologies, streaming Flash videos at my office has become a nice part of my daily routine and a good excuse to add another monitor to my desktop. Whether your musical genre taste is classical or rock 'n roll, it's relatively easy to quickly create a desktop library of Flash videos. In this article, I'll describe one approach that will have you streaming in no time.

AJAXWorld 2007 West will take place on September 23-26, 2007, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California, and will offer a new dedicated 'iPhone Track.' Another dedicated track will offer a comparative education opportunity for conference delegates on emerging RIA tools, including a Diamond track on OpenLaszlo and sessions on Microsoft's Silverlight, Adobe's AIR and Sun's JavaFX.

I'll be running a new special interests group on Rich Internet Applications for New York Software Industry Association. We are going to cover Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, AJAX, JavaFX, OpenLaszlo and more. I invite you to attend our first meeting on Oct 9,2007, where I'll give an overview of what's currently is out there on the market of RIA technologies for development of the entrerprise applications. I'll be inviting people representing various RIA technologies to help software engineers and development managers in making the right choices for their new projects.

Flex is a complete set of tools to develop rich Internet cross-platform applications based on the Flash platform. With Flex, you can create applications that not only have the 'wow factor' necessary to please clients and users alike, but the 'usability factor' necessary to make your application a real success.

I'm going to postpone the second part of my RSS aggregator article to tie this column into this Flex-themed issue. Have no fears, though, it will be back in full force in the next issue. Flex, as I'm sure most people know, is a way for programmers (you, me, and us) to create Flash movies.

'It takes a village,' said Cynergy vice president Dave Wolf (pictured) most recently at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 East, 'to build an engineering team capable of writing world-class Rich Internet Applications.' You cannot create the right atmosphere in a 'cubicle farm,' he contends. And Cynergy walks the talk, and walks the walk, with no individual offices, large spacious office environments, and a commitment to keeping its staffers energized and creative, more like an ad agency than a development shop.

Adobe's LiveCycle software is designed to allow some 60 Illinois state agencies and 3,800 counties, municipalities and school systems to automate the completing and processing of forms. The goal is for the state to increase convenience for citizens and reduce costs for itself.

Can afford to take just one day off, get out of your cubicle and see what other people up to these days? Is J2EE still in favor? What's this ESB is about? Have you even heard of using Flex as a Web front end of your Java applications? Do not miss an event in NYC this Monday, that is created for people who think that they are way too busy to take several days off and spend them in the class. Just take one day off and attend the Real-World Java event. The discounted rate for this event is $395. To get this discount, enter the coupon code ?JUGgold' while registering

Adobe Systems Incorporated has announced the immediate availability of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium and Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection software. Adobe Production Premium CS3 is a comprehensive collection of integrated cross-platform post-production software tools, helping video professionals deliver results for film, broadcast, DVD, Web, and mobile devices.

In short, unless my findings are incorrect, Silverlight, as it stands now, with no support for data binding, service consumption, or basic UI controls, is a worthless steamy pile. I just took a huge step in Flex's direction.

Multi-threaded video decoding. The VP6 video decoding will now be performed in a separate thread if a multi-core system is detected while the main thread does rendering and post processing of the video. 1080p video decoding is now possible on dual core machines.

Adobe Systems released the beta version of Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), formerly code named Apollo. Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system application runtime that allows developers to use HTML/CSS, Ajax, Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex to extend rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop. New features in the Adobe AIR beta include an embedded local database, PDF support, enhanced capabilities for JavaScript developers, and deeper integration with Adobe Flex. The beta version of Adobe AIR and the Adobe AIR Software Developer?s Kit (SDK) can be downloaded for free from www.adobe.com/go/air .