Greg Wilson of Adobe just blogged about the new Fedex Desktop application. He makes some great points and highlights some of the uses of AIR within the application. Check it out below:
Here Comes the Real AIR Apps - Greg Wilson
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I have spent almost two year’s at Georgia Tech’s Savannah campus, and I have gained a lot of experience in my time there. I turned in my resignation today, because I am becoming a full-time Flex and AIR Consultant. I already have some great projects lined up in the next months, and I am truly looking forward to diving into some serious Flex and AIR projects.
I am currently booked up for the next months, but please feel free to contact me at david [at] davidtucker [dot] net if you would like me to work on a project in the future.
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I had an AIR application that I was developing for a client around the time AIR 1.0 was released. This was a custom chrome application. When I profiled and tested the application I was less than impressed with the processor utilization. Actually, I was less than impressed with the processor utilization of any of the application I build that had system chrome set to NONE and had transparency. So, image my surprise when I did some more profiling and testing on this application (now that I am running AIR 1.0.1) to see that this issue was mostly gone.
I tried to find the actual release notes for AIR 1.0.1 to see if this was one of the issues that was addressed, but I couldn’t find any specifics (the release notes didn’t give any specifics). In all honesty, this improvement could be due to an external factor, but it appears to me that is was a fix that actually came with 1.0.1. Custom chrome applications (while not always a great decision) are now a more viable solution since this resource utilization issue has apparently been remedied.
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Adobe Evangelist Serge Jespers has a great overview of the Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3 on his site. He walks the user through the process of creating a Flex component from the FLVPlayback component in Flash CS3. I agree with Serge that the component kit has a lot of power - and many developers are under-utilizing it. I just used it on an application I just finished last week (more on that later).
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Shell scripts are great (of course - this is only going to work if you are on a Linux server). This script should also preserve plug-ins and themes (assuming that you keep data in the standard directories).
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My boss pointed out the little T-Shirt icons next to some of the stories on CNN’s site. Apparently, if you see this magical icon next to a headline, you can get a t-shirt with that headline on it. Yes… you can now be the cool guy in town with shirts that proudly display - ‘Teen texts mom, thwarts burglars’ or ‘Campaign requires testicular fortitude’. Wow, this was a great idea….I am now in the process of switching out my entire wardrobe.
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This morning, I checked out the new Flickr Code site. As a part of this site was a blog post on how one of the developers at Yahoo redeveloped the Flickr Uploader (actually I think he is still redeveloping). His platform of choice to provide a consistent cross-platform application was XULRunner. He states that real choice was between AIR and XULRunner.
What were the deciding factors? In his case it came down to two things: the ability to use external libraries, and multi-threading support. In his case - I think most of his evaluations were correct. For that specific application XULRunner made sense…for now. I think many of these limitations will change in the future for AIR. However, as AIR developers we have to be able to look at a situation and honestly evaluate if AIR is the best choice for that specific use case.
You can read the post and watch a video about it here (the video of the AIR vs. XULRunner starts at about 7:00)
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The SQLite database inside of AIR provides a great deal of functionality that can be used to create a great many different types of applications. In this article, I have placed links to the tutorials I have been writing over at InsideRIA.com on how to use this functionality (I am about halfway through this series). Let me know if you have any questions - and I can address them in the upcoming tutorials. Currently, I have covered topics such as: connecting to a database, running basic queries, strongly typing query results, and parameterized queries.
My SQLite Tutorials at InsideRIA.com
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I recently had the opportunity to develop a small tutorial application that ran queries on a good sized dataset (not huge - but 10,000 rows). I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to test AIR’s SQLite database functionality, and I must say that I was pleased. The application (which was a tutorial on strongly typed database results and parameterized queries for my AIR API series at InsideRIA.com) - just has a search field that enabled you to search through these 10,000 records to find a certain contact. It also auto-populates the datagrid as you type. So, if you typed my first name ‘David’, it would have search over 10,000 records five times.
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Amazon just officially announced that they are indeed developing persistent storage for EC2.
This new feature provides reliable, persistent storage volumes, for use with Amazon EC2 instances. These volumes exist independently from any Amazon EC2 instances, and will behave like raw, unformatted hard drives or block devices, which may then be formatted and configured based on the needs of your application. The volumes will be significantly more durable than the local disks within an Amazon EC2 instance. Additionally, our persistent storage feature will enable you to automatically create snapshots of your volumes and back them up to Amazon S3 for even greater reliability.
You will be able to create volumes ranging in size from 1 GB to 1 TB, and will be able to attach multiple volumes to a single instance. Volumes are designed for high throughput, low latency access from Amazon EC2, and can be attached to any running EC2 instance where they will show up as a device inside of the instance. This feature will make it even easier to run everything from relational databases to distributed file systems to Hadoop processing clusters using Amazon EC2.
Amazon has now cleared the second big hurdle for EC (with the first one being static IP’s - which they recently remedied). Now developers will have to start asking the question - “Why am I not using EC2 for my RIA’s?”.
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