My Presentation from 360Flex

I just posted my slides and code samples from 360Flex. My session was entitled ‘Cairngorm for Adobe AIR Applications’. This session was a brief introduction to existing tools for Cairngorm that you to interact with core AIR API calls as services in Cairngorm.

You can view them on the Presentations page.

Absolutely Great AIR Resource

Lee Brimelow just released his slides from FITC on AIR. These slides are a great resource and provide excellent code examples. You can check out his post here.

Enterprise AIR Data Synchronization with LiveCycle

Christophe Coenraets presented on the future of data services at 360Flex yesterday. As usual, his knowledge of data services proved valuable. He also demonstrated some of the new features that will be coming out in the next version of LCDS (reported to be close to public beta). One of these key features is data synchronization in AIR applications. He demonstrated this feature during the session, and initially it seemed to work very well (but we were using a simplistic example).

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It’s Here – AIR 1.0 and Flex 3.0

Adobe has now released AIR 1.0 and Flex 3.0. AIR specifically has been years in the making, and it’s impact will be huge. Many of the companies that haven’t yet jumped onto the AIR bandwagon due to its Beta status are now going to begin development. From what I hear we are also going to have an onslaught of new AIR applications over the next week. What a great time to be an AIR/Flex developer.

I am waiting for the keynote to start here at 360Flex, so if anything else gets announced – I will let you know.

Great Post on Why Flex and ActionScript

I am sitting in Caribou Coffee a bit north of Atlanta getting ready for 360Flex, and I was reading through some blog posts, and I spotted this one on why Blist chose Flash/Flex/ActionScript. Great read for anyone developing in Flex/Flash/AS3 as well as those who don’t.

Why blist Chose Flex and Flash

AIR and Cairngorm Revisited

As I stated earlier, I am presenting a session on ‘Cairngorm for Adobe AIR Applications’ at 360Flex Atlanta next week. I am in the process of finalizing my talk, but I wanted to give you guys (and girls) a chance to give some feedback which would could impact what areas I focus on for my talk. I feel like I have five hours worth of material – so, I know that I need to narrow it down to the areas that would really be beneficial.

Here are a few questions that I would ask you.

• What tighter integration would you like to see between Cairngorm and AIR?
• What is most important when building in Cairngorm AIR applications for you: development speed, following MVCS design pattern, code reuse?
• What AIR functionality is difficult for you to place in the Cairngorm flow?

Thanks in advance for your input, and I hope to see all of you at 360Flex Atlanta.

ActionScript 4 and 5 Wishlist

A bit of discussion has developed from my previous article, Moock on ActionScript 4 about features that people would like to see in future versions of ActionScript. Obviously at the top of the list (mentioned by Dave) we have Threads. Does anyone have other things you want to see in the next versions of ActionScript?

Moock on ActionScript 4

Colin Moock is presenting details of ECMAScript 4 at FITC. He has posted some of his lecture notes regarding changes (that will probably be present in ActionScript 4 as well). These changes include:

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Learning from the S3 Outage

Today’s S3 outage taught me quite a bit. I don’t currently have any sites or services running on AWS, but I will have multiple ones up shortly. I am always big on redundancy, but I admit that when I comes to things like EC2 and S3 – I assumed that Amazon had already implemented the redundancy (trust me, I realize that this wasn’t the best viewpoint to take). When it boils down to it – here is the truth: Everything can fail. Second, if it isn’t your service/server/network – you can’t fix it. You just simply have to wait for it to be fixed.

Every site needs a ‘what if’ plan: what if my database server crashes, what if S3 goes down, what if EC2 goes down and I lose all of my server instances? In a world that is moving so fast toward hosted services – we need to remember these things and architect our applications to function (even if not at a full level) when these things fail. Oh, and don’t kid yourself – they will fail.

Yahoo Rejects Microsoft’s Initial Offer

As many have speculated, Yahoo Rejected Microsoft’s initial offer of $44.6 Billion. Hopefully this will mean that there are additional companies that could become involved with Yahoo that would be more beneficial for the Flash, Flex, and ColdFusion developers out there.

Yahoo formally Rejects Microsoft’s Offer