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!

If you are new to Flex, or just curious about it, you need to check out James Ward (my Drunk On Software partner) and Bruce Eckel’s book, First Steps in Flex.

I spent Friday afternoon telling my friend Wes that I have never lost a hard drive that wasn’t in a Raid 5 / NAS… Thus, my Mac hard drive failed Saturday afternoon.  Amazing?!?!

Anyhow, I couldn’t be more impressed with Apple.  I put in a support request online and was called with in seconds of hitting the submit button.  I was unable to resolve it on the phone, but was able to schedule and appointment for 2 hours later at the Cherry Creek Mac store.  Luckily for me, Stu has recently had a hard drive die on him.  So, I had purchased my Time Capsule and been regularly backing up to it.  They quickly determined that the drive was dead and put in a new one.  After only a few hours at home, I was able to restore from the Time Capsule and I am back up and running with all of my files intact…. After years of owning PC’s, I couldn’t be more impressed.

Even better, was seeing Peter Forsberg in the Mac store while I was waiting.  I cannot imagine losing a hard driving ending up better…………

I am listening to the latest Java Posse podcast, a session from this years round-up titled, Don’t Repeat Yourself. In the discussion, Tor Norbye made the statement that, “programming is all trade-offs.”  This is a great point.  For what ever my strengths and weaknesses are as a developer, I have long believed that one of the main values I bring to each of my projects is a natural cost benefit analysis mechanism.  It seems that most anything is truly possible in software these days.  So, understanding the costs of each decision is one of the most important parts of building quality software.

Well, I have been pushing him to get in the Blogging game for a while, as he brings a unique take to all things software.  He is our CEO that codes.  I don’t know what that says for his CEO skills, but for us developers it makes for a great boss.  Anyhow, here is the official introduction to Mr. Stu Stern’s blog, Big Gorilla.

In Thomas Friedman’s latest article, he suggest we have Steve Jobs run the car companies for a year, as part of a bail out deal.  After living in an IT industry built on inovation for the last decade, it is hard to understand how our automakers have failed so clearly in this respect.  And, it is even harder to see them heading towards a taxpayer bailout when it is sink or swim for the rest of us.  How do you ever get better if you keep getting bailed out?  Its like the kid given too much early in life… it is almost impossible for them to ever break the cycle.  I hope its different with our automakers.  I hope Mr. Jobs is offered the job and accepts.  I doubt he will fail to innovate!

James Ward and I launched our new video podcast tonight, DrunkOnSoftware.com.  The concept is a bit silly, and of course tongue in cheek as we aren’t drunks, but one of the main things we have in common is the ability to not take ourselves too seriously.  We do love talking about software and the occasional drink.  So, we figure why not make that our niche… everybody needs a niche.  We are planning on talking about all things software, but will probably focus more on Adobe Flex than other things.

In the first episode, we talk about the Adobe Flash Player 10.  James shares about the main updates of interest to developers.

Please contact us if you are in the Denver area and would like to appear on the Videocast.  We would love to have you!

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.

I have been working on a case study with Claude Courbois of NASDAQ for a few months now. We finally finished it up and published it over at InfoQ.com. NASDAQ has a very cool application, Market Replay, which utilizes AIR (desktop) & S3 (data). I am personally fascinated by how much the world has changed, as the platforms allowed NASDAQ to roll out an enterprise application with very minimal hardware infrastructure.

These technologies, and the other platforms like them, are important to all technologists, as I believe that their innovation will really mean more opportunities for our entire industry. They are enabling us to bring to market many ideas that were previously too difficult or costly to implement.

I just finished up a post on Flex and the Open Web for InfoQ, summarizing Adobe’s Ryan Stewart’s response to critiques saying that Flex breaks the open web. I understand that Adobe has to do their best to win over the entire software community, but I for one care little about standards. They do have a role in the industry, and I wouldn’t throw them out all together. However, I think any claim that they will lead us to the future is simply wrong. Standards can only capture the lowest common denominator, and rarely if ever lead to innovation. They are the rear view mirror of what has already happened in the industry.

We need to look no further than the JCP for an example of how standards have failed the industry. The JCP sounded amazing on paper, but the reality was countless specifications that didn’t work. Is anyone still using EJB? Of course, but they are using EJB 3.0 – the rewritten specification that captured the innovation that happened outside of the standards process. I cannot think of a truly successful JSR where that isn’t how it came to be…

So, do standards matter when it comes to Flex? I would say yes and no. First off, the Flash Player is a defacto standard and the closest thing the Internet has to a truly ubiquitous runtime on the desktop/browser (Windows, Mac, and Linux). This brings us back to the lowest common denominator. If you are building an application that has to be available on all desktop and mobile platforms, they really should be using standards based technologies to ensure all of your users can access the application on the latest and greatest. On the other hand, if you are building an application for consumption through a traditional browser (or desktop with AIR), then you really should be considering Flex or some other rich client runtime (Silverlight, Java, etc…) – otherwise your users are missing out.

As with all things, it is important to choose the right technologies for what you are building, but don’t be afraid of platforms that go beyond the standards. In contrast to what seems to be the common wisdom, it is unlikely that the platform vendors are trying to screw you by including advanced features that are outside of or beyond the standards – they are probably just trying to give you the features that you need to succeed for your stakeholders.