April 2, 2008

Merapi: AIR and Java

Filed under: AIR,Development,Flex — Steve @ 9:42 AM

Writing about web page http://adamflater.blogspot.com/2008/02/meet-merapi.html

I was wondering what the status of the Artemis Project was recently and had meant to follow it up, but a post on FlexCoders today highlighted Merapi, a new project that takes over from Artemis.

Merapi will provide a framework that uses Java to give AIR access to the system shell (and therefore have access to things like printing, scanning, hardware etc.). It’s very early days for the project but in a few months time it may be possible to create desktop applications using Merapi that do really useful things, without going near Swing. One to watch…

April 1, 2008

Cairngorm: Event Chaining with SequenceCommand

Filed under: AIR,Cairngorm,Development,Flex — Steve @ 8:36 PM

Writing about web page http://www.cairngormdocs.org/docs/cairngorm_2_1/com/adobe/cairngorm/commands/SequenceCommand.html

I was talking to Sara earlier about this and said I’d write something about it briefly. Sometimes when using Cairngorm you find that you need to chain a number of events. An example might be when an application initialises and you need to chain a number of events/commands that perform a number of sequential tasks. Typically what happens is that you end up following the event/command model and fire the chain by sending an event from a command, then sending another from the target command, and so on. However, Cairngorm includes a class that can help; SequenceCommand:

By extending SequenceCommand, you can specify the event that should be broadcast to the controller (causing another command execution without a further user-gesture) when the current command has completed execution.

This is really handy, particularly for those runtime initialisation tasks, and it doesn’t break the standard Cairngorm model of Events firing Commands because you define a nextEvent property that triggers another Cairngorm Event (which triggers the next Command, and so on). David Tucker’s excellent guide to Cairngorm goes into more detail and has an example. There are also many examples of people extending the SequenceCommand concept to perform other tasks.

March 31, 2008

AIR Linux Alpha released on Adobe Labs

Filed under: Adobe,AIR — Steve @ 3:46 PM

Writing about web page http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIR_for_Linux:Release_Notes

AIR for Linux Alpha was released today on the Adobe Labs site. It’s far from fully-functional yet but it looks like most of the important stuff is there, certainly enough for me to test my AIR applications with.

March 26, 2008

AIR Debug Player – closing orphan instances

Filed under: Adobe,AIR,Flex,Flexbuilder — Steve @ 10:30 PM

Now and again I forget to properly close the debug player from within FlexBuilder, which in most cases is fine for a Flex app because it runs inside your browser instance, but if you do this with an AIR app it sometimes leaves an orphan instance running that you have to close manually, even if you close FlexBuilder – just look for any instances of ADL.EXE in your system process/task manager and close/kill it.

March 14, 2008

Flex 3 debug file size

Filed under: AIR,Flex — Steve @ 8:33 PM

Writing about web page http://www.cbetta.com/blog/index.cfm/2007/10/16/very-important-change-flex-builder-2-flex-builder-3

Thanks to James on this one – we’d both noticed that compiled SWFs of our new Flex 3 projects were almost double the size of similar projects in Flex 2. Here’s why:

Flex Builder only generates a debug version of the SWF by default. However, and this is the part that is tripping people up, there is no -debug suffix on the generated SWF file, so it will be named as if it were the release version. The big difference is that the file size will be much larger. This last point has raised a red flag with some developers, who mistakenly believe that the latest beta actually increases the file size of the release version of their application.

So basically Flex 3 only generates the debug version by default and no longer generates the ‘production’ version, in order to save development time. Flex 2 would create ‘yourproject-debug.swf’ and ‘yourproject.swf’ at build time, but this no longer occurs. To get the production version you need to go to Project > Export Release Build and go from there.

March 11, 2008

Silverlight and AIR events

Filed under: Adobe,AIR,Flex — Steve @ 11:49 AM

Tomorrow I’m off to the Silverlight Academic Day and I’ve just registered for the AIRTour London event on 9th April – both programmes look good and it’s a good opportunity to compare roadmaps and applications. Silverlight is more of a Flash/Flex rival of course, but it will be interesting to finally be able to see how each company presents its product and what the differences are.

Reports to follow – I have some preconceptions about Silverlight that I don’t think will be overturned, namely that it’s Flash/Flex for for .NET developers and that converting a legion of Adobe design tool users to an MS Expression/Silverlight workflow is going to be almost impossible, but I think Adobe has to keep moving now that Silverlight is available and MS can push it out widely via Windows Update.

March 1, 2008

AIR vs WPF: Fight!

Filed under: Adobe,AIR,Flex — Steve @ 11:27 PM

Writing about web page http://www.onflex.org/ted/2008/02/adobe-air-for-cross-windows-development.php

Gotta love corporate rivalry, especially when it’s between Adobe and Microsoft as both attempt to outgun each other in the RIA space. Up until now it’s been the odd blog post and counter blog-post between platform evangelists which is sometimes entertaining, but this recent post by Adobe’s Ted Patrick made me smile:

Developing native desktop applications for the many permutations of the Microsoft® Windows® operating system is a really difficult problem for software developers and corporate IT. In many cases applications have migrated to the web browser to simply avoid the fragmented native API’s of the operating system. Microsoft deprecates support of certain operating systems as they push new operating systems, tools, and dependencies…even Microsoft® Silverlight only supports up to Windows XP Service Pack 2 or higher for browser based applications. Adobe AIR supports the following Microsoft® Windows® operating systems today with 100% feature equivalance: Microsoft® Windows® 2000, Microsoft® Windows® XP, Microsoft® Windows® Vista® Home Premium, Microsoft® Windows® Vista® Business, Microsoft® Windows® Vista® Ultimate, Microsoft® Windows® Vista® Enterprise.

Basically if you are thinking about building an native desktop application on Microsoft® Windows®, you might want to take a look at Adobe AIR. You will get more reach with existing operating systems and you get full Apple OSX and Linux support all for $0. I think it will come to pass that AIR really is changing the game in terms of software reach.

February 26, 2008

AIR Linux beta–testing

Filed under: AIR,Flex — Steve @ 8:20 PM

Writing about web page http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/2008/02/20/adobe-air-on-linux-pre-beta-testers-needed/

There’s a post on James Ward’s blog asking for beta-testers for the forthcoming AIR client for the platform. Kevin Lynch recently demoed an alpha version of the client at Engage2008 and although its still early days (release is scheduled for sometime later this year) at least it demonstrates that Adobe is actively working on getting AIR to Linux as soon as possible.

February 25, 2008

Flex 3, Air 1.0 and Adobe Open Source

Filed under: Adobe,AIR,Flash,Flex — Steve @ 7:36 PM

Adobe announced a trio of important new products today; AIR is now 1.0 and ready for download, and the Flex 3 framework and Flex Builder 3 development suite were released at the same time. There’s also a new site showcasing the open-source frameworks (FlexSDK, BlazeDS and Tamarin). It looks like Flex Builder 3 will be free for education users, just like Flex Builder 2, but as yet the application form hasn’t been updated.

October 31, 2007

Repeat After Me: Silverlight is NOT a rival to AIR

Filed under: Adobe,AIR,Flash,Flex — Steve @ 5:27 PM

Long time without a blog entry, but I’m back :-) More on this later.

Adobe obviously hasn’t done a very good job at getting this across and Microsoft’s relative silence suggests it is possibly enjoying the confusion. Numerous so-called ‘experts’ out there keep mentioning AIR and Silverlight as competing directly in the RIA space. It’s an easy trap to fall into, as we shall see. A whole new crop of these popped up this week with the announcement of Mozilla Prism which, depending on how you look at it, is either a genius move by Mozilla or totally cheating seeing as all it currently does is pretend to be a desktop app by removing buttons from the Firefox browser.

So here’s my attempt at explaining the differences….

AIR
Desktop applications, can work online or offline, created (important this) in Javascript/HTML or Flex/Flash if you like (for added UI polish and none of that flickery DHTML stuff). Can render web pages, PDFs and Flash content. Applications have an installer/uninstaller and a desktop icon and support some desktop functionality like drag and drop, system tray etc.

Flash
Browser plug-in (although Flash apps can be also be ported to desktop via AIR), animation, interactivity, powerful graphics manipulation, video streaming delivery platform, now with H.264 support too. Uses Actionscript.

Flex
Uses Flash runtime (and like Flash can also easily be ported to AIR on the desktop), but much more robust application development tools and some clever (but expensive) back-end capabilities, talking to Java etc. (but doesn’t quite do authentication with file uploads properly thanks to a quirk in the Flash player, much to the amusement of every Java developer I work with). Uses MXML and Actionscript.

Silverlight
Promising Flash alternative, animation, interactivity, powerful graphics manipulation, except that perhaps unsurprisingly it has a few MS-centric features and although it does video well doesn’t have H.264 support and 90% penetration, uses .NET tools/workflow, XAML, C# – similar kind of model to Flex.

WPF
Stands for Windows Presentation Foundation, the real AIR rival, alongside Prism (which cheats, albeit elegantly). Silverlight is a subset of WPF/E, kind of what Flash is to AIR I guess. Applications run on desktop with access to DirectX, system functions etc.

Prism
Firefox without the buttons, plus a desktop icon so it looks like a desktop application but is really a browser page/application pretending to be a desktop application. Arguably all you need though, hence accusations of evil genius. At the moment making a desktop shortcut to the GMail address and hitting F11 in IE has much the same effect but this approach actually promises much once Firefox 3 and things like Canvas and other new HTML features come along.

So next time you feel compelled to compare, it’s sort of like this, only more complicated:

Sliverlight is an alternative to Flash
WPF is an alternative to AIR
Prism is a modified browser that provides a desktop ‘experience’ similar to AIR and WPF

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