jonr originally posted this on Jon Rose's Blog.

I did a write-up yesterday on InfoQ.com about the OS integration limitations of the AIR platform. Mike Chambers of Adobe offered up some ideas on how to work around this issue, which seem to start a flame war with Scott Barnes of Microsoft. Regardless of the religious war, I do believe this is a significant issue for the AIR platform, which will need to be addressed sooner rather than later.

Checkout the InfoQ.com post at:  http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/01/adobe-air-native-os-integration

jonr originally posted this on Jon Rose's Blog.

This weekend, I finished up an article on building a Flex Messaging application using the BEA Workshop Studio (Flex Bundle) IDE.  The IDE is Eclipse based and very familiar to a Java developer like myself.  You can check out the article on BEA’s Dev2Dev site: http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2008/01/flex-messaging-workshop.html.

jonr originally posted this on Jon Rose's Blog.

I have been playing a bit with BlazeDS, the new open source release of Adobe LiveCycle Data Services. Overall, it looks good to me, as the open source release has all the features I need. Unfortunately, I stumbled onto the fact that Flex 2 SDK doesn’t work with the BlazeDS messaging features, and I have a small project where I can’t upgrade to Flex 3.

When trying to produce a message the following fault is thrown:

“Destination ’simple-topic’ requires FlexClient support which was introduced in version 2.5. Please recompile the client application with an updated client framework.”

There isn’t actually a 2.5 version of Flex SDK. So, I enlisted some help from Adobe’s James Ward. He did some digging with the Flex engineering team, and after sometime was able to provide me with a work around. However, with that work around came the clarification that ‘BlazeDS is not compatible with Flex 2.’ I was in the dark to this fact and don’t believe that Adobe is publicizing it. I am ok with BlazeDS not supporting Flex 2 (it sounds like the next version of LCDS will have the same limitation), but I wish Adobe would have told me this up front.

jonr originally posted this on Jon Rose's Blog.

I just published a piece on InfoQ.com about the Flash Player being proprietary. I personally find this to be a funny issue. It really seems like a non-issue to me, as the plug-in has a long history of being improved and available. It seems unlikely that Adobe would just rip it away. I am hoping to see some responses on the post though, as I am curious to see if this is a concern out there.

jonr originally posted this on Jon Rose's Blog.

I have been writing for InfoQ.com for about 6 months now. I really enjoy learning about new things and attempting to capture the important details for others.

I just finished an interview piece with Chet Hasse on JavaFX. It was fun to broaden my perception on the framework. After pulling together his responses, I am much more optimistic about the possibilities with JavaFX. I was especially excited to learn that they are putting significant effort into the plug-in. I personally think this is the key to making Java a competitive RIA platform. The idea of simpler syntax sounds great too.

jonr originally posted this on Jon Rose's Blog.

Cay Horstmann posted a great blog today on the current state of Java:

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/cayhorstmann/archive/2008/01/dinosaurs_can_t_1.html

‘Why is it that Sun can’t give me a decent web framework? Is it a shortcoming of the Java language? Or crummy API design? Rails uses the metaobject protocol to good effect in Active Record, but as it turns out, that isn’t my problem. JPA works ok for me. The rest of Rails doesn’t attract me—I want components, not RHTML files.’

Also, Last night I listen to a Java Posse podcast on Java/Web UI/Applets:
http://www.javaposse.com/index.php?post_id=291572. It is funny to me how they describe the problem (paraphrasing), “Java is great for RIA development, except for the browser plug-in stinks.” Followed by repeated suggestions that Java just needs to address this ‘small’ problem. This is why Flex/Flash is so interesting to me – they solved a problem that Java hasn’t been able to address in a decade plus.

There are so many wonderful new options for building RIA’s. Why is anyone still trying to use Java? It is possible that JavaFX will catapult Java back into the race, but as things stand now I am confused why anyone is turning to Java for building web UI’s.