Today we launched Adobe AIR Launchpad, a desktop tool that helps Adobe Flex developers get started building desktop applications deployed on Adobe AIR. Simply run Adobe AIR Launchpad and select the capabilities you need; Adobe AIR Launchpad will create a ready-to-import Flex project with your selected features implemented in a way that can be easily modified and extended. You can use the resulting project as a starting point for your AIR application.

Adobe AIR Launchpad creates a folder structure that contains a ready-to-compile AIR application with the selected features implemented. It also creates a ZIP file in the parent folder that can be imported directly into Adobe Flash Builder. If you select auto update as an option, a “server” subfolder will be created that contains the XML file needed on the server to control auto-update. If you select the install badge option, a “install_badge” subfolder will be created containing the files needed to create an install badge.

The generated code is well commented and clearly written.  I think you will find that using this tool will dramatically accelerate learning AIR.

The Adobe AIR Launchpad is free and available now at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/airlaunchpad

If you like Launchpad and have never looked at Tour de Flex, check it out at http://flex.org/tour – there are over 500 Flex samples including a lot of AIR-specific samples.

CREDITS:  Holly Schinsky (blog / twitter) built nearly all of the application including the generated code and comments.  Holly has a unique sense of what developers need when learning a new language or API.  Her blog has a large and growing following because her blog posts are very useful and written from one developer to another in a no-nonsense style.  Holly has often discussed building code templates that developers can use as a learning resource so this project was a perfect fit for her.   Christophe Coenraets, James Ward, Michael Chaize, Ben Forta and I contributed to the overall design and concept.

James Ward created a great demo video:

Michael Chaize also created a demo video:

As enterprise IT administrators start getting requests for AIR applications to be deployed in their environments, they immediately start asking questions about how they can control the deployment, auto-updates, etc.

Many people are not aware that Adobe has an AIR Administrator’s Guide.  In this guide you’ll learn how to do the following:

• Perform silent installs of the AIR runtime and AIR applications using Microsoft SMS, IBM Tivoli and other deployment tools
• Prevent installation of additional AIR applications
• Prevent installation of untrusted AIR applications
• Disable automatic updates of the AIR runtime

You can download the guide in PDF format from http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/admin/air_admin_guide.pdf or read it online here.

Topics:

• Find out why we chose the technology stack:  Ubuntu Linux, MySQL, ColdFusion, LiveCycle Data Services, Flex, AIR
• Learn how to use publish/subscribe messaging techniques to enable multi-player communications
• Hear about the challenges we faced as we dealt with users in remote areas of the globe with poor networking conditions and how we addressed it (we have users from more than 200 countries)
• Learn how to take advantage of ColdFusion remoting in Adobe Flex — soooo easy and soooo fast!
• Explore various collaboration techniques employed throughout ChessJam from in-game chat to synchronized views

I’m really looking forward to presenting this session.  This project has been a lot of fun and I am excited to share.  To prepare for this session, go grab the app and play! — http://chessjam.com

CFUnited Session: 7/29 Thursday 4:00PM – 5:00PM Faulkner

Topics:

• Explore multiple techniques to tap into your app/site’s activity data (swf, “magic png”, server-side, etc.)
• Learn how to convert an IP Address to latitude, longitude, city and country
• Use ColdFusion’s sendGatewayMessage() to broadcast the data
• Learn how to configure publish/subscribe messaging using BlazeDS (included with CF9) and LiveCycle Data Services (I’ll explain the differences)
• Learn how to build amazing data visualizations using Adobe Flex
• Take a deep dive into two visualization examples:
  • Use Google Map Flash 3D APIs (amazing features)
  • Use IBM ILOG Elixir’s heat map component and gauges

I’ll be sharing the full source-code for the whole thing.

CFUnited Session: 7/30 Friday 3:15PM – 4:15PM Ballroom A

I hope to see you there!

Here’s a list – check them out – the each include a video:

• Video Chat for Android in 30 Lines of Code — 30 lines of code and you can do multi-user video chat!   Takes advantage of Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Services
• Android Trader Desktop with Flex and AIR – real-time data updates with live charting, etc.
• Employee Directory Sample Application Using Flex and AIR for Android – every company has an employee directory – a great use case and a great example of using SQLite with AIR on Android
• “VoiceNotes for Android”: Sample App using Flex, AIR, and the Microphone API – Cool demo of the new microphone API in AIR for Android

You can join the AIR on Android beta by going to http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/android/

Even if you don’t yet have an Android devices capable of running AIR, you can use the emulator and still have fun!  I blogged about this recently.

I’ve been involved in web development since the early betas of Netscape.  I’ve used Java Servlets, JSPs, ASPs, Perl/CGI, PHP, ColdFusion and other means of dynamically generating web content and have always worked to push browser capabilities to the limit.   From day one I was excited about what web browsers could do, but like many web developers, I was almost instantly frustrated by the limitations and the painfully slow progress of web standards.  It has taken 15 years to reach the capabilities reflected in the HTML 5 spec.  These features should have been in HTML 2 or at least HTML 3!   Many other standards have innovated dramatically faster, so for me personally, HTML 5 is at least 10 years overdue!

The Flash/HTML overlap – Would you replace your <IMG/> tags with Flash?

Flash was added to our toolbox to extend the capabilities of web developers beyond what HTML provided.   It basically has helped developers fill the gap that exists between the desires of our application design and the capabilities of existing web technologies.   The intent of Flash has never been to compete with HTML.  The intent is to help developers realize the goals of our applications.  If HTML and related technologies provided everything we needed, Flash would not exist.

As complementary technologies evolve, there are inevitably overlapping capabilities.  Adobe has never promoted the use of Flash to do things that HTML can do without Flash.  Have you ever heard anyone promoting the use of Flash to display images?  You could replace all of your <IMG> tags with Flash but why would you use a plugin where no plugin is really needed?!   Although Flash would do a great job at displaying your images and even provide some unique features, it’s very unlikely that you need these features so you would be nuts to use Flash!  If Adobe told me to promote this idea, I would move to the Lightroom team!

This is a trivial example of where there is overlap, but because web developers fully understand the requirements and capabilities of displaying images, it’s obvious which technology to use!   The currently debated overlapping features are a bit more complex resulting in confusion for many.

HTML 5 increases the overlap

I remember the first time I saw DHTML used to make cascading menus (2002 I think?), I was impressed!  I could build UI controls that respond to mouse rollover events, dynamically display dropdown menus and all sorts of cool things.  Amazing!  Although this could already be done with Flash, it was nice to see HTML technologies evolve to this level.  (I’ll skip the history lesson about the huge pains we went through to make sure this new coolness worked on multiple browsers.  It was a mess until JQuery and other AJAX frameworks evolved!).

If you look at what HTML 5 is bringing us, you’ll see that the overlap between Flash and HTML 5 is indeed increasing.   HTML 5 introduces animations, drawing capabilities, video, audio,  and many other things that we usually rely on Flash to deliver, so yes, the overlap is obviously larger in many ways.  However, there is a high probability that the overlap is probably not as big as you may think.  Let’s start with the obligatory video debate.

The center of attention in the current debate – Video!

Now I’m going to say something that might surprise you.   If your video needs are met by HTML 5 and your target audience has an HTML 5 capable browser, you SHOULD use the new video tag instead of Flash!   Like I said before, why use a plugin for something that a plugin is not needed for!?  It’s no different than my <IMG/> analogy above.

However, before you draw any conclusions about video… be sure that you completely understand the implications:

1: Does your target audience have an HTML 5 compatible browser capable of viewing your video?

If not, I can assure you that they almost certainly have Flash, therefore, it’s an obvious choice for playback of video on non-HTML5-ready browsers.  Read my prior article, “HTML 5 and Flash – A Reality Check“.  Are you surprised to see that more people use IE6 than Safari?  I was!  Of course there are new devices that support the HTML 5 video tag and some of these new devices do not have Flash support for various reasons (no, I’m not going there), so it basically creates more work for us developers to support 100% of the audience.  Now we find ourselves writing code that handles video playback differently based on the user agent.  It’s reminiscent of the early 2000s and I believe that it’s going to get worse before it gets better because the number of devices, browsers, screen resolutions, OSes, etc. is dramatically larger than ever before.

2: Do your video requirements go beyond simply pointing to a video file with the new video tag?

You would be surprised at how many customers have much more complex requirements.   Here are a few comments made yesterday by John Harding, Software engineer at YouTube on the YouTube blog that illustrates my point:

“It’s important to understand what a site like YouTube needs from the browser in order to provide a good experience for viewers as well as content creators. We need to do more than just point the browser at a video file like the image tag does – there’s a lot more to it than just retrieving and displaying a video. The <video> tag certainly addresses the basic requirements and is making good progress on meeting others, but the <video> tag does not currently meet all the needs of a site like YouTube”

The article goes on to explain multiple technical reasons why Flash will continue to be the video player for YouTube.   You can read the full article at http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html.  Hulu recently made a similar blog post -http://blog.hulu.com/2010/05/13/pardon-our-dust/ that mentions a few other interesting points.   Although HTML 5 provides video playback, many customers find a gap between their requirements and what HTML 5 offers….so once again, Flash fills the gap!

Did you know that there was such a vast difference between the capabilities of HTML 5′s proposed video tag and Flash?  Have you really looked at the complete feature set of Flash video?

Assuming the HTML 5 video format war finally gets resolved (it has a long ways to go), we will indeed see more videos delivered by the browser without the use of Flash, and that is the way it is supposed to be.  However, when you need advanced video capabilities, you will find that Flash once again complements HTML very nicely.

Video is just one aspect of Flash and only one aspect of HTML 5.  I used it as an example of how disconnected people are from the reality of the debate.

As HTML technologies expand, so do the capabilities of Flash

The ever increasing overlap between Flash and HTML 5 is just one part of what’s happening right now.  The other part that is seldom mentioned is the continually increasing capabilities of Flash.   As HTML 5 is slowly realized, Flash continues to innovate at a very fast pace so that it can continue to fill the gap between what HTML technologies offer and what developers want to build.  You should see what’s coming in future versions!  Flash will continue to complement HTML and help developers realize capabilities not possible otherwise.  Can Adobe continue to innovate to fill the gap?  Can Flash evolve fast enough to continue complementing HTML?  You bet.  I’ve seen it!  Eventually, we will be debating HTML 6 vs Flash Player X and we’ll see whole new set of hot topics. Fun times!

Get educated!

Spoken in my stern teacher voice — It is impossible for you to evaluate the future of HTML 5 and Flash unless you are fully educated on both technologies.  I keep meeting developers who have a decent understanding of HTML5 but think Flash is nothing more than simple video and animated ads.  I also meet developers who have a decent understanding of Flash but think HTML 5 is only about adding video, audio and canvas tags to today’s HTML.  In both cases, the person is VERY misinformed and is lacking the required education to make any future-looking statement about either technology.  However, both uneducated groups tend to be very loud!  It reminds me of a political election where people vote based on what they have learned from political ads!  STOP IT!

Whether you are debating technology or politics, it’s an absolute requirement to be equally knowledgeable on all topics involved.

Where to learn more

Hopefully you are now inspired to learn more.  Below are the resources I found while learning about HTML 5.  I’ve also listed some resources about Flash and related technologies.  Go read everything below and let’s have an intelligent and fun discussion about the future.

HTML 5:

• Google’s http://html5rocks.com – fantastic resource with tons of live demos – my favorite resource for showing off HTML 5
• Microsoft’s IE 9 test drive home page – includes some very impressive HTML 5 demos – http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/ – it’s great to see Microsoft innovating around HTML 5.
• Apple’s Safari technology demos – some impressive demos of HTML 5, but a bit too “Apple owned” feeling – http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/ – the original demos only ran in Safari but now also run in Chrome.
• CanvasDemos – an entire site devoted to the new canvas tag in HTML 5 – some very impressive stuff – http://www.canvasdemos.com/
• HTML 5 Test site – gives your browser a HTML-readiness score and list the capabilities.  Each listed capability is a hyperlink to the HTML 5 spec – http://html5test.com/
• HTML 5 Readiness site – shows current status of most modern browsers (anything not listed has no HTML 5 support) – http://html5readiness.com/
• HTML 5 Demos – a decent set of HTML 5 demos – http://html5demos.com/
• HTML 5 Video tag browser support matrix – a very up to date article on which browsers support which video formats/codecs, etc. – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video
• Adobe Dreamweaver HTML5 Pack – an amazing set of HTML 5 capabilities you can use today – http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/html5pack/

Adobe Flash Platform:

• Adobe Flash Platform Home Page – http://www.adobe.com/flashplatform/
• Flex.org – great starting point for learning about Flex, a developer’s toolkit for creating Flex content.  If you have never looked at Flex, you are missing a big piece of the Flash Platform, especially when it comes to complex application development.  Be sure to check out the showcase (“What’s possible”).  You’ll see that Flex is used to build very complex mission critical apps in the enterprise.  These apps run on the Flash platform.
• Tour de Flex – a gallery of nearly 500 code samples illustrating everything from simple UI controls to complex data visualizations and real-time data handling – http://flex.org/tour
• Top Flash Misconceptions by Mike Chambers – addresses some very recent false claims about Flash – http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/tag/flash_myths/
• What’s new in the latest release of Flash Player 10.1 – a very substantial release – http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.html
• Adobe AIR home page – a runtime that enables desktop applications built with either Flash, Flex or HTML/JavaScript – http://www.adobe.com/products/air/ – supports Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android (beta) and more on the way.  If you have never looked at AIR, you need to check this out.
• Flash Media Server home page – http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver/

Go learn!

Tour de ColdFusion is a desktop application built on Adobe AIR that provides quick access to hundreds of ColdFusion code samples.   Live running samples combined with the source code that you see running is the fastest way to learn!

Over the next few days, we will be adding additional samples.  Tour de ColdFusion will automatically reflect the latest sample database each time you run it so you know that you are seeing the latest, greatest stuff.

Help us make Tour de ColdFusion better by helping us add new samples.   If you have any code samples, techniques, frameworks, etc., that you think would make Tour de ColdFusion an even better learning tool, please contact us at submit@tourdecoldfusion.com.

Please report any issues to bug@tourdecoldfusion.com.

Go to the Tour de ColdFusion Beta home page to download and install.

Filed under: Adobe ColdFusion, Tour de ColdFusion Tagged: CF, ColdFusion, tdcf, tour de cf, tour de coldfusion ]]> http://gregsramblings.com/2010/06/24/tour-de-coldfusion-beta-launched/feed/ 0 http://gregsramblings.com/2010/06/18/tour-de-flex-2-0-air-and-flex-component-and-api-explorer-launched/ http://gregsramblings.com/2010/06/18/tour-de-flex-2-0-air-and-flex-component-and-api-explorer-launched/#comments Fri, 18 Jun 2010 17:26:58 +0000 Greg Wilson http://gregsramblings.com/?p=1576 ]]> We just posted Tour de Flex 2.0.  If you already have a previous version of Tour de Flex, it should auto-update to 2.0.   This latest version has several bug fixes and now requires AIR 2.0 to support many new AIR 2.0 samples.   Go grab it and check out the new samples in the AIR Applications folder!  There is some great stuff!

THANK YOU to Holly Schinsky (twitter) for building the majority of these new samples in addition to fixing many of the bugs in the Tour de Flex application.

There are now 490 samples in Tour de Flex!

If you don’t already have Tour de Flex, go to http://flex.org/tour.  Tour de Flex is a desktop application for exploring Flex capabilities and resources, including the core Flex components, Adobe AIR, data integration, and a variety of third-party components, effects, skins, and more.

“Sorry, an error has occurred. The application could not be installed because an application with that name already exists at the selected installation location. Try installing to a different location.”

This also breaks auto-update.  You’ll get the following error:

“This application cannot be installed because this installer has been mis-configured.  Please contact the application author for assistance.“

After doing a bit of research, I discovered that a change was made starting with AIR 1.5.3 with how publisher IDs are generated.  When you switch from a namespace prior to 1.5.3 to 1.5.3 or later, the assigned publisher ID will be different unless you override.

The solution is simple and documented here.

Here’s the quick version of what you need to do:

1. Determine your application’s current publisher ID. In an installed application, this is found in the META-INF/AIR/publisherid file.
2. Add a <publisherID></publisherID> element in your descriptor, and copy your publisher ID into it.
3. Update your application’s namespace to 1.5.3, 2.0 or whatever

Now when I try to install, it recognizes it as a newer version and gives me the dialog and upgrade experience I expected.

To find out what browsers people are using, I decided to go find some data.  I quickly discovered some interesting stats at http://w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp .  There are twice as many people using IE6 than Safari??!!  Wow.  After studying the data, I was reminded that w3schools doesn’t really provide good data for my purposes because your mom, daughter, doctor, dentist, accountant, and coworkers in HR never visit w3schools.com.  It’s a site for technical people looking to learn more about web development!  The data is still interesting but keep reading…

I recently discovered a goldmine of information maintained by our new friends from Omniture called SiteCatalyst NetAverages, an online service that provides insight into current Internet usage trends. The data is based on anonymous aggregate unique visits across the majority of Omniture customers.  These sites are the big leagues and they are visited daily by your mom, daughter, doctor, dentist, accountant and co-workers in HR.

I won’t waste your time analyzing the results.  Take a look for yourself.  The charts below are from last month (May 2010).

After looking at this data, I realize that we are dealing with two different challenges.  The first challenge is getting all vendors to agree on the numerous aspects of the standard and implement them consistently across all supported platforms (I have to admit that I’m skeptical.  History does not build any confidence).  The second challenge is the rate of adoption.   Although Flash Player 10 was quickly adopted (over 90% in only a few months), new browser technology moves much slower.  I do think that HTML 5 will be adopted faster than previous browser advancements because the new features are compelling, but the reality is that it will take some serious time.  Keep in mind that IE 6 was introduced in 2001 and it still appears in the chart!  It’s depressing!

If you would like to take a look at the data from NetAverages, go sign up!    It’s part of CSLive and is complementary for 12 months when you register your Creative Suite 5 product or sign up online before April 11, 2011.  You can signup now at http://adobe.com/go/cslive.  There are other charts showing OS’s (Win XP is nearly 50% still!…geez), screen resolution, JavaScript versions, etc.   It’s fascinating to explore.

If you would like to see data from another source, check out NetMarketShare – the results are even more surprising (they show IE 6 at 17.6%!).  Check out their OS version chart – Windows XP still at 62%??!!  Now that I think about it, my accountant does still use Windows XP.  Thankfully my mom has a loving son that upgrades her often.  :)