Leaders in the Flex community recently gathered at Adobe’s San Francisco headquarters this week. I’ve covered my thoughts to the conversations that went on during those two days. The goal was to discuss Flex and it’s future as an Apache project, but other topics included: HTML5, Adobe’s new corporate strategy, and the future for the Flex community.

Apache is the the future for enterprise class Flex. For those highly skeptical and critical of Adobe, my message to you is this: The move to Apache is a big one and categorically different from anything we’ve seen in the past.

Read the whole blog post here.

Over the past week the Flash and Flex community have been on a roller coaster ride with announcements by Adobe regarding the Flash platform.  As a technical director at Roundarch this is a topic I follow very closely since it directly affects the digital solutions we design and develop for our clients.  I’ve shared my thoughts on Flex and the future of developing rich internet applications in a post on my blog.

I am fortunate to be surrounded with technologists, user experience practitioners, visual designers, and strategists at Roundarch who combined represent expertise in almost all things relevant to modern software development. It’s a lucky spot to be in and I’m confident in our proficiency to adapt both reactively and proactively to trends like this in the industry.

I’ve been involved in the Flex community in some capacity now for over 4 years. Over the past week Adobe has made some major announcements concerning Flash and Flex. Some in the Flex community are clearly livid over what has happened in the past week. I’d like to offer a little perspective on how I came to love Flex and my thoughts on the future of developing rich user interfaces.

Read the whole blog post here.

Whether Adobe represents an aging dinosaur in an online world that is quickly passing them by or a force still to be reckoned with in a battle of giants for control of the world of rich Internet application solutions was the central theme of a panel discussion in which I recently participated at the Pacific Crest 13th Annual Global Technology Leadership Forum, in beautiful Vail, Colorado.  The questions asked of the panelists, all of whom represented digital agencies working in the RIA space, were about what you’d expect:  What kinds of projects do you work on?  Is Adobe more or less relevant to your business than they were a year ago?  When not using Adobe’s tools, what else do you use?  Is HTML 5 going to take over the world?  Since the conference attendees were all institutional investors looking to make portfolio decisions across a wide range of technology stocks, what they really wanted to know, of course, was, “Should I buy?  Should I sell?  Just tell me — what should I do?”

The panelists were, probably not surprisingly, mixed in their assessments of ADBE, but the opinions generally fell in line with the type of work that made up the bread and butter of each of the agencies.  Those who specialized in more consumer-facing applications felt that Adobe, although still obviously leading the pack for designers with their Creative Suite, had become far less relevant than they were a year ago in terms of the importance of the Flash platform.  One agency even reported that whereas Flash development represented 25% of their new business in 2010, NONE of their new business in 2011 was being built with Flash; their customers simply preferred to make the trade off of reduced interactivity in exchange for a technology stack (HTML and JavaScript) that can easily be consumed on the iPad and iPhone.

On the other hand, the agencies like Roundarch that focus more on enterprise deployments where a richly interactive experience is key had a different perspective.  Sure, customers are growing in their level of sophistication and better understand that there is a multiplicity of devices to be supported, but these needs are additive to the work on Adobe platforms, not in lieu of it.  More importantly, however, was the recognition of the compelling story that Adobe is now telling with its Customer Experience Management strategy.  For enterprise customers, the ability to tie together a workflow that starts with conceptual and production design and development with the Creative Suite with solid integration into deployment and ongoing content management using CQ5 and ends (or starts again) with usage statistics and analysis with Omniture is terribly attractive.

Let’s face it — if you’re looking at Adobe’s growth opportunity as being centered around their Creative Suite (a mature market with little growth opportunity if there ever was one) or their revenues related to Flash (meager at best), then they just aren’t that interesting from an investment perspective.  But if you look at them with a slightly wider lens — one that is focused on their having finally put together a strong value proposition for the enterprise market backed by an extremely solid product suite — then the outlook for ADBE is a bit more exciting.

Juan Bonfante is a senior developer at Roundarch and a guest author for Tech Cocktail.

Technology Agnostic: Developing In An Adapting World

By: Juan Bonfante

As a web developer I’ve noticed that over the past five to eight years, a trend to develop applications that can run ubiquitous of their environment. With the rising popularity of cloud computing and the emerging mobile markets, enterprise clients have started to move away from the model of building web applications that would only run on one or two particular browsers, in order to create dynamic applications that can run virtually on any device, without degrading their brand or the user experience. And while this idea now permeates all aspects of our daily lives, as a developer this can almost seem like an insurmountable challenge. As a developer how do you keep up with all of the new languages, frameworks, and API’s out there? How do you become technology agnostic?

Read the full post here.

The New York Jets football organization certainly is with its new Command Center touch-screen application. Jets owner Woody Johnson used the business intelligence application for the first time during the Jets’ first regular season football game against the Baltimore Ravens at the New Meadowlands Stadium.

While using the application’s dashboard, called “The Pocket,” Johnson and other permitted individuals can access live, real-time data on tickets, merchandise, concessions and parking.

Made up of two pieces, the Jets developed a .NET application to pull data from data files to be placed into a common source, explained David Simbandumwe, engagement director at Roundarch, a designer of digital experiences that helped with the application’s development.

This particular portion of the application includes an ETL (extract, transform and load) process that accesses data feeds from point-of-sale systems Micros, Retail Pro and TicketMaster, and it summarizes the data into a consistent format, according Roundarch’s technical specs.

Roundarch built a J2EE server-side application, which retrieves the information from the database, and a touch-screen or client-side application to render everything, Simbandumwe added. The touch-screen utilizes Adobe AIR and Gesture Works, a solution for creating multi-touch applications, for touch-screen interactions, and it runs on the Windows 7 operating system.

Read the full article by Katie Serignese at SD Times.

Bringing Style to Flash Camp Chicago

Just last week I had the distinct honor of speaking at Flash Camp Chicago, the annual conference hosted by the Illinois Technology Association. Adobe Flash Camp events are great because they are a single day where the community brings together denizens of the Adobe world such as James Ward, Jeff Tapper, Kevin Schmidt, Michael Labriola, and fledgling member Ben Schmidtke. The opportunity to network with the top contenders in the world of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) makes this style of conference one of my absolute favorites.

Flash Camp Chicago served as the maiden voyage for my talk entitled “Building RIAs with Style,” which I’ll continue to present and refine throughout 2010. I started out the talk by introducing lower level concepts about web graphics for developers, continued by exploring how some popular RIA frameworks handle styling, and wrapped up by comparing two important workflow tools—Adobe Flash Catalyst and Microsoft Expression Blend—to demonstrate how the different platforms operate.

My goal with this talk was to provide rookies with a basis for understanding graphic assets, how to apply styles in RIA development, and the importance of styling as well as provide more advanced tricks of the trade for senior developers.

I always enjoy my trips to Chicago and would like to thank Roundarch for sponsoring my talk and the Flash Camp Chicago organizers for inviting me back to speak this year.

Adam Flater is a Technical Architect and Evangelist at Roundarch and is also the founder of the Merapi Project. For more information on Adam Flater, follow @adamflater on Twitter or visit http://adamflater.net.

Sean Moore posted his list of the “10 Awesome Flex Developers You Should Follow” and two people from Roundarch were included. We have always been very proud of the extremely talented people we have on our team. Both Adam Flater and Jesse Warden have established themselves as leaders in the Flex community and it is really great to have Sean mention their achievements.

On Thursday June 18th, a Chicago RIA community including the Chicago Flex Users Group and the Chicago Adobe Users Group welcomed the Adobe User Group World Tour that came to demo the latest version of Flex 4. Adobe Platform Evangelist Kevin Hoyt presented Flash Catalyst, Adobe’s new interaction design tool geared towards rapid creation of rich internet applications, Flex 4, the latest version of Flex, and Flash Builder, Adobe’s new offering for creating RIAs. Flash Catalyst was presented at Ascend training in the afternoon while Flex 4 and Flash builder were demoed at the Roundarch Chicago office in the evening.

Here’s a video of the Flex 4 Flash Builder presentation at Roundarch.

Last month Chicago had our very own gathering of great minds in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space. Riapalooza, as it’s called, is a yearly one day conference meant to foster the RIA community in the midwest region. This year’s event was held Friday, May 8th at the Illinois Technology Association (200 S Wacker Drive 15th Floor Chicago, IL) and is the second one of its kind. Riapalooza aims to be technology agnostic and as such we had representatives from many players in the space including a contingency of Microsoft evangelists and few Adobe evangelists.

Adobe has been in the RIA space a long time with its Flash runtime being ubiquitous in over 98% of all desktops. Flash Lite, Adobe’s mobile Flash runtime is forecasted to be in over 1 BILLION mobile devices by 2009. Adobe’s AIR runtime, a cross platform runtime that brings RIAs to the desktop, already has over 100 million installs.

Microsoft on the other hand is a relative new player in the RIA space. Although they’ve been on the web with their .NET platform for a while, it wasn’t as rich an experience as some of the stuff people are used to seeing today. Even though Microsoft was a pioneer in the RIA space with their XmlHttpRequest, a cornerstone in rich AJAX enabled websites today, their early RIA offerings were met with limited success. Lately Microsoft has been pushing Silverlight, a cross platform RIA runtime meant to compete head on with Flash.

The event itself had a very good turnout. The conference room was packed with developers in the industry. The sessions covered a variety of topics from real world RIA problems, consuming 3rd party APIs in Flex, case studies, to RIAs controlled by alternative user interfaces. The six sessions were jam packed with material. I really enjoyed Corey Miller’s Building Interactive Applications Using UX Principles. His presentation can be found on his blog.

The “unconference” also had panel discussions during lunch which was great because it really engaged the audience through participation. Larry Clarkin did a great job of moderating and seeding questions and getting the conversation going. Topics included RIAs and the emerging mobile platform, the definition of RIA, what an evangelist is and what do they do, to how the various companies are approaching RIAs as well. It was great to see Adobe and Microsoft representatives butt heads in a friendly rivalry. What was also great was that user experience (UX) with respect to RIAs was probably given as much face time as RIA technologies. There were discussions of emerging computing areas that will be affected by RIAs such as mobile and touch screens.

Riapalooza is a definite must for developers in the industry interested in learning more about RIAs, meeting new people, connecting with experts and thought leaders in the industry, and keeping up with RIA news and technology. And at $20 a pop, $10 for early registration, it’s a no brainer.

A recap of the talk that Adam Flater and I gave on RIAs beyond the Mouse and Keyboard can be found here.

Follow the speakers and Riapalooza orgainizers on Twitter

• Michael Schaffner, Adobe Certified Instructor http://twitter.com/schaffner
• Anthony Handley, Microsoft Expression MVP http://twitter.com/anthony808
• Kevin Hoyt, Adobe Sr Product Specialist http://twitter.com/parkerkrhoyt
• Steve Holstad, Development Consultant @ Clarity Consulting http://twitter.com/steveholstad
• Josh Holmes, Microsoft UX Architect Evangelist http://twitter.com/joshholmes
• Mike Labriola, Adobe Community Expert at Digital Primates http://twitter.com/mlabriola
• Corey Miller, Magenicon & Microsoft MVP http://twitter.com/xamlmammal
• Chad Udell, Designer/Developer http://twitter.com/visualrinse
• Adam Flater, Technical Architect and Evangelist @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/adamflater
• Dave Meeker, Director of Emerging Technologies @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/dmeeker
• Pek Pongpaet, Lead Interactive Developer @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/pekpongpaet

The second Riapalooza will be held on Friday May 8th at the Illinois Technology Association (200 S Wacker 15th flr) from 9AM-5PM. It’s an unconference gathering of RIA (that’s Rich Internet Applications for you not in the know) professionals who are passionate about what they do.

There will be 6 exciting talks as well as ample opportunity to network. Here are the panel titles:

• RIAs Beyond The Mouse & Keyboard
• Top 10 Questions About RIA That You Never Had The Courage To Ask
• RIA Problems You Never Knew Existed
• Building Interactive Applications using UX Principles
• Empowering the Client-Side: Consuming Internet Services in RIA
• Social Media, RIA and Sustainability: A Website Development Case Study

Roundarch’s Adam Flater and Pek Pongpaet will be giving the talk on RIA’s Beyond the Mouse & Keyboard. This talk will be the last talk at the end of the day so we’ll keep it short, fun and sweet so people can get to the beer at 5. Without giving away too much, we’ll talk about how RIAs and computer interaction in general is moving away from the keyboard and mouse interface as can be seen by the success of the iPhone and Nintendo Wii.

Here’s a couple of sneak peek videos of some of the stuff you’ll see at our talk.

Flash + Merapi + Lego Mindstorm =

Flash + Papervision3D + Augmented Reality Toolkit + Twitter =

So be sure to join us as we demo some really cool stuff.