James Ward - RIA Cowboy

Over the next few months I’ll be going around the world (literally) speaking about Flex and Adobe AIR. Here’s a quick rundown on where I’ll be:

Wednesday March 25 in Las Vegas: TheServerSide Java Symposium - Co-presenting with Eddie O’Neil from BEA

Thursday March 26 in Philadelphia: Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise - Porting from Web 1.0 to RIA in the Enterprise

Thursday April 3 in Bangalore, India: Adobe RIA Architect Summit 2008 - Best Practices for Building Flex/AIR applications

Tuesday April 15 in Atlanta: BEA Dev2Dev TechDays - Developing a Rich UI with Flex in Eclipse & Connecting a Flex UI to the back-end SOA (The Dev2Dev Tour is also going around the world with many other great Adobe speakers.)

Wednesday April 16 in New York: Salesforce.com’s Tour de Force (Also going around the world with other Adobe speakers.)

Friday April 18 in New York: Flex Camp Wall Street - Offline Reporting in Rich Internet Applications & From Tags to Riches with Shashank Tiwari

May 5 in San Francisco: CommunityOne - Hanging out with my Redmonk friends and possibly a session

May 6 - 9 in San Francisco: JavaOne - On Wednesday Chet Haase and I will be doing a late afternoon session at the Metreon followed by drinks and pool at Julian’s. Also you won’t want to miss Stephan Janssen’s presentation “Parleys.com: An Adobe Flex/AIR and JavaFX™ Case Study”

June 25 in Zurich, Switzerland: Jazoon 08 - Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Java

There are also a number of other great events going on that other Adobe people will be speaking at, but unfortunately I couldn’t fit into my schedule:

onAIR Europe Tour

360|Flex Europe April 7-9, 2008 in Milan, Italy

And others…

I hope to see you somewhere along the way!

Today Adobe launched Flex 3 and Adobe AIR 1.0 – the most mature and comprehensive platform for Rich Internet Applications in existence.

The news of the launch is everywhere but I wanted to point out a few of the most exciting things related to this launch.

The Flex SDK and BlazeDS are now officially open source.

InfoQ has published an interview with me on the Flex 3 launch. They have also posted an interview with Kevin Hoyt on the AIR 1.0 launch as well as an overview of today’s announcements.

Salesforce.com and Adobe have launched the Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex.

Not really related to the launch but also very exciting – Chet Haase, Java Swing guru and co-author of Filthy Rich Clients has joined the Flex engineering team.

This launch is the biggest RIA launch ever! I can’t wait to see what you build with these awesome technologies!

Almost a year ago I began working with Ron Hess and Dave Carroll from Salesforce on the Flex Toolkit for Apex - a port of the JavaScript libraries for Salesforce.com’s web services. Since that time the toolkit has matured and been used in numerous production applications. Today I am pleased to announce the new Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex. This new toolkit build on the Flex Toolkit for Apex and adds additional functionality for the new Adobe AIR runtime for desktop RIAs.

For more information on the new toolkit check out a tutorial I wrote on how to use it. Also visit the new Salesforce page on the Adobe Developer Connection.

It was very impressive seeing all of the amazing applications that were built with the original toolkit. I can’t wait to see what you build with this new toolkit. Let us know how it goes!

While I was at Dreamforce this year I had the chance to do a video interview with Peter Coffee from Salesforce.com. In this interview we discussed the industry momentum behind RIAs in enterprise software and how Flex, Adobe AIR, and Force.com are being combined to deliver much better user experiences in business applications. The recorded interview is below. You can also find the original post on Peter Coffee’s blog.

A few weeks ago I was able to participate in a Chalk Talk with Salesforce.com and StakeWare. The session focused on how Rich Internet Applications, Flex, and Adobe AIR relate to the Force.com platform. With this combination of technologies companies like StakeWare can quickly build business applications that have rich user interfaces that work the same across browsers and operating systems.

PodTech recorded the session and have split it into three parts [part1, part2, part3]. I spoke in part 2. You can watch the video below or on the PodTech site.

At Salesforce.com’s 2007 developer conference, called Dreamforce, I did a few minutes of demos during the day two keynote with Marc Benioff and Bruce Chizen. I showed three real applications built with Flex, Adobe AIR, and Salesforce.com. It was a fun experience and I only had a few minor demo glitches. Thanks to PodTech the video is below. My demos are about four minutes in.

One of my old blogs has been turned into a full article on the Adobe Developer Connection and updated for Flex 3 Beta 2 & Adobe AIR Beta 2:
Building an Adobe AIR application on salesforce.com with Flex 3

Also a recording of the session that I hosted at Dreamforce has been posted on the Apex Developer Network:
Make Your App *Bling*: Build Amazing Salesforce Apps Using Adobe Tech. (click on “Apex & Beyond” then scroll down to the session)

Lastly, in the next few weeks we will be releasing an update to the Flex Toolkit for Apex which adds simple local caching for AIR applications. More information as soon as we finishing implementing the basic CRUD functions.

Last week I attended Dreamforce, salesforce.com’s annual developer conference. It was exciting to see all the innovation going on with business applications. Much of that innovation is centered around Flex and Adobe AIR. In fact 18 of the 32 companies in the salesforce.com incubator are using Flex and AIR! Does that give you an idea of where the momentum is for companies building business applications?

At the Dreamforce Day 2 keynote, Workday CEO Dave Duffield gave a demo of the new Flex-based interface to their ERP software. Duffield said multiple times that they have standardized on Flex as their UI platform! A while back I was in early meetings with Workday that focused on their possible use of Flex. I showed them my Census RIA Benchmark and some of the other amazing things they could do with Flex. I’m really glad they have decided to fully embrace Flex for their UI. Compared with the other technologies they were considering, I’m sure their developers and their customers will be much more pleased with their experience.

I met so many people at Dreamforce who were building RIAs with Flex, salesforce.com, and the Flex Toolkit for Apex that it was somewhat overwhelming. The toolkit, which started as one of my airplane projects, has been the catalyst for bringing together Flex and salesforce.com. Thanks to a lot of help from Seth Hodgson, Dave Carroll, Ron Hess, Adam Gross, and many others we have built a great platform for Rich Internet Business Application development - great user experiences on the front end and a solid infrastructure on the back end. It’s no wonder so many companies are building their business applications on this stellar combination of technologies.

It is hard to keep track of all the innovative business applications being built with Flex, AIR, and salesforce.com. Model Metrics, for example, is building applications that allow you to take your data offline. Their first app is targeted at pharmaceutical sales reps. It allows them to sync their salesforce.com data to a tablet or laptop, then go to a doctor’s office and record all the information about their visit. When back online they can automatically sync all that information back into salesforce.com. It’s a great app built entirely with Flex, AIR and salesforce.com. Another great application is SlideRocket. This Flex-based PowerPoint-like application hooks into salesforce.com so that you can easily send your presentations to your salesforce.com contacts and see when your contacts viewed them. DemandBase has a very nice Flex application for finding sales leads. When you purchase leads they are automatically inserted into your salesforce.com account! Check out the DemandBase application for yourself. One last company to highlight is Ribbit. Ribbit has built a great voice/phone communication application that provides services like automatic voicemail transcription - and it can live inside of salesforce.com. All of these applications show where the cutting edge is for business applications. It’s all about great user experiences with Flex and AIR - built on great infrastructure like salesforce.com.

If you are building Flex, AIR, and salesforce.com applications please let me know! You can email me at jaward <at> adobe <dot> com or just leave a comment here. Thanks!

This tutorial has been updated to Flex 3 Beta 2. The new version is now on the Adobe Developer Connection:
Building a standalone Adobe AIR application on salesforce.com with Flex 3

The excitement around using Flex & AIR to build amazing front-ends for Salesforce applications continues to grow. Nitobi has posted a cool AIR application that uses the Salesforce Ajax library. Also Dave Carroll of Salesforce has posted a great blog about why Flex & AIR developers should care about the Apex platform. Back in April I posted the first version of a tutorial about how to use the Flex Toolkit for Apex to build AIR (was Apollo) applications. Since the Flex 3 and AIR betas were released recently it’s time to update that tutorial. So if you want to start building some sexy interfaces on top of salesforce.com follow along…

1. Download and unzip the Flex Toolkit for Apex:
http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Flex_Toolkit

2. Download and install the Flex 3 Beta:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder3/

3. Create a new AIR Project:

4. Add the Salesforce SWC to the Library Build Path:

5. Write your AIR application:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:WindowedApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" xmlns:salesforce="http://www.salesforce.com/"
  creationComplete="conn.loginWithCredentials('dev@mavericks.demo', '123456', new AsyncResponder(loginResult, loginFault));">

  <mx:Script>
  <![CDATA[
  import mx.controls.Alert;
  import com.salesforce.results.QueryResult;
  import com.salesforce.AsyncResponder;

  private function loginResult(result:Object):void
  {
    conn.query("SELECT Id, Contact.Firstname, Contact.Lastname FROM Contact",
      new AsyncResponder(queryResult));
  }

  private function loginFault(fault:Object):void
  {
    Alert.show("Login error!");
  }

  private function queryResult(qr:QueryResult):void
  {
    dg.dataProvider = qr.records;
  }

  ]]>
  </mx:Script>

  <salesforce:Connection id="conn"/>

  <mx:DataGrid id="dg" width="100%" height="100%"/>

</mx:WindowedApplication>

6. Save it (which automatically compiles it)

7. Run it:

8. Export it as an installable AIR file so you can share it with others

9. Say “That’s Hot!”

Now go ahead and build some amazing Flex and AIR applications on top of salesforce.com! Just let me know what you create so that I can use it in my demos. :)

Download the AIR file for this tutorial

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