Bruno Silva

“Flex Camp is a series of conferences designed to help you understand more about Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR.”

And it was a really good conference. I have a whole new perspective at this emerging Adobe technology. This event in Lisbon (ISCTE University) was an initiative of RIApt (Portuguese Community of Rich Internet Applications)
It all starts with a simple question.

What is RIA?

Rich Internet Applications are part of the evolution of the world wide web. It started with Text-based UI and Mainframes, evolved to Integrated Media UI and client/server architectures, and now we are daily dealing with RIA in web applications.

People expect a great user experience while navigating over the web and using distributed applications that are part of a networked and global world.

What is Flex?

Flex is an open-source cross-platform/browser framework brought to the world by Adobe to produce RIA. The output applications donw with Flex are .swf files which can be viewed in any browser with a Flash Player up-to-date plugin. It is based in XML (the format is called MXML. It is pretty similar to XAML used by Microsoft (or the other way around )

Flex allows you to use SOAP, HTTP/S, REST among other technologies/protocols. A great advantage of this technology when compared, for instance, to Silverlight (to what else could I compare it?…) it is the fact that a lot of people already support flash-based websites in their browsers. And it is already completely cross-platform (I’m still waiting for Moonlight to say the same about Silverlight).

There were a lot of demonstrations of some Flex applications. Some of them pretty great.

http://www.picnik.com - Online Photo editor. Nice, but I prefer Splashup.

http://www.buzzword.com - A reaaaaally amazing online document processor. Are you thinking about Google Docs? Just forget about it. This one has a real interface. RIA style . Astonishing! You can even save your files as Word 2007 documents (or as an usual .doc file). Give it a try.

http://sliderocket.com - Online slide show presentation composer (an online Powerpoint, lol). It is nice, but I don’t think that is as useful as buzzword. When I create a presentation I often use a lot of images and sometimes large pictures. Uploading them to a web server to use them in the presentation takes a lot of time. The waiting time for uploading and downloading the presentation for editing is not very effective. I think that in text processing this kind of issue is not such a problem. A presentation typically is more visual and occupies much more space.

http://remix.mtv.com - an online video editing tool. Pretty nice, I wasn’t paying that much attention during this demo. Sorry…

What is Air?

Air is a platform for Desktop RIA. This means that you can have an application based on Flex/Flash running as a desktop application. It can give you a great user experience. It is also cross-platform. Since it runs as a local application, it can do much more that an web-based application. A lot of the security issues that can be problematic when talking about a web-browser environment are dropped.

Air has an API that allows you to work with I/O, Networking, Clipboard actions, integrate with other typical operating systems features, etc. All you can do with a regular desktop application can be done with Air (or so they say).

Some sample applications:

Adobe Media Player - just another media player…. It was used to show us the HD support of Flex during this conference.

Google Analytics Suite - Google Analytics shaped in a fancy Air application. It can generate PDF reports!

Twhirl - this one was not presented during Flex Camp, but I use it a lot. It is a Twitter client.

This post was about what were these technologies and some examples of real life applications.

Next post will be about development with Flex/Air. Stay tuned.