Andrew Shorten, Adobe
=====================

Adobe Flex 2

Still in beta, like all good Web 2.0 technologies.

For the last 18 months Macromedia (now Adobe) have been working with
"enterprise" customers. Now trying to share that with a wider audience.

Shared themes in Ajax and Flex

* Creating engaging, compelling user experiences
* Separaiton of data and UI
    RSS feeds
    Public APIs
    Open data formats
* Information comes to the user

Why flex?

* Ajax is limited by the bromser
  - Not designed for high-performance UI rendering (pretty graphic effects)
  - Limited number of built-in UI controls - you have to build others from
  scratch or with 3rd party libraries
  - Write once, run in any browser is still a dream
  - Lack of integrated audio and video capabilities
  - No bi-directional real-time messaging support
  - Data connectivity limited to XML over HTTP (... not true ...)
  - No local data storage for inline/offline working
  - Difficult to make accessible (screen reader support) - this is possible in
  Ajax but hard to do and test
* Flex delivers the framework blah blah to do these things

Flash 1996 - dumb animations
Flash today - "The leading platform for delivering effective user experiences
across browsers, operating systems and devices"

The most "expressive medium" for content.
The most "effective" user interface layer for "strategic applications"
The most "versatile" "endpoint" for "communications"

Flash reach: 98% of desktops (which version?). 600 million PCs and devices.
Version question is why Adobe are looking at ways of reaching users with
updates as fast as possible. Within first 12 weeks of Flash 8 there were 350
million updates.

Flex

Flex enables developers to build applications that deploy to the Flash player.
Block diagrams of components.

MXML - ActionScript - CSS - Flex Class Library (over 45 reusable UI components)

More block diagrams.

Shows off "bi-directional messaging" with an app that incorporates chat and
dragging photos around in a way that lets everyone see them in
almost-real-time.

Has view source - if you allow it when you compile the application.

Compelling twice in the same sentence!

Example: MeasureMap, which uses Flex, Flash and Ajax.

Flex Framework = Components, Layout managers, compilers, tools, profilers etc.
Flex Builder tool is built on top of Eclipse. Flex Enterprise Services is a
server-side component.

SDK is free of charge. Enterprise server is free for small (intranet) apps -
costs $$$ for the IDE and large-scale deployments.

Really silly graph mapping "Reach" against "Richness and Capability".

"Ajax on steroids and Vista on a diet".

http://labs.adobe.com/