Google Gears

The latest entry among the candidate RIA technologies is Google Gears.



Still in version 0.3 at the time of this writing, its obvious that a lot of work needs to be done.

However, Google Gears (GG) has a couple of neat features...

* Database based on SQLLite.
* WorkerPool (JavaScript MultiThreading).
* Desktop Module to interact with the OS.

The Database module provides browser-local relational data storage to your JavaScript web application. Gears uses the open source SQLite database system. Ergo exactly as we have grown accustomed with Adobe AIR.

The WorkerPool module allows web applications to run JavaScript code in the background, without blocking the main page's script execution.
In web browsers a single time-intensive operation, such as I/O or heavy computation, can make the UI unresponsive. The WorkerPool module runs operations in the background, without blocking the UI. Scripts executing in the WorkerPool will not trigger the browser's "unresponsive script" dialog.
Nevertheless, since the browser's XmlHttpRequest object is not available in the context of a worker, Gears provides its own HttpRequest object to fill that need. Gears HttpRequest provides most of the features of XmlHttpRequest except for the ability to access the response as an XML DOM object and the ability to send a request synchronously.

Check it out...
http://gears.google.com/

A couple of more cool features are scheduled, but lets see which ideas actually make it out of the labs alive.

Some reasons to consider GG are that it does not require an explicit installation, just that you allow a specific site to run Gears enabled and that its open source in contrast to e.g. Adobe AIR and there a couple of more pretty interesting features of GG, but I will not get into that now.

When this is said, in my very humble graphical understanding - I think there exist a striking resemblance between Adobe AIR logo and the Google Gears logo and to be totally honest, the feature set if we disregard the very promising multi-threaded Javacsript... do you see what I mean ?

AIR 1.1 : Now with Localization !

For us Danish developers, localization is always a major concern... so the fact that Adobe AIR 1.1 is out now with support for localization just made the platform more interesting...

Adobe AIR 1.1 is a small release that adds international support to AIR applications. In the future, the Flex team will release official updates to both the Flex SDK and Flex Builder that include the latest version of AIR. However, this particular release is happening off of the Flex release cycle so there some inconveniences involved when installing it.

You can read more about it here in Matt Chotin's short article clearing this up...
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex_air1.1.html

And you can download it here...
http://get.adobe.com/air/

Flex AIR and ActionScript Posters

If you have a registered edition of Flex Builder and a valid license key, you can order your Adobe Flex / AIR posters.

Read more here

ItDepends : A tool for visually exploring the dependencies between classes and packages in an Adobe Flex application

Currently I am converting an existing application with about 3.500+ classes to use RSL's. It's proven to be rather difficult because we are using a lot of different libraries and modules with quite a number of dependencies between libraries. Despite no libraries having direct circular dependency, there are some indirect dependency-circles in the system.

When moving to a RSL-based architecture it becomes extremely important to understand the class-definitions included in each library and modules.. and more importantly to know exactly when they are both loaded, needed and used.

ItDepends is a tool for visually exploring the dependencies between classes and packages in an Adobe Flex application.
It's a great aid when undertaking my task, but even during the normal development of modular applications it can be valuable to use it when considering how to break up the application to increase performance as well as general system quality.



Check it out...
http://code.google.com/p/it-depends/

FlexCover : A code coverage tool for Flex, AIR and AS3

Flexcover is a code coverage tool for Flex, AIR and AS3. It incorporates a modified version of the AS3 compiler which inserts extra function calls in the code within the SWF or SWC output file. At runtime, these function calls send information on the application's code coverage to a separate tool; The modified compiler also emits a separate "coverage metadata" file that describes all the possible packages, classes, functions, code blocks and lines in the code, as well as the names of the associated source code files.



Check it out...
http://code.google.com/p/flexcover/

Thunderbolt : A logger extension for ActionScript 2 and 3

ThunderBolt is a logger extension for ActionScript 2 and 3 as well as Flex 2 and 3 applications based on the Firebug add-on for Firefox.





It looks very promising, and knowing Jens Krause's ordinary high level of ingenuity and as well as quality, I am willing to give it a shot.

Features:

* Detailed information (class, file, line number, time, frame)
* Log levels (info, warning, error, fatal)
* Interactive tree view for complex object structures
* Profiling (time spend during code execution)
* Collapsible grouped output
* Filter log by classes and packages
* Interactive console (inspect and modify object on runtime)
* Log levels: INFO, WARN, ERROR, DEBUG (FATAL, ALL)
* Tree view for complex object structures such as class identifier and its properties
* Custom LogTarget based on Flex Logging API including filters
* memory snapshot
* stop logging flag
* SWC components for logging using Flex 2/3 or Flash CS3

Adobe OnAIR Tour Stockholm (2)

Jens Brynildsen have been so nice to share his photos from the Adobe OnAIR Tour's stop in the swedish capital, Stockholm.

Check it out...
http://www.flashmagazine.com/News/detail/onair_stockholm_2008_pictures/

Adobe OnAIR Tour Stockholm (1)

A day inside the "Munchen-bryggeriet" masshall when the weather was so good and Stocktown was at its finest, caused everyone to assume that the sessions would be as abandoned as the beach in Jaws succeeding the second attack of the killer-shark... however, it was not !
It was packed with designers, flash programmers and flex developers (and perhaps even an existing AIR developer) and off course reps. from Adobe.

The food was great, the "swag" was OK and enough so that everyone seemed to feel appreciated.
Lots of cool people with lots of great knowledge and ideas...

Stay posted for more on this topic...

Adobe Air : OnAIR Tour Stockholm (0)

The Adobe AIR team visits Stockholm in Sweden next month. Unfortunately the registrees have already reached capacity.

Several of the other stops on the tour is still open for signup, so dont hesitate to consider going to either Berlin or London if your in the area.

Check it out...
http://onair.adobe.com/schedule/cities/stockholm.php

Adobe Event : January 25th in Copenhagen

The Adobe experts are throwing a presentation of their Web technologies and AIR.

Folks like...

- longtime Macromedia/Adobe web-tech evangelist Greg Rewis
- omnipresent CSS and accessibility expert Stephanie Sullivan
- video-rockstar Jason Levine
- top-of-the-lnie AIR guru Mike Downey

...will come and present this for the general masses.

I don't expect this to be advanced in any way as its targetted towards the general public, but nevertheless it might be interesting for the more strategically inclined techies to attend as it will summarize the vision of the technologies down to one commutable serenade. A serenade I expect will be usable as part of a "sales pitch" both internally to management, other peer-departments as well as externally to customers considering a RIA solution.
I therefore also assume it could be beneficial for more non-technical personnel working with techies to attend, as I assume it will provide a not-too-technical overview of the technologies.

Check it out and signup here:
http://events.adobe.co.uk/events/cgi/event.cgi?country=dk&eventid=6279
NB. Its free and signup has just opened as of the time of posting this.

This day or seminar follows a day for VIP's only, where I suppose the plans for the future will unveiled... tell me, is there anybody out there who is not excited about the sharp turn Adobe has taken since the acquisition of Macromedia in regards to parter-relations :-)

FITC Amsterdam 25th - 27th February

Don't forget to get your ticket while the early bird discount still is available (Last chance is the 9th of February). Its the 7th year of this exciting event and I am gonna try to do my best to be able to find the time and finance to attend.



Check it out:
http://www.fitc.ca/event_detail.cfm?festival_id=29

DFUG : Interview w. PV3D' s Ralph Hauwert and Mike Chambers

Mike Chambers have posted an interview following the DFUG / Adobe AIR User meeting in Aarhus.
I'm attending Ralph's course on PV3D next month in London, and this interview just even makes me more happy to have signed up already.

Check out Ralph's blogpost on it (linking to the video of the interview):
http://www.unitzeroone.com/blog/video_interview_on_papervision.html

Adobe AIR : AIR/MTV challenge

Adobe and MTV are hosting a contest to find the coolest apps built using Adobe AIR and the MTV Assets.

I definitely wanna join, but I still need to:
- find a cool project to do.
- find some other people interested to join with.
- convince my company that its valuable to join such a competition enough so they will allow me to stop overworking myself on projects with customers 16 hours a day...

Check it out:
adobe.mtv.com

DFUG : AIR User Group Meeting in Aarhus

Last Thursday I had the great opportunity to attend a couple of hours of free-stepping by the two AIR evangelists, Mike Chambers and Lee Brimelow (both from Adobe).

Making Aarhus one of their 6 European stops on the AIR User Group tour of Europe it was a great opportunity for me as a true Copenhaniac to revisit the wonderful capital of Jutland (The danish mainland)(Copenhagen is our nation's true capital featuring our Parliament as well as the notoriously expensive amusement park Tivoli and the (for most tourists surprisingly small) Little Mermaid).

Anyways...

The setting was LynFabrikken, a media collective featuring just about everything the nearly human developers heart may desire. I had brought my GF for the trip so we started getting some sushi at a nearby SushiBar and bringing it to the venue. Everybody else was drinking beer and eating pizza so we kinda didn't fit into any of the arch-types present, but neither did the fact that she was a female so I suppose we were the odd couple of the crowd (I counted 3 female specimens out of the apr. 120 attendees).

Mike Chambers started presenting General Adobe... I shall not elaborate on this, you will know already for sure.

Lee Brimelow continued after the break where most people used the opportunity to refresh themselves from the DFUG-sponsored bar and to catch up among their network. Nice ambiance altogether.
Going through the general description of AIR, Lee entertained everybody with his informal and self-deprecating style for which he is known.
Seeing that he actually used to evangelize for WPF instead of Adobe's Flash Platform I couldn't keep my question bottled up about where he saw the eventual standoff between Flash and WPF taking place and on what grounds.
He refused such a thing would happen due to the completely different characteristics of the two platforms.
He used the opportunity to make sure that everyone was aware of the fact that Silverlight and Microsoft is great for creating applications, but they sucked at creating experiences. So if you want to create a boring CRUD oriented data-management application in a controlled environment its fine to use WPF, but if you want to create an experience or even just to wrap tedious work processes for users in a compelling UI, the the Flash Platform would be your obvious choice... Not mentioning that its SO unlikely that Silverlight will ever get the same penetration as the Flash player but leaving this unsaid and yet there was none among the audience that wasn't aware of this fact. Unfortunately he managed (once again) to avoid answering and explaining concretely his drastic change from evangelizing one thing to evangelizing the opposition... some day I hope to get him to explain in details this transition of epic proportions.

Shortly after the conclusion the American guys left to catch the train to Cologne (The location for the meeting next day) and I ended up having a very interesting talk with Andreas Hollström from Adobe Nordic about the interdepartmental processes on Flex development projects, a dialog that took its offset in the Thermo review and soon moved into general process optimization... interesting stuff :-)

The GF and I soon had to split to catch our train back to Copenhagen, so we had to leave the free bar unravished, but I promised to come back soon and take care of that.
I had to limit myself to one beer during my chat with Andreas as I had to launch an early public Beta of our newly developed project for Elsparefonden: "Min Bolig | Det intelligente hjem".

The deployment went fine as did the train ride. My GF not coming from Denmark and not being technically inclined, actually enjoyed the trip and I am considering to bring her to more of this sort of thing as it always lights up the room with a beautiful girl, and it almost NEVER seems to bother geeks and other nice folks to be in the presence of a good looking female (but then again, who would dislike that).

PV3D : Majority Desk

Developed by Eddie Herrmann and Dan McWeeney for demo jam at SAP TechEd, Majority Desk is a 3D desktop controlled by two Nintendo wiimotes.

It’s a very interesting project running on Adobe AIR with Papervision3D on the rendering and the excellent WiiFlash on the controls.