Space of Flex/AIR technologies

This week I got an info that Flextech User Group got registered at Adobe Groups. If you want to join this group you can find it here: http://groups.adobe.com/groups/05e8d70699/summary It is based out of Wrocław Poland. Of course their official blog is here http://blog.flextech.pl but I think everyone in Polish community already knows that

Important to note here is that Flextech is not a new group. Actually guys behind it (especially Paweł Cichoń) are one of the most active Flex community supporters in Poland! Big kudos for Paweł and his crew for doing really great job, keep it up guys!!!

I’m really proud that Polish Flash Platform Community is becoming really strong and active. We could also see it last week at Warsaw Flash Camp (checkout the photo review) event were we had incredible atmosphere with unbelievable attendance.

Today we released first betas of Flash Builder 4 (formerly known as Flex Builder) and Flash Catalyst. This was long awaited release as we could already feel its taste with public and open releases of Flex 4 SDK. Now the tools and SDK are available on Adobe Labs http://labs.adobe.com.

This release brings a lot of new features and improvements especially to Flex skinning and styling architecture. There is whole new framework introduced called Spark that allows full separation between UI component logic and their look. For better designer and developer workflow Flash Catalyst comes in hand supporting import of artwork from tools like Photoshop or Illustrator and converting it to Flex components.

When it comes to developer productivity improvements there are very noticeable changes in compiler performance, integrated into Flash Builder FlexUnit test wizzards, asdocs support in code hinting and I think also very much awaited code indentation.

We have also released interesting articles where you can learn more:

• What’s new in the Flex 4 SDK
• What’s new in Flash Bulder 4
• Getting started with Flash Catalyst

and some videos:

• http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash/videos/

The Merapi Project http://merapiproject.net was just released as Open Source. Merapi is a Java-to-AIR bridge framework, that brings power of Java API’s to AIR/Flex applications. I’m very excited to see this finally happen and looking forward for new applications with event tighter integration to underlying operating system.  With Java cross platform capabilities this is a perfect mix that will bring RIA’s to another level!

Congratulations to Merapi team!

You can find Merapi Project code on the Google Code Web site:
http://merapi.googlecode.com/

Example applications are located here:
http://merapi-examples.googlecode.com/

And to participate in the conversation with other Merapi project members and folks in the community, be sure to head over to the Google Group that was setup here:
http://groups.google.com/group/merapi-project

New product from Acrobat.com family was just released (its an early release so you can find it on labs at the moment)! Its an online presentation editor that allows its users to share, edit and collaborate presentations on Adobe hosted services. It is very similar to in concept, layout and of course technology to Buzzword – an online text editor. You can check it out here: http://labs.acrobat.com/

Tour de LiveCycle is a desktop application designed by the Adobe Evangelist team to serve as both an introduction to Adobe LiveCycle ES and an extensive reference tool. We have organized over 1,000 pages of content into a hierarchical tree that you can use to explore the areas most relevant to you. Whether you need to build a full application or you just plan to spend 10 minutes getting a feel for LiveCycle ES and the kinds of problems it can help you solve, Tour de LiveCycle can help.

You can find more info here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/livecycle/tourdelivecycle/

Here is the badge that you can use to install Tour de LiveCycle:

You can also check Tour de Flex which is very powerful demo of Flex and AIR technologies:

Yesterday Amethyst Beta 5 was released. Amethyst is a Flex development environment for Visual Studio. With every release it becomes more and more feature complete. I think in the future it has a big chance of becoming the Flex IDE of many VS/.NET developers.

This release bring feature like:

Refactoring

• Rename variables, classes and methods
• Encapsulate field (add getters and setters and update references)
• Preview and edit (check or uncheck items) before renaming
• Rename from ‘smart tags’

Organize imports

• Auto-add class to import list
• Sort imports
• Remove unused imports
• Sort and remove imports in a single operation

Configuration-dependent property pages

• Seven pages of categorized project properties
• Save properties as named configurations for easy re-use
• Option to select alternative Flex SDKs
• Options to define symbols for conditional compilation

Find all References

• Highlight an ID such as a class, method or variable to navigate to all references in project

Run and debug on server

• Option to run or debug applications using a web server
• Supports WebDev, Apache, IIS

Mateusz Małczak one of our Polish Flash Platform gurus (an author of an awards winning Komixo http://komixo.com/ comics editor) has released an asynchronous JPEG encoder that is based on libjpeg and compiled into AS code with Alchemy. More info about his work you can find here: http://segfaultlabs.com/blog/post/asynchronous-jpeg-encoding

Here is also a preview where you can compare it with optimized JPEGEncoder. It not only is faster but it also produces smaller jpegs:

Yesterday new version of Swiz 0.6 was released. It brings couple of new features and some performance improvements:

• Support for mediating bubbled event
• Added view attribute in Mediate tag
• Autowire views with view attribute in Autowire tag
• Ignoring view classes with underscore for performance optimization
• Added viewPackages for performance optimization
• Added eventPackages for shorter notation in strict mode
• SwizConfig for Swiz MXML declaration
• Generic fault handler for executeServiceCall
• Autowire bean properties with new property attribute
• Prototype supports class reference and constructor arguments

Sonke Rohde published great post explaining all the new features: http://soenkerohde.com/2009/05/swiz-06-released/

At the beginning of April (09.04.2009) Polish Ministry of Finance released their first Adobe AIR based application e-Deklaracje Desktop. This application lets its users submit annual tax declarations electronically and monitor their status. In Polish tax legislation every citizen is obliged to settle his income for previous year with tax office by the end of April. Historically e-Deklaracje project was initiated by Ministry of Finance in 2007/2008 but with less success and wide range adoption due to electronic signature requirement. By that time it required special hardware readers for digital signatures that are not commonly adopted in Poland.

This year Ministry of Finance has prepared change in legislation that was later signed by President of Republic of Poland that allowed sending annual declarations without qualified digital signature. Still to ensure proper security level users had to provide their personal information like: first name, last name, date of birth, NIP – tax identification number, PESEL – personal identification number and declared income from previous year. In reality this set of information is more than it was required in traditional paper based declarations (that’s the case with income from last year). I guess all this information gives better identity verification than traditional way where anyone can send his declaration by post or bring it in person to tax office (where no one asks for any id).

After only three weeks of availability over 77000 citizens have sent their declarations electronically (UPDATE 18.05: latest information from MF website states that 89000 declarations were sent, I guess those that forgot to do it till the end of April are still submitting)!!! This is incredible result taking into consideration such a short time, I believe next year we can expect this number to multiply couple times when people will have it available since January.

I’m also proud to say that local Adobe team (Tadeusz Chełkowski, Tomasz Lichota, Bartek Soin and of course myself) supported this project from very beginning with our technical and RIA experties.

Why Adobe AIR?

Ministry of Finance had couple of major requirements that had to be met by that type of application:

1. Cross-platform support – solution had to work without any compromises on all major operating systems like: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
2. Usability – it had to be easy to install and natural to use for inexperienced users. With badge installer on MF website it just couldn’t be made easier.
3. Security – give the users confidence that application they are installing was really issued by Ministry of Finance.
4. Interoperability – integration with SOAP based backend services.
5. PDF forms support – already existing PDF forms developed in previous year could be reused with small adjustments supporting non-qualified signature.
6. Desktop integration – required desktop features:
   

• Reliable local storage for drafts and sent declarations offline persistence;
• PDF forms templates and documentation local caching;
• Notifications mechanism for asynchronous confirmations (declarations receiving and confirmations service works in asynchronous mode with response time up to 24 hours).

As you can see all of above make Adobe AIR perfect fit for that type of applications. In my opinion the most important features in case of any application issued by public sector institutions are: cross-platform support, usability and security.

We had some stories in Poland in the past of applications written only for Windows platform with closed protocol specifications that ended with Linux users taking legal actions against publishing institutions. Adobe AIR built-in cross-platform support resolves this issue, I actually observed very positive feedback especially on Linux forums after e-Deklaracje release. Some comments stated that this is first time Polish government institution has noticed that there are also other OS’s than Windows.

In terms of usability there are two important factors, first of all installation process to make it as smooth as possible, ideally with small footprint, dependent runtime, tools and libraries automatic detection and installation (badge installer was resolving most of these, except Adobe Reader installation). Another factor is availability of experienced UI designers and developers. This is Adobe’s strong field with great community of Flash and UI design experts.

From the security perspective for application that gathers and sends out user personal information is important to give users confidence that the application was distributed by trusted entity and any communication with backed services is done through secure encrypted channels. Application issuer verification is Adobe AIR built-in feature with signed install packages.

You can check it out yourself on MF website: http://www.e-deklaracje.gov.pl/index.php?page=do_pobrania

This is how the application looks:

e-Deklaracje Desktop main window

Declaration fill window

History window

Amethyst Beta 3 was released today! For those of you that don’t know it, it’s a Visual Studio Flex plugin. If you are looking for some other alternative you can check one of my previous posts http://www.riaspace.net/2009/01/flex-developer-tools-ides where I listed all the tools in the market available to Flex developers. This is really great news as it brings debugger with my favorite VS feature of Drilldown Debugging. To learn more go to: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Amethyst-Beta-3-Flex-IDE-Released

These are the principle new additions in beta 3…

Integrated Debugger with:

• Breakpoints
• Step Into
• Step Over
• Step Out
• Continue
• Restart

Debug Windows

• Watch windows
• Autos
• Locals
• Call Stack
• Quick Watch

• Parameter Completion: when you call a method, its arguments are shown in a tooltip with the current argument in bold…

• In MXML you may omit ‘mx:’ in order to get code completion in tags – e..g. enter: <b to view a completion list starting mx:BaseListData
• MXML completion is case insensitive – e.g. enter bu and press Tab to add the tag: <mx:Button