Tag: Adobe

New Flash Tools available on labs

Posted by Neil – June 1, 2009

This morning, Adobe announced that the latest drops of both Flash Builder (the IDE formerly known as Flex Builder) and Flash Catalyst are available on Labs.

Both have been well covered in the media already, and Catalyst (or Thermo as it was known) is heading for it’s third year of being demo’ed at Max, without a release.

“Design in Mind” was one of the core themes for this release, and these tools, together with the updated Flex 4 SDK, deliver on that to make it easier than ever create high fidelity, rich Internet applications that target the Flash Platform.

Andrew Shorten’s also released a little tutorial that you can work through to familiarize yourself with the tooling. In this tutorial Andrew shows you how to build an employee address book application that lets users enter search criteria and view a list of results fetched from a database (via a ColdFusion service), from which they can select an employee to get their full contact information. The completed application could work either as a browser-based application (using Adobe Flash Player) or a desktop application (using Adobe AIR).

So, if you haven’t already, head over to the labs and check them out, they are certainly interesting tools.


Is it cos I is European?

Posted by Neil – May 29, 2009

german_lederhosen_blackThis Monday sees the start of the annual Scotch on the Rocks conference at the Sway bar in London.  This year there’s a change in format as the conference is going on the road, visiting a city every other day through all of next week.  There’s a fairly good line up of speakers (alongside a decent showing from Adobe) and a fair few people making their way up there.

But that’s not why I’m writing this blog post.  Something I’ve noticed this year is the complete absence of any Adobe conferences containing ColdFusion content in and around Europe.  Aside from Scotch and the odd ColdFusion camp here and there, there’s nothing.

For the Americans this is a very different story.  For instance, there’s the Adobe MAX conference in October, CFObjective() a couple of weeks back, CFUnited plus a host of other smaller localised ones.  This goes to show a common problem with software companies based in the states – the belief that the world stops when you hit the US coast.  Admittedly, last year there was an Adobe MAX in Europe (and Japan), but this year, they’ve been binned, and Adobe are expecting everyone to go to the LA event instead.  However, for nearly everyone outside of the US this is an incredibly expensive proposition – nearly always costing into the thousands just to attend and have somewhere to sleep for the night.

So, for those of you who may not live on this continent, please note that without the valiant efforts of FuzzyOrange and the Scotch team, we would have absolutely nothing in the UK (or nearby) until towards the end of 2010 (assuming MAX comes back).

Therefore, if you live in northern europe, and can make any of the venues next week, please buy a ticket and attend Scotch – as it’s the only chance you’re going to get for a ColdFusion orientated conference this year.

What I’ll be learning over the next year…

Posted by Neil – May 14, 2009

Earlier this evening I realised that it’s my birthday in two days time, and as tradition goes, I must choose a new language/tool to pick up and learn over the next year. Last year was Rails, the year before that was getting a proper grip of Javascript and jQuery.

So, what’s this year? Well, it’s a bit of an odd one as it’s not really anything new to me, but something that is now dramatically different from when I last looked at it – and that’s good old Flash.

My last run-in with Flash was using Flash 8 and Actionscript 2 back in my days at 2nd byte. Whilst there I developed the Flash interfaces for a number of the used vehicle locators that the company builds for UK car manufacturers. Looking back at them now, they’re nothing amazing, but back in the day they were cutting edge.

So, why should I be revisiting Flash? Well, since I last had a play Flash has gone through two major revisions (CS3 and CS4) and ActionScript itself has changed dramatically. Tie this in with the necessity to make todays Flex applications a better experience for the user, there’s an increasing need to create animation and flow that you just can’t really get from Flex alone.

Plus, there’s the fact that I’ve never been a 100% analytical type developer. At college I was training as a product designer, and was even taught to draw properly at one point, but since then I’ve never really gotten the chance to flex any creative muscle so to speak, having largely been stuck on the back end of applications development with ColdFusion and Rails.

So, there you go, that’s my promise to you lot over the next year – that I will take a good long look at Flash CS4 and ActionScript 3 and try and really get them into my head. You never know I might even document some of my new found experiences here for you all to laugh at :)


WPF loses out to AIR

Posted by Neil – May 12, 2009

I thought it was interesting today to see that the New York Times have relaunched their online news reader today, especially because it’s an Adobe AIR application, which means that I can use the application pretty much wherever I’m in from of a PC (or in my case, one of my Macs).

What’s more interesting is that this is a relaunch. From what I understand from a quick google this was previously an application written in WPF (the Windows Presentation Foundation), a platform based in the murky world of .NET, and also one that won’t run on my Mac making it 100% inaccessible to me, and thus rendering it completely useless.

So, WPF lasted 2 and a half years before it got ditched, but it’s not entirely clear as to why. One theory is that the original application was originally sponsored in some way by Microsoft*, as it was unveiled by Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Gates in Seattle on April 28th 2006. It may be that the NYT have since reviewed user feedback (like: let me install it on my frickin Mac!) or they are super impressed by the new Text Layout framework.

To some extent this also echoes the recent switch of the MLB.com from Silverlight to Flash for streamed content. Again, a “collaboration” between Microsoft and MLB, that has now been ditched in favour of the Adobe technology again.

Now, the conspiracy theorists out there might suggest that Microsoft paid for these apps to be built in order to get the technologies out there, but now the media companies are reacting to customer feedback and ditching them in favour of the flash platform for various reasons.

I would genuinely like to know what’s going on here. Is it a case of the media companies are choosing the better technology, or are Adobe quietly paying out to these companies to get Flash out there, in order to kill the opposition? Answers on the back of a postcard please… ;)

Interesting stuff…

* I’ve just found on Wikipedia that this was a “collaboration“

EDIT: It also appears that in the UK Channel 4 have recently done the same thing, previously having used a “Windows-only DRM”, and now having switched to Flash.


The Bentaur Hits London

Posted by Neil – April 23, 2009

On Tuesday night the UKCFUG had the pleasure of Ben Forta, Mr Evangelism at Adobe, coming over to give us all a run-down on the latest news in the ColdFusion world, and what’s up and coming in the long awaited next version of ColdFusion, Centaur (or 9 as it will more likely be known).

After a late-in-the-day, but necessary change of venue we had 140+ ColdFusion developers descending on the Sway Bar in Holborn, London (also the future venue of the London leg of “Scotch-on-the-Road“). From mine and Nik’s memory we reckon this places this single meeting in the top three in terms of attendance (and that’s a history going back around a decade). This goes to show, that while we might not be the most communicative or vocal community, there are a lot of us, and interest in the platform is still high.

Starting off, Ben talked about the features that are still not a well known fact in the current ColdFusion 8. This focused largely on the built in LiveCycle Data Services and the related Flex integration, but a load of people present honestly appeared to not realise this stuff was built into the product.

After a short break, Ben then moved onto the main event, a preview of ColdFusion 9 and the new ColdFusion Eclipse based IDE, Bolt.

Nothing in either of these products,from what I recall, was described as definite but there were a number of notable features that appeared to get people excited. First up was talk about being able to write CFML as CFSCRIPT across the board (CFC’s and all), and then was coverage of the ColdFusion Exposed Services Layer (CFESL) which basically allows third parties to directly call services built into ColdFusion, such as PDF generation or database querying. This single feature provides a whole load of opportunities for developers – for instance, you could have a dedicated PDF generation server called by other servers, or even generate those documents directly from a Flex app without writing any CFML code.

Then Ben went onto talk about the new built-in ORM based on the Hibernate persistence framework. This is a long awaited addition to CF, with the community having had to roll their own versions in the past. Again, details were sketchy, but from what we understand you can create a CFC based off a database table, and a whole load of magic happens in the back end which allows you to query and interact with your database without having to worry about any SQL.

Finally, Ben talked about Bolt. Bolt is the completely new IDE for ColdFusion. Bolt is essentially an Eclipse plugin, allowing elements of CFML code completion and insight. Additionally there were features around code generation and wizards, all of which are aimed at making the CF developers life easier – the underlying ethos of the ColdFusion product.

All in all it was a fantastic night for all, with free drinks and nibbles supplied by Hostway and Adobe (who also provided some raffle prizes for a few lucky attendees.

We’re busy planning the next UKCFUG, so hopefully we’ll see you there!


Adobe.com gets a facelift

Posted by Neil – December 7, 2007

Yup, the new adobe.com went live today, sporting a look mirroring that of the dev center.

Interestingly, ColdFusion is no longer listed on the front page (or the products page) as one of the top products, it’s now buried in the drop-downs.

BBC chooses Flash for video

Posted by Neil – October 16, 2007

I’ve just been sat here encoding some video to flash, and happened across a post by Peter Ent talking about how the BBC had chosen Flash for the basis of it’s iPlayer software (their online catch-up TV service).

So why is this significant? Well, think Silverlight. Microsoft have been pushing Silverlight as hard as they can for Video – so one would think that Silverlight would be ideal for the BBC’s iPlayer content – but No, the BBC have decided to go for flash – which is quite a significant win.

Now we just need them to get rid of all the RealPlayer based news content they pump out.

RIAForge, demos and the non-Coldfusion Community

Posted by Neil – October 8, 2007

This morning I was reading a post from Brian Meloche regarding “Promoting ColdFusion to non-ColdFusion Developers“. I did answer via the comments, but I thought that I would post something a little more susbstantial.

Generally I believe that what is there makes sense, but I’m not overly keen on the aspects mentioned within the “Build demo apps” section of the list. Two main points are things that I feel the need to discuss:

1) “put this on RIAForge”

To start with, I want to make something clear: I think RIAForge is a good thing. It is a call to action for the open-sourcers in the community and provides a centralised place to go for everything that they kick out, be it frameworks, browser tools, pre-baked applications etc. However, I do feel that in the context of the above post something needs to be considered.

Take a look at the categories on RIAForge. Note that every single one is an Adobe product. This means that a user would probably have some sort of vested interest in Adobe products before visiting the site. This achieves two things: It helps Adobe developers find stuff quickly and it segregates the Adobe community from everyone else. Therefore, I fail to see how this would help promote CF to non-CF developers.

Put yourselves in the shoes of “another” developer (be it .NET, PHP, Java whatever). What motivation would you have to go to RIAForge? The end result is that whenever you go to Sourceforge, Freshmeat et al, that you don’t see much in the way of CFML, as it’s all over on RIAForge, nicely grouped together.

So, whats the answer in the context of the original issue? Well, for me it has to be populating the centralised, vendor agnostic sites with CFML. Get CFML onto Sourceforge, Get CFML onto Freshmeat, Get CFML on Hotscripts. It is only by generating activity in CFML on these sites that people will realise CFML is still active and doing well. Hiding it away on a CFML-centric site does exactly the opposite.

2) “promote popular application types (blogging, bulletin boards, etc.) written in CF”

OK, for this I want you sit in your managers seat – the one that pays the bills, and more importantly, buys CFMX or Bluedragon licenses. Now, think like they would think for a second. What are your key interests? For most, there will be only one: the bottom line. How much money can I make the business this year.

So, now think about CFML in the same way – what are the important aspects that you need to consider?…

Productivity and cost.

So, managers want to know how CFML can help them get their jobs done with the minimum outlay in the quickest time. Therefore managers need to be demonstrated this to take any interest in CFML. They need to be made aware that for them to get their end-of-year bonus they need to invest in CFML. OK, so the license costs are an issue, but we’ll leave that one for now. They need to know that decent-ish CFML developer can do what a good Java developer can do in half the time. This is what is important when thinking about the bottom-line.

Now think about this from the non-CF developers view-point as well. You have similar interests. You want to know that you can do the stuff that matters to you in the shortest time possible as easily as possible, thus getting the aforementioned manager off your back.

So, what does this mean with regard to the point on promoting popular application types? Well for me, showing a developer/manager that they can do the easy stuff in CFML in a pointless task – they can already do this with whatever tools they are using, and someone has probably already done it for them. What I beleive we need to show the community is how to do the stuff they do every day (ie the boring corporate stuff) – but show them how much quicker they can do it with Coldfusion.

Make a big point about how easy it is to generate and consume webservices, do AJAX, do database work, use event gateways etc. With this, CFML will seem a lot more attractive to everyone (thus making the license costs harder to swallow).

But what about the stuff that CFML can’t do (yet)? Well, don’t describe CFML as an island. Make it abundantly clear the CFML is Java (or .NET). Make it clear that CFML can be extended and reinforced. Make it clear that CFML is a way of making hard things easy.

So, hopefully I’ve described myself clearly enough. Any thoughts from anyone else?