James Ward - RIA Cowboy

Over the past few months Greg Wilson, Christophe Coenraets, and myself have been hard at work on a secret project. So today we are proud to announce the new Tour de Flex has just gone live! Tour de Flex showcases the capabilities of Flex, BlazeDS, LCDS, Adobe AIR, and Flash Player (now collectively called the Adobe Flash Platform).

Like the old Flex Component Explorer, Tour de Flex can be used to find components. But it goes way beyond just out-of-the-box Flex components. This first release contains 217 components and samples including popular Cloud APIs like Salesforce.com and Intuit, numerous community components from people like Doug McCune and Tink, commercial components from companies like ILog, and numerous other goodies. If you find something missing you can submit it!

Also in this release is an Eclipse / Flex Builder plugin which allows you to find components from inside Flex Builder!

We hope the Tour de Flex will provide an easy way for you to find components and see what is great about the Adobe Flash Platform. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Adobe AIR, BlazeDS, Flash Player, Flex, LCDS

Getting Flash Player working on 64-bit Linux systems has been a challenge. But not anymore! Today Adobe Systems released a beta of native Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux! Check it out and report bugs to the open Flash Player bug database. Here is a short video I shot of me testing the new Flash Player 10 plugin for 64-bit Ubuntu Linux. Let me know what you think!

Flash Player, Linux

On a recent dreary Saturday afternoon in Denver my friend Jon Rose and I decided to give the video podcasting thing a try. The first episode is about the changes to the recently released Flash Player 10 that will impact software developers (primarily those of the Flex persuasion). When preparing to record the interview we decided to break out the Glenlivet. One thing led to another and somehow we came up with the name “Drunk on Software” as a cheap ripoff of the popular “Joel on Software” blog. But don’t worry… Even though some episodes will involve drinking they will hopefully be coherent and useful. In the future we will be interviewing the smart people we know in the Denver area (or wherever Jon and I happen to be). So if you’d be interested in being interviewed and can handle being barraged with questions while we drink fine liquor, please let us know!

Check out Episode 1 and let us know what you think!

Drunk on Software, Flash Player

It appears the Flash Player engineering team is making progress on 64-bit Linux support. There are no details yet on when this will ship. But I’m sure they could still use your help.

Flash Player, Linux

In a few weeks I’ll be stopping by the Atlanta Java User Group and the Chicago Flex and AIR Developers Group:

Atlanta - August 19, 2008 - Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Java

Chicago - August 20, 2008 - The Future of Flex, Flash Player, and AIR

Hope to see you there!

Adobe AIR, Flash Player, Flex, Java

I run 32-bit Linux but there is a very vocal group of people who really want 64-bit Linux support for Flash Player. Today there is a decent work around for running the 32-bit Flash Player on a 64-bit Linux system using the nspluginwrapper. From what I’ve heard it works fairly well on most distro’s but I haven’t heard yet how well it works with the new Flash Player 10 beta. Despite this potential work around eventually Adobe does need to natively support 64-bit Linux - and they will. This is not as simple as a recompile - otherwise there would be 64-bit support today. There is a bug already filed in the public Flash Player bug database for 64-bit support. I’d encourage you to not just go vote for that bug but also to get involved. As Tinic Uro points out in the bug comments, the missing piece for 64-bit support is open source - so you can help! Flash Player uses the open source Mozilla Tamarin VM. This VM does not yet support 64-bit Linux because all that machine code generation in the JIT compiler needs to be ported from 32-bit to 64-bit. The code is in Mozilla’s Tamarin Central Mercurial repo. This IS open source! You can help get 64-bit Linux support for Flash Player!

Flash Player, Linux, Tamarin

In the past Open Web proponents have criticized Flash and Flex because the SWF specification - while being published and publicly available - limited what readers could do with the specification. More specifically the agreement to view the specification required that readers not build programs that would run SWF files. The intentions behind this were good - Adobe does not want Flash to have inconsistent and incompatible implementations.

Today Adobe Systems has announced that they are removing those restrictions on the SWF and FLV specifications! This is very exciting news and something I’ve been lobbying for since I started working for Macromedia (actually I think I began bugging Emmy Huang about this before I started working for Macromedia). Flash has become the standard for sexier web experiences with RIAs, video on the web, and interactive web content. Today that standard is truly open!

Adobe has also announced the Open Screen Project which aims to create an open and consistent layer on top of the countless small device platforms including consumer devices, phones, MIDs, and set top boxes. This is an extremely exciting project that will hopefully do for the world of small devices what the browser did for the PC world. You could also call this the “RIA Everywhere!” project. :)

Software keeps getting more exciting and the Open Web just got sexier and smaller!

Flash Player, Flex, Mobile, Open Web

Revolutions may be enabled by technology, but they are driven by people. Adobe’s recent announcements about Flex, Flash, and Adobe AIR on Linux are the most recent technology enablers for the software revolution that is currently underway.

Usually I’m one of the first to post about Adobe’s Linux related announcements. My trip to Bangalore, India, however, made me a little late to the party this time. In case you haven’t seen the announcements, on March 31, 2008 Adobe released an alpha version of Adobe AIR on Linux and an update to the alpha version of Flex Builder 3 for Linux (which supports building AIR applications on Linux). On the same day Adobe also announced that we joined the Linux Foundation.

In a post about the announcement, JD points to one of my old blog posts, which still accurately echoes the significance of this announcement - “… for the first time EVER, nearly everyone in the world has access to a FREE, ubiquitous application runtime, and a FREE application development toolkit for that runtime! Of course I’m referring to Flash Player 9 and the free Flex 2 SDK.” Now I can update this statement “For the first time EVER, everyone in the world has access to a FREE, ubiquitous web runtime, a FREE cross-OS desktop runtime, and a FREE, open source, and mature development toolkit for those runtimes! Of course I’m referring to Flash Player 9, Adobe AIR, and the Flex 3 SDK.” This is huge. We can now build real software once and have it run on every major OS and in every major browser – and we can do it using open source tools!

Why the excitement? Haven’t we had this for years - with Java? QT? GTK? True… in theory. We’ve had the technology; but we always lacked a critical mass of people that were actually using it for wide reaching, real software. There are now countless companies - including Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, Intuit, E*Trade, eBay, AOL, NASDAQ, Yahoo!, and numerous startups – that are using Flex to build real software for Flash Player on the web and Adobe AIR on the desktop. This kind of software revolution is reminiscent of the transition from client-server to web applications. The movement is real. The technology is mature (even the new Adobe AIR desktop runtime consists primarily of mature, proven technologies like Flash Player, Tamarin, SQLite, and Webkit). Software is changing for the better, especially for those of us on Linux.

I now have several desktop applications installed on Linux - such as the eBay Desktop - which I would never have had before AIR worked on Linux. Most companies simply do not invest time and money building or porting their software for such a small customer base. With AIR it doesn’t matter. Companies build the software once and it works on the web, on the desktop, on Windows, on Mac, on Linux. This is a software revolution not because the technology exists, but because people - lots of people - are actually using it.

Today we call the products of this software revolution “Rich Internet Applications”. In ten years it’ll just be “software”.

Adobe AIR, Flash Player, Flex, Linux

Bubblemark is a popular benchmark for some of the RIA technologies including Flex, Adobe AIR, Ajax (DHTML), Java Swing, Java FX, Silverlight, etc. I’ve been trying for a while to create a new Flex version of Bubblemark to show just how fast Flash Player and Adobe AIR are. But I’ve come to a few realizations… First, you can make benchmarks say whatever you want them to say.

When trying to optimize Bubblemark I found a few interesting things. First was that IE (and some versions of Firefox) limit the frame rate of Flash Player (and possibly other plugins). This means that while the Flash Player VM might be able to actually achieve 200+ frames per second the actual visual result might be only 60 fps. And maybe this is for good reason. Why do you need a visual frame rate faster than the refresh rate on a monitor? You don’t. And especially not for RIAs.

Graphic rendering performance is certainly relevant for RIAs but that is only one factor which affects overall application performance. As Chet Haase points out, Bubblemark lumps a number of different factors - calculation speed, rendering performance, and timer resolution - into a single “frames per second” metric. That leads to my second realization.

The frame rate of bouncing bubbles isn’t very relevant to RIAs. As Josh Marinacci of Sun says - “there aren’t any real benchmarks yet for rich internet applications.” I think that my Census RIA benchmark is more pertinent to RIAs than bouncing bubbles. Census benchmarks how quickly an application can get data from a server, parse that data, and render the data in a datagrid. Sorting and filtering are also important benchmarks that I’m working on integrating into Census. Today the Census app has various Flex and Ajax tests but I’m also currently working on adding a Silverlight test, an Ext JS test, and an updated Dojo test. I’d love it if someone would create a Java FX version as well.

Just for kicks let’s go back to Bubblemark and see what I was able to come up with (with help from Chet Haase). I created two versions of the new Flex Bubblemark application. You can run each version in the browser (Flash Player) or on the desktop (Adobe AIR). The results will vary between the web and desktop versions due to the browser throttling. The first application will only move the bubbles once per frame. This is similar to the original Flex Bubblemark application. If the browser is only letting Flash Player run at 60 fps then the maximum fps will be 60. Adobe AIR seems to limit the fps to 250 but I haven’t yet confirmed that. With both of these versions CPU utilization should be pretty low since they are being artificially throttled. The second set of applications moves the bubbles as many times as possible per frame. The appearance of these might be choppy since the bubbles only get rendered after being moved potentially hundreds of times. The second set of benchmarks is more real world if you are interested in VM processing speed as opposed to resolution of the timing mechanism. However a third set of tests which is probably the most useful and that I haven’t yet written would calculate how many bubbles can be moved once per frame and maintain 60 fps. That kind of metric is probably relevant to RIAs that need to do a lot on every frame. But most RIAs I’ve seen are more concerned with the speed of data processing. Here are the new Flex Bubblemark applications:

Single Move Per Frame: Web | Desktop (requires Adobe AIR 1.0)
Many Moves Per Frame: Web | Desktop (requires Adobe AIR 1.0)

(Flex Bubblemark Source Code)

Benchmarks are only useful when you apply them to your scenario. Is the performance good enough for what you need? Are your users able to run what you build? There are thousands of RIAs which run in Flash Player and now hundreds of Adobe AIR applications. For the millions of users of these applications the frame rate is fast enough and the VM performance is superb. For the developers of these applications the Flex tooling enabled them to efficiently build these applications. Not only do the runtimes and the tools work on Windows, Mac, and Linux - the runtimes and core development tools are free. There is more to choosing a platform than the speed at which a runtime can bounce objects around the screen. Sorry if I’ve burst any bubbles.

Adobe AIR, Flash Player, Flex