I haven’t been very active with writing for InfoQ.com lately. My lack of activity has been primarily due to time constraints, but has also been because I have been a bit bored with the recent RIA news. So, I was excited to get ‘back in the saddle’ with a post on the release of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0, as both releases are cause for excitement to anyone developing RIAs. The release will improve the development experience for Flex and AIR developers, but will also serve to move the ball forward in the space.

Here is my write up: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/11/flash-10.1-and-air-2.0

This week, I posted an interview with Bruce Eckel on InfoQ.com.  Bruce is a legend in the Java community, who has moved on to working with Python and Flex.  When I first learned Java his book Thinking In Java was a huge help.  In the interview, he shares on a broad number of topics, including discussing his latest book, First Steps in Flex.

Check out the interview here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/05/bruce-eckel

Today, I posted an interview I did with Doug McCune on InfoQ.com. His personality and passion for development came through in his encouragement for developers to build “cool shit.” I love the sentiment, as I so often get trapped in trying to bring business value and forget that sometimes software development should just be a creative endeavor. However, as cool as that sounds, it can be challenging to bring that sort of mindset into the enterprise. With that in mind, Doug had some really interesting comments on UX within business applications:

Enterprise software is almost uniformly horrible, but there’s no reason for that. We’re seeing a “UX revolution” in RIA design, and for all the buzzword nonsense surrounding “user experience, ” there’s something real happening in terms of the overall quality of the experience delivered by RIAs. We’ve seen some really great and innovative work in consumer RIAs, with a trend toward simple and intuitive interfaces. And yet in enterprise software this trend has barely even begun, it’s all still complex. I want to see enterprise applications treated like consumer apps, with the same attention to the user experience and with a consistent drive to simplify and make everything more intuitive. Complex systems don’t have to be presented with confusing software. But it takes more work to figure out the simple, elegant solution. It’s far cheaper and faster to make bad complex software than good simple software.

I also think there’s a business intelligence breakthrough afoot that will bring these same concepts of intuitive software specifically to the BI arena. Business intelligence is just a fancy way of saying that you’re extracting value from raw data in some way. This is typically limited to your mundane set of charts, gauges, and all the other normal dashboard UI elements that are the current standard. But I think thinking about BI problems from a fresh perspective, from the perspective of someone outside the enterprise space, will lead to the invention of new visualization methods. Maybe sales performance isn’t something best shown using a silly looking speedometer gauge. Maybe there’s an intuitive way to extract more value from that heap of raw data sitting on enterprise servers. But I don’t think enterprise developers have been willing enough to experiment with new concepts. People need to start inventing.

I have to agree that enterprise software is generally poor, particularly in the user interfaces.  In addition, his comments on working toward the simple, elegant solution makes me want to scream, “Yes!”  I think the only place I differ with him on is where the blame belongs for the overall low quality of enterprise systems.  Developers do deserve some of the blame, but I think generally the challenges come from the organizations, project owners, and managers who do not understand what is now possible, or even worse never understood how to build software to begin with.

In years gone by, the platforms really limited the ability of developers to build cool user interfaces that still made sense on the budget.  I was originally drawn to Flex because it can do things that simply weren’t possible on the web only a few short years ago.  This probably factors into the decisions that even smart, experienced managers are still making today, as many of them have previous attempts at doing cool things that led to ballooned budgets and jeopardized projects.

So, there is the obvious onus on developers to sell their ideas and educate their organizations on what is possible now that the platforms have capabilities way beyond getting data in and out of the database.  However, with that said, the real limitation of enterprise software will always be that the teams building most systems are part of companies that do not exist to build software, and often just don’t understand the processes, the platforms, the code, the users, etc.  In those cases, it is unlikely that they will be able to overcome their limitations to build cool, highly usable systems.  So, while I am optimistic that the advances that have come with the RIA revolution will trickle into the enterprise, it is unlikely that they will have the same impact on business applications as we are seeing in consumer applications built by companies that exist solely to build quality software.

If you enjoyed Doug in writing, check him out in this recent Flasher Magazine video interview. Also, look for him in a future DrunkOnSoftware.com interview.

Last month, We posted a Drunk On Software video interview with Anvil project founder, Ryan Knight.  This month Ryan shared more about the project in an InfoQ.com email interview I just posted.  Check it out and let Ryan know what you would like to see in the next release of Anvil.

In 2008, Flex reached the tipping point where it went from a technology with possibilities, to wide spread usage.  The year started with Adobe releasing Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 and finished with an updated release of AIR (1.5).  According to friends at Adobe, in mid-2008 there were about 150,000 Flex developers – a number that pushes it beyond interesting, to a viable and growing community.  Also, there were the Sun Deflextions…

In my consulting travels, it went from a technology few knew of in 2007, to one where most developers had some impression of it, or had even done some work with it in 2008.  It has been exciting to see a technology go from the fringes to the prime time.  I do hope that Adobe finds a true revenue model, and Flex doesn’t just become another Java as far as the vendor is concerned.

Personally, this really means new challenges for 2009, as I am tasked with writing RIA content for InfoQ.com and building real applications with Flex.  In late 2007 and early 2008, there was a constant stream of announcements and excitement around the platform.  As 2009 starts, I think it has already become more about the reality of building real world applications.  So, on the InfoQ side, I think my new challenge is going to be providing resources on how to best implement applications on the platform and talking more about the weaknesses of Flex and how to address them.  I guess that is the reality for any platform that becomes mainstream.

All that said, 2008 was an exciting time to be associated with Adobe Flex!

In 2007, I became an editor for InfoQ.com.  InfoQ.com is an enterprise software development community, with news, articles, video interviews, and a yearly conference.  As an editor, I write weekly news items and contribute the occasional article or video interview.

Today we posted a list of the Top Posts of 2008.  I am excited to have a few items on the list.  I had the number one item in the architecture community, a news post titled “James Gosling on Adobe Flash / Flex / AIR.“  In the Java community, I posted 2 of the top 5!  Both of these posts are original works that I collaborated on with James Ward (Top 10 Adobe Flex Misconceptions & Top 10 Mistakes when building Flex Applications).

Click through and check out all the exciting 2008 news!

Chet Haase, an engineer on the Adobe Flex Platform Team, shared a few thoughts this week on how JavaFX and Adobe Flex compare.  Chet brings a unique perspective, as he was a member of Sun’s JavaFX team before joining Abobe.  You can read his comments in my InfoQ post.

Flash Player 10 is out tonight.  There are some pretty nice looking features, but it looks like we will have to wait for Flex 4 to really take advantage of them.  Read my write up on the release on InfoQ.com here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/10/flash10.

Interviews are still my favorite part of writing for InfoQ.com.  This week I interviewed Stu Stern on FlexMonkey.

Stuart Stern, our fearless leader at Gorilla Logic, loves to share that “Everything you know is wrong” is not a value proposition. Usually highlighting mistakes he saw as an executive at Sun Microsystems – one example being the slightly delusional believe that everyone should be using Solaris on their desktop instead of Windows. Sun held onto this for years because Windows was insecure and clearly inferior to the Solaris platform. The problem for Sun was that people actually liked Windows no matter how much Sun told them they were wrong.

I think this sort of pitch is actually quite common, as technology vendors are trying to gain ground in highly competitive markets. A certain amount of comparing and contrasting is essential to help potential customers understand a vendors product and where it fits in the market, but sometimes it is just too much.

Last week, I did an interview with the folks at Curl (an RIA platform) for InfoQ.com. Following the comments on the post and reading more about their recent benchmarks, it seems that Curl has settled on a marketing strategy that boils down to telling people that everything about Flex is wrong and everything about Curl is great. This seems to be getting them some attention, but it misses the mark a bit for me. The industry as a whole can be mis-guided, but when it comes to Flex I don’t believe this is the case. Also, like most people I just don’t like being told that my firsthand experiences are not valid.

Honestly, Curl sounds like an excellent platform for building RIA’s. Although, I do have serious reservations about deployment with Curl, as virtually no one has the client-side runtime. One of the things I love about Flex is that deployment is greatly simplified, as most (all) users already have the runtime. I would encourage those building RIA’s for the corporate Intranet to evaluate Curl along with Flex – outside of that controlled environment I would stick with more widely adopted technologies.