I attended the Java Posse Roundup in Crested Butte last week. It was interesting to hear discussions on so many different topics. My favorites were ‘Why are Open Source People Such Weirdos?’ and ‘Overview of JEE.’

There were good conversations on RIA too, but generally a lot of agreement. Agreement is good, but doesn’t always make for interesting conversations. Although, it was interesting to hear a general excitement for what is now possible with the RIA platforms (Flex/AIR, JavaFX, Silverlight, and GWT), most everyone seems to have a wait and see attitude towards JavaFX.

You can read my InfoQ.com write-up on the conference and OpenSpace format at: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/03/javaposse-roundup-2008.

For loving Flex so much, I have actually been skeptical about Adobe AIR. Over the last year, I have had a hard time understanding why moving applications from the Web to the Desktop mattered (it just didn’t seem that interesting). Then I had the chance to attend the Adobe Engage event two weeks ago, where they launched Adobe AIR with its 1.0 release. With the launch, they demonstrated a number of applications built using the AIR platform.

For me personally, it was one of those exciting, yet horrifying moments in life. It was horrifying because I started to understand how limited my personal development experience has been by only knowing a world where the browser/Internet exists. I have been in the software industry for 10 years – so for me it has always been about web based applications. There have only been two times in my career that have I been asked to build a non-web / desktop application, compared to dozens of requests for web UI’s.

So, even though it was a bit frightening to realize how limited my view of user interface development has been, it was exciting to begin to understand what is now possible as the web and the desktop blend with platforms like Adobe AIR. There were a number of cool applications / features demonstrated. One of the coolest applications was Sprout, for assembling content from anywhere.

Most all of the applications demonstrated were amazing, but much of my optimism and excitement comes from many of the subtle features in these applications enabled by the AIR platform. Seeing a Flex application in the browser communicating with an AIR application on the desktop is just cool, and will help us (developers) to implement features that improve user experience.

Congrats Adobe on the production releases! The new Open Source BlazeDS project and Flex Builder 3 are also a part of this release. Check out the InfoQ.com write-up that Scott Delap posted tonight: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/02/air-flex-release.

It sounds that there are a number of cool customer applications shipping with this release.

To learn more about the products I was able to do a couple of interviews with the Adobe team. I interviewed Kevin Hoyt and Mike Rozen on AIR 1.0. They shared an overview on AIR, details on the programming model, and a number of technical details on the platform.

There are certain use cases that are perfect for AIR. For example, an office productivity app that might normally be accessed through browser, such as an SAP-type application, could also be offered in Adobe AIR. It could have an identical user experience in the browser as with Adobe AIR, but could be used while the user is disconnected from the network or moving from one location to another. Also, online applications that are usually only accessible through the browser, can be available on the desktop via Adobe AIR. Plus, since AIR applications are built with same technologies used to make browser-based apps, the time and effort to extend the app to the desktop is minimal.

I also got to catch up with James Ward on Flex 3. Last year, he shared a number of details on the development framework. So, in this interview we went over a number of items from open source to other technologies in the Flex ecosystem.

Congrats again Adobe, and Thanks Kevin, Mike, and James for sharing more details on the platform with me and the InfoQ.com readers!

I just got done reading an interesting post by Gerard Mason on Flex & Java developers. He points to my post last year on the RIA Landscape and Flex. Near the end he states he surprised at the black lash on “in-browser” Java technologies:

So, yes, I wasn’t prepared for the degree of, frankly, hatred of in-browser Java that I found, even amongst ex Java developers. Like lovers who’ve been deceived, strung along, and humbled once too often.

While, I will point out that I still am a Java developer (not an ex), it has been a long-long time since I considered applets an option for web user interfaces (does anyone?). So, if you want to develop “rich” user interfaces Java has little to offer. Mason does cover this early in his post:

It seems that after a decade of Java programming, while Sun has more or less abandoned the browser and chased the server, people have finally given up waiting for usable in-browser technology…

Applets still look clunky, they still have funny fonts, they still take forever to load, as the browser has to load and run the complete JRE (at least)…

Well the market was Sun’s to lose, and they lost it; indeed, they seem not to have cared about it at all.

Sun is working on JavaFX, but the current trend line looks like the technology is going to be far too-little-to-late. Anyhow, Mason throws out a couple of questions/statements. First:

I’ve not done a lot of reading about Flex, but I haven’t heard anything about sandboxing.

From the context, I assume he means from a security perspective. He will have to flush out more on what he is looking for here, but it is worth noting that Flex applications run on the client side in a single threaded VM with limited OS permissions (i.e. the flash player). So, the needs are probably a bit different here than what he is use to in Java. In addition, I still rely on Java for all of my server-side business logic. So, I still have the full power of Java there.

Second, he states:

If Flex/Flash becomes the standard delivery mechanism for RIAs, Adobe will make a lot of money and we’ll all wish we had stayed free.

I am still a bit confused on how this is different from the Java world we have all lived in for so long. They have taken many of the same steps that Sun took to open-up Java (it did take Sun 10 years to really open source it). In addition, the player, flex sdk, and backend plumbing (BlazeDS) are all free. All you really need to pay for is the Flex Builder IDE. I have actually been wondering if Adobe is heading down the road of following Sun’s example of bringing the industry a quality platform, but never really figure out how to monetize it.

I have been playing a bit with BlazeDS, the new open source release of Adobe LiveCycle Data Services. Overall, it looks good to me, as the open source release has all the features I need. Unfortunately, I stumbled onto the fact that Flex 2 SDK doesn’t work with the BlazeDS messaging features, and I have a small project where I can’t upgrade to Flex 3.

When trying to produce a message the following fault is thrown:

“Destination ’simple-topic’ requires FlexClient support which was introduced in version 2.5. Please recompile the client application with an updated client framework.”

There isn’t actually a 2.5 version of Flex SDK. So, I enlisted some help from Adobe’s James Ward. He did some digging with the Flex engineering team, and after sometime was able to provide me with a work around. However, with that work around came the clarification that ‘BlazeDS is not compatible with Flex 2.’ I was in the dark to this fact and don’t believe that Adobe is publicizing it. I am ok with BlazeDS not supporting Flex 2 (it sounds like the next version of LCDS will have the same limitation), but I wish Adobe would have told me this up front.

Cay Horstmann posted a great blog today on the current state of Java:

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/cayhorstmann/archive/2008/01/dinosaurs_can_t_1.html

‘Why is it that Sun can’t give me a decent web framework? Is it a shortcoming of the Java language? Or crummy API design? Rails uses the metaobject protocol to good effect in Active Record, but as it turns out, that isn’t my problem. JPA works ok for me. The rest of Rails doesn’t attract me—I want components, not RHTML files.’

Also, Last night I listen to a Java Posse podcast on Java/Web UI/Applets:
http://www.javaposse.com/index.php?post_id=291572. It is funny to me how they describe the problem (paraphrasing), “Java is great for RIA development, except for the browser plug-in stinks.” Followed by repeated suggestions that Java just needs to address this ‘small’ problem. This is why Flex/Flash is so interesting to me – they solved a problem that Java hasn’t been able to address in a decade plus.

There are so many wonderful new options for building RIA’s. Why is anyone still trying to use Java? It is possible that JavaFX will catapult Java back into the race, but as things stand now I am confused why anyone is turning to Java for building web UI’s.

There are basically no more barriers to entry with Adobe’s announcement today that much of Flex Data Services is being open sourced. In addition, they recently lowered the price of the Flex Builder IDE to $249. What reasons are left for Java developers to keep using crappy server side Java frameworks over Flex? Really. Please share.

Here are some links on today’s announcement:

http://coenraets.org/blog/2007/12/blazeds-open-sourcing-remoting-and-messaging/

http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/2007/12/12/blazebench-why-you-want-amf-and-blazeds/

Also, check out my latest InfoQ.com post, where I talked with Adobe’s James Ward on some of the Misconceptions around Flex:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/12/top-10-flex-misconceptions

I gave another day of my life to Oracle yesterday. First, trying to help a co-worker with Oracle Discoverer Plus issues (no success yet). Then I discovered a lovely bug in the Oracle JDBC Driver, where BigDecimal values are not always written to the database correctly. Ahhh…