I am hanging out at Adobe Engage and my hockey team just brought back Peter Forsberg!!! Sweet!

Congrats Adobe on the production releases! The new Open Source BlazeDS project and Flex Builder 3 are also a part of this release. Check out the InfoQ.com write-up that Scott Delap posted tonight: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/02/air-flex-release.

It sounds that there are a number of cool customer applications shipping with this release.

To learn more about the products I was able to do a couple of interviews with the Adobe team. I interviewed Kevin Hoyt and Mike Rozen on AIR 1.0. They shared an overview on AIR, details on the programming model, and a number of technical details on the platform.

There are certain use cases that are perfect for AIR. For example, an office productivity app that might normally be accessed through browser, such as an SAP-type application, could also be offered in Adobe AIR. It could have an identical user experience in the browser as with Adobe AIR, but could be used while the user is disconnected from the network or moving from one location to another. Also, online applications that are usually only accessible through the browser, can be available on the desktop via Adobe AIR. Plus, since AIR applications are built with same technologies used to make browser-based apps, the time and effort to extend the app to the desktop is minimal.

I also got to catch up with James Ward on Flex 3. Last year, he shared a number of details on the development framework. So, in this interview we went over a number of items from open source to other technologies in the Flex ecosystem.

Congrats again Adobe, and Thanks Kevin, Mike, and James for sharing more details on the platform with me and the InfoQ.com readers!

I just got done reading an interesting post by Gerard Mason on Flex & Java developers. He points to my post last year on the RIA Landscape and Flex. Near the end he states he surprised at the black lash on “in-browser” Java technologies:

So, yes, I wasn’t prepared for the degree of, frankly, hatred of in-browser Java that I found, even amongst ex Java developers. Like lovers who’ve been deceived, strung along, and humbled once too often.

While, I will point out that I still am a Java developer (not an ex), it has been a long-long time since I considered applets an option for web user interfaces (does anyone?). So, if you want to develop “rich” user interfaces Java has little to offer. Mason does cover this early in his post:

It seems that after a decade of Java programming, while Sun has more or less abandoned the browser and chased the server, people have finally given up waiting for usable in-browser technology…

Applets still look clunky, they still have funny fonts, they still take forever to load, as the browser has to load and run the complete JRE (at least)…

Well the market was Sun’s to lose, and they lost it; indeed, they seem not to have cared about it at all.

Sun is working on JavaFX, but the current trend line looks like the technology is going to be far too-little-to-late. Anyhow, Mason throws out a couple of questions/statements. First:

I’ve not done a lot of reading about Flex, but I haven’t heard anything about sandboxing.

From the context, I assume he means from a security perspective. He will have to flush out more on what he is looking for here, but it is worth noting that Flex applications run on the client side in a single threaded VM with limited OS permissions (i.e. the flash player). So, the needs are probably a bit different here than what he is use to in Java. In addition, I still rely on Java for all of my server-side business logic. So, I still have the full power of Java there.

Second, he states:

If Flex/Flash becomes the standard delivery mechanism for RIAs, Adobe will make a lot of money and we’ll all wish we had stayed free.

I am still a bit confused on how this is different from the Java world we have all lived in for so long. They have taken many of the same steps that Sun took to open-up Java (it did take Sun 10 years to really open source it). In addition, the player, flex sdk, and backend plumbing (BlazeDS) are all free. All you really need to pay for is the Flex Builder IDE. I have actually been wondering if Adobe is heading down the road of following Sun’s example of bringing the industry a quality platform, but never really figure out how to monetize it.

I just posted an interview with Granite Data Service founder Franck Wolff. You can check it out on InfoQ.com at: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/02/granite-data-services.

A few interesting items:

- I have used GDS a bit, but I didn’t realize that there Hibernate support allow for using lazying loading in the Flex clients. This sounds very powerful and I am excited to check it out.

- He had some interesting thoughts on the possible negative impacts RIA might have and, how GDS can help address them:

I think that with the new RIA developments we face the risk of going back fifteen years ago from an architectural point of view, when the client/server paradigm was dominant. This trend could bring us to stateful clients interacting with stateless servers (i.e. a simple database front-end). While this architecture may be possible and viable for small Flex applications, I think this is not the best choice for large applications.

Thanks Franck for the interview and for the significant open source contribution.