I’ve seen a the presentations here at onAIR Tour in Prague and some of them are about how to create a JavaScript AIR application. However when it comes to data intensive applications Flex is the best solution. It has smooth integration with LCDS and BlaseDS and that is helping a lot.
We’ve just arrived at OnAIR tour in Prague. the city (as we had the chance to see it so far) is beautiful and the old town has a great architecture.
Even before the keynote started (Ryan Stewart), the room was almost full. I’ve talked with the guys from Adobe and they were very satisfied on how this tour was going on through Europe. There was a lot of interest and people were very excited about Adobe AIr.
SourceForge is receiving nominations for the 2008 Community Choice Awards. If you would like to help in nominating Flex SDK for this you can click here to nominate Flex SDK and select the “Best Tool or Utility for Developers” category.
I have tried today to create an AIR application. My tool of choice was Flex Builder 3 as I knew you can create AIR applications using it.
So let’s see what I have done.
Of course, first I have created the AIR project:
From the beginning I have spotted a problem in this picture: there was no mention to HTML or JavaScript or anything. Adobe AIR has the capabilities to render HTML and one of the strongest points of this framework is that a web developer can basicaly hit the ground running and just program his way into the desktop world using HTML and JavaScript.
Going forward, I have search resources to see what is the tooling support for this and I found in Adobe’s documentation an entry about this: AIR development tools. Obviously, even if is not mentioned in that chapter of documentation, Flex Builder 3 has suppor for creating AIR applications so let’s persue this further and set up the environment.
If we run the application right now, MyAirApp window shows up as a Flex AIR application. We need to change that so MyAirApp to render html.
First let’s create index.html and set it up to be used by the AIR application. To do that the bin-degug/MyAirApp-app.xml file should be edited and change two tags: content and visible. Yes I now, is not a very elegant thing to do. Is just the first thing that helped me. I’ll try to find a less hackish way to this. If you already know one please share it with us.
Running now the application will render:
So here is my first HTML AIR application. OK, I said JavaScript AIR application into the title. This is only the first step to get there. More will come soon.
Have fun coding.
On June 9th I will be in Prague for the OnAIR tour and Czech beer sampling 
. So if you are arround and want to meet with us to learn about Adobe AIR please visit us.
More details about the event can be found here.
You want to get your feeds closer? Check out this new application build using Adobe AIR and Flex 3: Snackr.
Snackr is a RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop. Thank you NJ.
The official guide to Adobe AIR, written by members of the AIR team, is out. One of the authors, Dragos Georgita is my colleague. He is the engineering manager for the Adobe AIR team here in Romania. He and his team are doing a lot of great things, especially related to AIR and JavaScript.
We are all here at the office very proud of him and we wish him many books to come. (I am still waiting for my signed copy )
You can buy the book from amazon: Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide.
Yup, I took the Scrum Master training. And I was also fortunate to go to a training help by Ken Schwaber.
The training was intense. Two days of learning and doing exercises. Slowly, Ken pointed to us different aspects of the Scrum process and why it works. Anyway, Scrum is a great leap of fate. No more predictability. At least in the beginning. As the team is getting more an more used to Scrum and you can actually compute the team’s velocity (which by the way increases in the same time) you can predict better how much work the team can do.
What I really like is that some of the concepts from scrum are common sense and can be put in practice in any other development process. Like transparency and quality. In Scrum is just far more easy “enforce” them.
I hope that somewhere in the future I will be able to work in a project fully developed in fully adopted Scrum.
Of course there are some issues about Scrum that remained unresolved for me. Like what can you do when the “self managed” team does not manage itself. Like what are the main factors that can make a project developed in Scrum fail or make the Scrum process being abandoned. I do not believe in the “silver bullet” concept. Or let’s put it this way: during the course I liked something that Ken said to us. There is no magic in software development, as in if you strongly and passionately believe that something can be done it will indeed be done. And managers often believe in such magic. But the same thing I guess can be applied also to Scrum. If you strongly and passionately believe that Scrum can work it will indeed really work?
Ted Patrick writes on his blog that Flex Builder 3 Pro is free for Education.
So if you are a student of a professor just go to FlexRegistration.com claim your copy.
Adobe released Flex 3, the free open source framework for building rich internet applications. It’s time now to build real cross platform web applications that work the same no matter in which browser the application was opened or which operating system the user has.
Flex 3 is open source and is free. The new site opensource.adobe.com is hosting the source code and the community resources for Flex SDK and BlazeDS. And talking about BlazeDS.. for whom is familiar with LCDS, this is the free version of server based Java remoting and web messaging technology. It enables (among other things) server push to Flex and AIR clients.
The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating system.What is great about this framework is the ability to develop desktop applications using Flex, Flash and Ajax. So if you are a skillful Ajax developer and you have a powerful web application that you think will benefit from running on desktop, you are definitely interested in AIR.
