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Archive for November, 2007
Adobe AIR Rebranded…Again
Nov 15th
Well, Adobe's AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) must be getting ready for primetime, for today a brand-spanking new logo was unveiled.
For those who don't know, AIR is a cross-platform runtime that allows developers to create web and desktop applications which leverage languages like ActionScript 3, HTML, Javascript, etc.
AIR has had a mildly interesting development. About a year ago, it was pushed in beta as "Apollo" featuring a rocketship-themed logo. Next, it was suddenly switched over to "AIR" with the standard "new" Adobe branding. Today, however, marks the third rebranding in a year–hopefully the last one.
While I'm not wild about the new logo (I like the Apollo one alot better), I think it indicates a more concerted effort on Adobe's part to make AIR a serious tool for developers to consider.
Sadly, I have only developed a single AIR application. I utilized the Flex architecture, but what I developed could have just as easily been completed in standard HTML and Javascript. Hopefully, in the year to come, I will have an opportunity to play around with it a bit more.
Share this:Quickly Falling in Love with Flex
Nov 6th
The last several weeks, readers will note that the majority of my posts have been devoted to AJAX, particluarly Adobe's Spry Framework. My main infatuation is that AJAX allows for clunky page-reload based web activity to be replaced with instant, on-the-fly interaction, not only with constituent portions of the website, but more importantly, with server-side processes (especially databases).
All this time, I have flirted around with Adobe's Flex 2, an incredibly rich platform for developing ActionScript 3.0 applications. While I have played around with it from time to time (basically, when I get a new computre–the trial period is only 30 days), I have not really gotten into significant development…until now.
One of the issues with Flex is that, like javascript, it has not native way to interact with a database. For this, one needs an application server of some kind, or to create myriad XML files to store data. Now I've always known that Flex could integrate nicely with ColdFusion, allowing the developer to access independant ColdFusion components to leverage processing logic and database interaction. However, I did not know how ridiculously simple it was.
So one might wonder what the big deal is. So Flex can easily connect to More >
