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Aaron Worsham

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Adobe Air – Finding its niche

Yes, it was called Apollo at one time. Considering how many people re-reference AIR as Apollo in conversation, Adobe should stick with their first marketing idea in the future.

Adobe AIR is the new runtime desktop environment that has the kids in Silicon Valley all excited. Here are some sample apps for reference. According to Mark Blair, Adobe’s Pacific technical director, the idea behind AIR is this: online apps offline, platform independent, everywhere

It makes some sense, since so much development effort is being put into online applications, that you be able to tap into those apps on the desktop. In this way, AIR applications become non-browser dependent interfaces to big online applications like eBay, Amazon and others. Google and Microsoft are both thinking along the same lines (though at entirely different levels) with Google Gears and Silverlight. Gears is a low level persistence layer that syncs your online gmail, Calender [As noted in the comments, I should have said Reader and Docs ~aaron] and others with offline surrogates. Silverlight is aiming more directly at Adobe Flash/Flex and has only recently made noise about a desktop controls component. This late game hesitation on the part of Microsoft is understandable given their already commanding position on the desktop with .Net Really, for my money AIR’s largest technological competitor is JavaFX. Both are platform independent, VM based technologies. Until Microsoft’s Silverlight 2.0 comes calling, this space is Adobe’s to loose. Adobe has both a head start over Sun and a laser beam focus on their product’s polish which Sun typically lacks. If you have a web application and your customers are demanding UI options beyond the browser, take a look at AIR

Interesting technology notes, AIR uses WebKit, SQLite and Tamarin for its web rendering, data storage and ActionScript Virtual Machine respectively. WebKit is the renderer used by Apple’s Safari and native to the iPhone. Tamarin is a very fast ECMAscript VM that supports full runtime error reporting, built-in debugging, and binary socket support. It was donated to Mozilla by Adobe and will be used in SpiderMonkey to speed up its JavaScript support.

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Adobe Flex over Flash – A programmer's perspective

So we talked last week about Adobe Flex, the Rich Internet Application (RIA) stack created by Macromedia and currently owned by Adobe. If you have ever watched a video online from a web 2.0 video site, you have used a Flex application. Sure, Flash and Flex are cousins and the common language they speak is ActionScript, so logically anything you create with Flex can also be created with Flash. But I stand by my assertion that big projects like video libraries are now written in Flex. I can say that with some confidence having worked with a Flex RIA team for over a year now. In doing so, I realized that Flash has some serious limitations that Flex had to overcome.

Testing:

  • Flash – Without automated testing, bugs are really very hard to find. Debugging Flash applications is something of an art form.
  • Flex – We can add unit testing with FlexUnit to any IDE and have one click testing of our appliations. We also have Stress Tests available

Refactoring:

  • Flash – Difficult to do. Flash code bases usually reverted through entropy to an unwieldy mess of bolted on functions that eventually degrades to an unrepairable state.
  • Flex – Quoting Adobe ‘Flex Builder 3 [the Eclipse based IDE sold by Adobe] will provide refactoring tools for MXML and ActionScript that are similar to those provide by Eclipse JDT, including Find All References, Move and Rename’.

AIR applications (desktop Flash):

  • Flash – You can build AIR applications using Flash CS3, but they will be completely different projects than similar applications for the web.
  • Flex – The promise is there for unified code base which can be deployed as a Flex or AIR application. I have not tested this, all though I have heard of some success in this area. Unified code base is difficult. Java has come close, though still there are problems making completely portable code unified. The benefits of having one code base are, however, great.

Multimedia

  • Flash – Clearly this is the place where Flash excels, mostly because of its head start. So many multimedia applications have been written in Flash that the ground is well worn.
  • Flex – Catching up fast. As I said above, most large multimedia apps today are being written in Flex, mainly because you can embed Flash into a Flex app to get the best of both worlds.

Skilled Help

  • Flash – There are many Flash developers out there. Since Flash has been around for a decade now, this is a well established category for consulting, services, and employment. The issue here isn’t the amount but the quality. For anything more than a Flash Banner Ad, I personally recommend a Flash programmer that can handle the complexity. Guru’s such as these are tough to find though. If you have one keep her happy.
  • Flex – Since Flex is relatively new, you will have a hard time finding a Flex expert. No matter, really, since what you want is a solid programmer that wants to get into a new area. Programming skills is the real need here since a language is a language. Once you have someone who wants to get their feet wet, exposing them to Flex is not much different than any other new and shiny programming language. We had an ex PHP programmer that became a wunderkind in Flex. All the MXML and ActionScript were just new variants of XML and ECMAscript. Documentation isn’t good yet, but books can be found and examples are aplenty Of course, a good internet consultant can also help you get on track quickly.

Advanced subjects in Flex would deal with the cool microframework Cairngorm which brings Design Patterns like MVC to the table.

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Adobe Flex – sitting with the cool kids

In the web’s earlier days the cool kids were the Macromedia Flash Developers. They had that mystical quality to them; a special blend of tech voodoo and creative style. A great Flash artists could bring any early browser screaming to its knees, but inbetween dropped frames and hung processors you swore you were looking at the future of the web. Flash Developers were the Rock Star developers of the web a decade back.

Now we try to use Flash in moderation as if it were a controlled substance. Most business websites have a pinch of flash to spice up the bullet points and mission statements, but it all seems perfunctory and subdued. In the business world, Flash has been relegated to bit parts like tie-ins or transitions, back seat functions to the AJAX revolution. Sure, the media industry is still addicted to their Flash applications as is the online gaming and advertising sectors. For most development houses, however, Flash became an unfamiliar tool used sparingly.

Adobe buying Macromedia has successfully righted that ship, in my opinion. They’re first all Adobe take on the Flash franchise was to relicense a little thing called Flex. Flex was originally a Macromedia product targeted for upper echelon corporations. Flex was and is Flash for programmers. Plain and simple, Flex lets your code slingers write decent Flash applications using tools they understand, namely programing languages. When Adobe got ahold of the property, they wisely saw the potential for curious geeks to adopt this new shiny thing, promote it within their communities, and build it up to a viable web solution. Flex 3 SDK (Software Development Kit) is free to to download and licensed under a open-source friendly Mozilla Public License. Adoption of the Flex 3 platform has been impressive, thanks in no small part to adobe’s marketing of the tools as they have.

N ow the geeks are sitting side by side with the cool kids at the web table. I would say we now have to work on the Jocks (DBAs), but that just might be a bridge too far.

In upcoming posts I will review Adobe Flex and Adobe Air.

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