The Bentaur hits London
by Neil Middleton 12:19 am Thursday, 23 April 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!
Why player penetration isn’t as important as you might think
by Neil Middleton 12:05 pm Wednesday, 12 November 2008.
Something we come across a lot when we’re talking about Rich Internet Applications is the questions regarding player penetration, i.e how many people have player X installed (Adobe’s Flash vs. Microsoft’s Silverlight), as it’s generally seen as the primary measure for how easy to “see” an application will be.
However, something we’re also seeing is that the players are currently suited to different areas, Flash being very good for the public sites (video being No 1) and Silverlight being very good for Intranet based applications where Microsoft technology is used as the back end.
So, with player penetration it’s worth considering the following: Is the player penetration at all important when you are looking at an intranet application with a closed user audience? Do you need to worry about the percentage of the internet that has your runtime installed if you can go round and install it on all your users machines for them anyway?
Not really.
This raises another interesting thing, which is that of internal approval. We are now finding that for those environments where neither Flash (in a new enough version) or Silverlight are present, companies are generally more willing to take on Silverlight due to the vendor – it’s a product that comes from a company they already have a relationship with, and also one that can be pushed out via Windows Update and the like. It’s a sys-admins dream come true.
So, at the end of the day it seems that Flash vs Silverlight is definitely a case of best tool for the job. If you are building a public facing site of some kind, use the Flash platform. However, if you’re in a closed environment and MS are already in place – go with Silverlight / WPF. These choices will just make your life easier.
PS: Incidentally, we still come across lots of businesses who haven’t broken free of IE6, a seven year old browser yet (!) due to some internal policy – this goes to show how hard it can sometimes be bringing in a third party plugin to help with RIA’s.
Comments (0)10 reasons why Flex is wicked cool
by Neil Middleton 10:43 pm Wednesday, 1 October 2008.
Every couple of months, for some reason unbenownst to me I find myself getting incredibly motivated and enthusiastic about one particular technology that I use every day of the week. Sometimes this might be ColdFusion, sometimes it might be AIR, sometimes it might be something else entirely that I’ve been researching, but at the moment it’s 100% Adobe’s Flex.
Now, this might sounds very much like a sales orientated blog post but it’s not, it’s a genuine 10 reasons why Flex is what I would call “wicked cool”.
So, on with the 10.
1. Flash Platform
OK, quick lesson for the uninitiated here. Flex is Flash. Well, what I mean here, is that Flex is purely a way of developing and generating a SWF file that runs in the Flash Player in the same way that Flash CS4 is an IDE for developing Flash movies. So what does this mean for a regular developer? Well, this means essentially that anything that can be done with Flash as a runtime can be used from with Flex as well. For instance, all of the new developments in Flash player 10 are now available to Flex applications as long as the end user has the runtime installed.
2. Open Source
The Flex SDK as it stands is an open source product. What this means is that, for the large part, Flex is not going to dissapear anywhere after being binned by some company that doesn’t care, but it also means that Adobe cannot do anything really revolutionary with it without the communities input. Being open source can only be a good thing.
3. Flex Builder
If any of you have ever used the older Flash IDE’s or come from a background largely in the ColdFusion market, you’ll love Flex Builder, most specifically the debugger. It gives you full intellisense, refactoring and profiling capabilities as well as a full step through debugger. Best of all, it’s Eclipse based, which means if you’re a common visitor to the likes of CFEclipse, Aptana, PyDev etc you’re already in the right place for Flex.
4. Community
As communities go, the Flex one is a greatly diverse bunch of very friendly people. Not everyone comes from a Flash background, or even a client-side development background but everyone shares a passion and enthusiasm for Flex. Additionally the back-ends available for use as back-ends to a Flex application means that if you’re a platform x developer using Flex, you can pretty much guarantee you’re not alone. There’s plenty of user groups and conferences out there surrounding the Flex community, so if you’re not involved, get out there and get something going – you can only benefit from it.
5. Options
This point largely refers to the itegration opportunities available to the common Flex developer. Supporting XML, REST, AMF and more, you can pretty much integrate with any backend you want. Using Rails? No problem, RubyAMF is out there, or plain old REST. Python? PyAMF etc, Java? BlazeDS or Livecycle.
6. ColdFusion
This point ties in largely with the last. By far and away the best option for a Flex backend is ColdFusion, the long since apparently dead platform. ColdFusion gives you the ability to crack out some very simple code, deploy into a super scalable Java environment, and simply connect to Flex using AMF. There’s no integration work involved, CF understands AMF natively. Additional to this, Flex “gets” ColdFusion too. There’s no need to create any sort of complex services-config file in your Flex project, just say “ColdFusion” and you’re up and running.
Additional to this, the Adobe team have hinted at a couple of conferences to a much deeper integration between the two products. I can’t say too much due to NDA’s but expect it to get a whole load more interesting with a future release.
7. Runtime penetration
Some runtimes out there suffer from one significant problem. Pre-installation of the runtime. If you’re a Silverlight developer, Curl developer etc you have to have a serious thinka bout how many of your end users will have the runtime installed ready to receive your application in their browser. Silverlight is currently knocking around the 10% mark, Curl is way behind that. Flash? Well, lets put it this way, there is not a single piece of software on the planet that has as many installations as Flash. Nothing. At the time of writing, 97.7% of machines are capable of running Flex applications. Currently it’s taking Adobe about six months to get a new version of Flash to around 80% of the internet – which is damn fast.
Worried about your users not being able to run Flex? Don’t be.
8. AMF
The Action Message Format. One of the main reasons why Flex is so cool. AMF is a binary transport format native to Flash which allows the flash platform developer to transport complex actionscript types across the internet in an incredibly efficient way. James Ward, Adobe evangelist, has been running a census on various transport methods for a while now so it’s well worth checking that out to see how good AMF is when stacked up against some of the common alternatives such as JSON or XML. For full details on AMF, check out the wikipedia page.
9. Adobe AIR
Unless you’ve had your head buried underground for the last year or so, you’ll be familiar with AIR, previously known as Apollo. From a Flex point of view, the presence of AIR means you, a mere web developer tooled up with the ways of Flex, can deploy your apps to the desktop. This is especially cool when you consider the capabilities of Flex versus the other AIR tool of choice, good old HTML and Javascript. For more information on AIR, visit the product page.
10. Creative Suite
A lot of people forget this – Adobe have been at the forefront of creative design tools for several years now leading the way with Photoshop. Whilst this isn’t a huge thing in itself for a web developer it does have a lot of effect of Flex, namely the fact that several of the Creative Suite tools integrate with Flex and Flash in loads of different ways. If you’ve not seen CS4 yet, you should, it’s brilliant.
So there you go, a quick brain dump of why I think Flex is wicked cool. I’m not saying that it’s the only thing you need to know to be successful with RIA, but it’s certainly going to get you most of the way there.
Now, can anyone else think of any more than the 10 I have here?
Comments (6)Niklas and Neil at Flex Camp London
by Niklas Richardson 3:27 pm Wednesday, 13 August 2008.
Last week we mentioned that a Flex Camp London has been organised for the 28th of August up in town. What we didn’t say at the time was that both Niklas Richardson and Neil Middleton will be speaking at the conference.
Nik will be speaking on the topic of “Flex and ColdFusion” at 4.20pm, and Neil will be presenting “Who you need on your Flex team”. At 3.45pm we will also be showing off on of our flex apps in one of the three “Show and tell” sessions.
So, if you’d like to find out more about Flex, or come and meet up with us for a chat, come down to the Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL on the 28th and say hello.
For more detailed information, please visit the Flex Camp London website.
Comments (0)Are Flash and Silverlight the same thing?
by Neil Middleton 11:12 pm Monday, 11 August 2008.
We’ve been having a discussion in Monochrome towers over the last few days about the whole Silverlight vs Flash vs Flex etc etc etc argument, and some interesting things have turned up that I thought we should repeat here.
Both Microsoft and Adobe now have some very similar looking technologies with Silverlight and Flash, namely the ability to script code, and render applications all within a box in the browser, whilst doing various background tasks such as hitting out to web services and remote APIs. Similar sounding although they may initially seem, they do differ at a slightly lower point in the stack. Behind the box in the browser, lies two frameworks – the .NET framework for Silverlight, and the Flash Player API for Flash/Flex.
OK, so these aren’t dramatically different either – so where does the differences lie? The entire internet seems to think that Microsoft is out to get Flash with Silverlight and take over the world of the rich internet application – but we at Monochrome now think a bit differently.
For starters, lets look at the bloodlines of both formats. First up, Flash has always been flash (or Future Splash as it used to be), it’s been a tool for drawing vector graphics into a stage. Certain other things have also been added over time: video, web services, AMF, XML support etc etc. Finally, the flex framework has come trotted along to enable developers to build their applications using Flash in a more rapid way.
Silverlight on the other hand used to go by a different name, WPF/E. So, WTF is WPF/E? WPF/E is essentially Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere, or another way of saying WPF (the technology now used to build applications on Windows Vista), but not necessarily on the desktop. Therefore, in a nutshell, this means that it has come from a very different background to that of Flash. Silverlight’s heritage, in a round-a-bout way comes from the ancestry of WinForms, i.e application development. It is not coming from the stable of design.
So, what does this mean? At the end of the day, not much, but it does mean something when you look more into the future. For a start, Microsoft have no intention of taking on Flash – after all, it not easy taking on the most installed piece of software on the planet. It’s a well known fact that Microsoft intend to see everything they provide ultimately in the cloud, coming down to your screen via WPF or Silverlight into the browser, which is exactly what they are setting themselves up to do. Therefore hey are developing Silverlight to be the best web based application development platform it can be, not necessarily a “flash killer”.
Therefore I think it’s fair to say that going forward, Flash and Silverlight will co-exist as two very different beasts. Silverlight will specialise in delivery applications to the web, backing up the vast library of applications available out there already from .NET developers. Flash on the other hand will continue as normal, specialising in browser based animation and video as it does now, with a smattering of applications via the Flex framework.
It will certainly be interesting to see where things take us over the next couple of years.
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