James Ward - RIA Cowboy

eWeek.com is reporting that Oracle has released five new CRM Gadgets built using Adobe AIR and Flex! At Oracle OpenWorld 2008 I had the chance to record a video of these new gadgets. Check it out:

This is a great innovation in the usually boring CRM software space. Great job Oracle!

Tomorrow at 3:30 at Adobe MAX 2008 there will be a session on building rich Internet applications in the cloud using Salesforce and Adobe Flex. They will even be giving away a new Macbook! The combination of Flex and Force.com (the platform side of Salesforce) is a fantastic way to build RIAs in the cloud. If you are at MAX this is a session not to miss!

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!

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!

While at AjaxWorld 2008 I had the chance to record another episode of the “RIA Cowboy Videos”. This time I talk with Lightstreamer about their AS3 / Flex APIs for streaming data to the client. Check out the video and let me know what you think.

IntelliJ IDEA 8.0, the popular Java IDE, has been released and now supports building and debugging Flex applications. This is great validation of Flex’s momentum in the Java community. For more information on how to get started see “Creating Flex Applications with IntelliJ IDEA“. If you are a Java and Flex developer you should definitely download the trial version and check it out.

Normal computer users like my father know at least three software vendors: Microsoft, Adobe, and Intuit. Microsoft is known for Windows and Office, Adobe for PDF (Reader / Acrobat), and Intuit for Quicken and QuickBooks. Yet all three of these software vendors are changing. All are moving in two directions concurrently: rich Internet applications and the cloud. These two paradigm shifts are changing how developers build software but more importantly they are changing how people like my father experience and use software.

The future of software is services in the cloud and rich Internet application on the client. Adobe has pulled back the curtain and given us a glimpse of this with new products like photoshop.com and acrobat.com. Intuit is beginning to do the same with QuickBase and Flex through the Intuit Partner Platform. For developers this means that applications can be built with Flex and live in the cloud. These applications can even integrate with QuickBooks. Intuit has built an Eclipse plugin that works with Flex Builder. This makes it extremely easy to build cloud-based Flex applications. I’ve recorded two short screencasts that will walk you through how all of this works:

Part 1: Creating a QuickBase application with Adobe AIR and Flex

Part 2: Creating a QuickBase widget for the browser and the desktop

To get started or to read more visit Intuit’s Developer website.

The web began as a platform for browsing, finding, and exchanging documents. Over the past ten years the web has moved beyond this document-centric role, and is now a platform for exchanging data. We typically refer to web sites used for data exchange as web applications. The next major evolution of the web is underway as web applications become more interactive and useful. The industry now refers to these next generation web applications as rich Internet applications or RIAs.

Another popular means of document exchange is the Portable Document Format (PDF). Like the web, PDFs are also evolving into more than just a document exchange technology. When RIAs are inserted into PDFs, this familiar format for documents becomes a method for exchanging and interacting with data. The primary benefits of using PDFs for data exchange are that PDFs can easily be secured, emailed around, and accessed when offline.

I’ve put together a demo illustrating this concept. You will need Reader 9 in order for this to work. First load the Flex Dashboard application application in your browser. Then in the application click the “Create PDF” button. Now you should be looking at the same data inside of a PDF! You can even save the PDF locally and view it when disconnected. You can also refresh the data from the server from the PDF or from the browser.

This works by using a template PDF containing the Flex application without any data. When the user asks for a PDF the data is inserted into the PDF template and delivered to the user. Optionally the PDF could be secured with PDF policy protection before being sent to the user. You can also create these PDFs in a nightly batch process.

For an in-depth tutorial of how I created this demo click here.

I’m here at day one of Dreamforce 2008, Salesforce.com’s annual conference. During Marc Benioff’s keynote they announced the new Force.com Sites technology for Salesforce hosted websites which can integrate with Salesforce data. At the end of the keynote Marc brought out Neil Young to talk about LincVolt, an open community for converting gasoline based cars to electric / compressed natural gas cars. It’s a very cool project but what I was really excited about was their use of Flex on the Force.com Sites powered LincVolt website. Here is a camera phone picture of the keynote (notice the sexy Flex chart at the bottom - which you can also see by going to the site).

Very cool stuff!

Walking around the expo floor I’m seeing a ton of Flex. I’m trying to get it all on video. So keep watching here for more details on what people are doing with Salesforce and Flex.

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