Category Archives: web authoring

adobe, salesforce.com, software development, web authoring

Salesforce.com partners with Adobe for Flash Builder for Force.com

Adobe and Salesforce.com have announced Flash Builder for Force.com, a special version of Flash Builder that lets you create Flex applications that interact with Force.com web services. The preview will be available for download today from developerforce.

I asked Dave Gruber from Adobe and Eric Stahl from salesforce.com what is really new here, since force.com has always exposed a SOAP web service API, and Flash Builder has the ability to import WSDL service descriptions in order to call them. In addition, a Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex has been available for some time.

Gruber explained that there is now a “custom interface to the Force API” that reduces the amount of code you have to write to wrap these services. In addition – and this may be more significant – some parts of LiveCycle Data Services have been integrated into the Force.com platform, including the data synchronisation piece. The illustration above shows an AIR application with a Sync tab, and this is the kind of online/offline application that should now be easier to build.

“We have a lot of customers asking us for that desktop connected, disconnected scenario. We want to give people a great set of tools for building those kind of apps,” says Stahl.

According to Gruber, Flex developers who want to take advantage of the new framework will have to purchase Flash Builder for Force.com even if they already have Adobe Flash Builder. “It’s a unique offering, this is not going to be built into the standard Flash Builder product”, he told me.

Salesforce.com has toolkits for many client platforms, but offering a custom IDE for Flex demonstrates a significant partnership. “Adobe is clearly the leader in rich internet applications, it’s a synergistic relationship,” says Stahl.

.net, adobe, microsoft, software development, web authoring, windows

Blast from the past: how Adobe praised XAML at PDC 2003

I’ve been trawling back through material from Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference in 2003 for a piece that will be posted shortly. I believe that the vision that was presented at PDC 2003, and how it fell apart, sheds a lot of light on why Windows is as it is today.

In doing so I came across this snippet about Adobe’s participation in the PDC keynote. It’s still online in Microsoft’s PDC press release:

Adobe Systems, a leading developer of software for consumers, creative professionals and enterprises, demonstrated the possibilities for ISVs created by integrating the new "Avalon" presentation technology and declarative programming techniques for Windows. Using these technologies, a prototype version of Adobe After Effects showed how developers could unify documents, cutting-edge graphics and media. For example, developers would now be able to build animated charts and graphs that are linked to back-end data sources to produce a smart solution that displays stock prices, sales and other information within a high-end professionally designed format.

"Many developers have not taken the visual design of their applications seriously enough, with the most innovative work restricted to creative professional software and games," said Greg Gilley, vice president of Graphics Applications Development at Adobe. "Longhorns new Avalon technology brings the designer and developer closer, so they can truly collaborate on creating software applications that are as beautiful as they are functional."

The odd thing is, this quote could come from the Adobe MAX 2009 conference from which I have just returned. “Animated charts and graphs … linked to back-end data sources” is what we saw in applications build with Mosaic, Adobe’s new framework for LiveCycle ES2 clients.

The difference: Adobe is doing all this with Flex and MXML, not XAML, and the client platform is the Flash runtime, not Avalon running on Windows.

Gilley of course was speaking before Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia (and Flash and MXML) in 2005. Furthermore, nobody at PDC in 2003 could have guessed how long it would take Microsoft to deliver XAML.

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.net, silverlight, software development, visual studio, web authoring

Silverlight data, image upload example code

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Some time ago I created a simple example of CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) in Silverlight with ASP.NET – you can view it online here. I originally posted it in April; see this post for details. Several people asked me for the code and I’ve not done so until now – mainly because of the hassle involved in making a Visual Studio solution portable as a demo. The Silverlight app was originally written in Visual Basic and I’ve now ported it to C# for convenience. The version on this site runs on Mono, but the demo code is for Visual Studio 2008 on Windows – there really is no difference apart from the database code.

One issue I had with the demo was providing a database. I wanted something easier than just providing the SQL to create a database, ideally a solution that would just open and run immediately. I tried using SQL Server Compact Edition but Microsoft has actually hard-coded something that stops you using this for an ASP.NET application and I got an exception accordingly. I’ve therefore used Access. I wouldn’t consider this for a real web app, but it is convenient for a demo.

The code is somewhat retro – no entity framework, no WCF, no LINQ – except an expression to filter the datagrid – and old-style ASP.NET Forms Authentication. It would be good to convert it to use RIA Services, which I may do if I can find the time. This may mean the code is no use to you at the moment.

Although it is a simple app and not production-ready, I found it interesting to do. Silverlight code is easy to write, but interacting with remote web services for all the content is more challenging. There are flaws – for example, I’ve not handled what happens when multiple users edit the data simultaneously.

There are a few little hacks too. For example, I have an edit form where you can upload an image. I want to have the image display as soon as it is uploaded, but found that if I try to display it in the WebClient’s OpenWriteCompleted event handler it fails; somehow the file is not quite ready to be served. I use a timer to insert a small delay.

Another issue was faking synchronous web service calls.

Anyway, I’ve now uploaded the code and you can find it here. If there is enough interest I’ll put it in a repository to make it easier to add bug-fixes and so on.

adobe, flash, web authoring

The Sneak Peeks at Adobe MAX 09

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I was looking for a list of the Sneak Peeks shown at last week’s Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles. I couldn’t find one quickly, so here is mine. Note that these are billed as experimental features that may never ship.

Thin client gaming: this is a kind of application virtualisation. We saw a 3D game that was rendered on the server, and streamed as video to a variety of clients. The clients send keystrokes back to the server enabling the users to control the game. Processing graphics on the server could enable effects that would otherwise require a more powerful graphics processor than would typically be available on a small device, as well as reducing the local install footprint to near zero.

Physics engine in Flash: Very interesting demo showing how you might apply physics effects to objects in the Flash designer. Instead of tracing an animation path, you set parameters that say in effect “behave as if dropped” or “behave as if thrown”. Great for games; if you wanted to code a pinball machine (as shown in the demo), for example, this would save a lot of mathematics.

Smart Paste: a cool demo showing how you might be able to paste content from vector graphics designers (like Adobe Illustrator) into an HTML web page, using the HTML 5 Canvas element and preserving scalability. The intermediate format is FXG, an XML format for Flash Platform graphics interchange. We were shown how the vector graphics could be bound to data from Excel to create a chart. The best bit was when we saw a Flash animation exported to JavaScript and HTML using this technique. Flash export to HTML from Adobe?

Flex mobile framework: Ely Greenfield showed a demo of Slider, a version of the Flex SDK optimised for mobile devices. Despite this being a Sneak Peek, there’s little doubt that this will ship.

Project ROME: an AIR application (20,000 lines of code) for graphic design, with a context-sensitive designer, text flow between containers, the ability to import Photoshop art, video embedding, and output including SWF, PDF, JPG, SVG. ROME also runs in the browser as a web application. This is interesting if you envisage a time when applications now part of Creative Suite could be implemented as web apps. See this on YouTube.

Developer cloud: Develop client and server parts of an application in an integrated manner and with the same programming language, with smooth debugging between the two. Demo of server-side ActionScript. Microsoft platform developers already enjoy something like this with C# or VB.NET in combined Silverlight and ASP.NET projects in Visual Studio 2008.

Fireworks hierarchical undo: This demo didn’t actually work, but it is a great idea. The problem with Undo is that it is linear. Therefore, if you do some bad work, and then some good work, you have to undo the good to undo the bad (if you see what I mean). This feature would let you undo selectively instead.

Pause and resume development: Also known as Edit and Continue, this lets you make changes to Flex code while paused during a debug session. Another one Microsoft developers already enjoy.

Photoshop intelligent hole-filling: this one got loud whoops of applause. The idea is that you take an image which includes an unwanted object – like a pretty view spoilt by an electricity pylon – select the object and ask for it to disappear, intelligently replaced by parts of the rest of the image. The demo worked fairly well; the image below shows how a group of water buffalo were disappeared from a photo. Now you will trust digital images even less.

That’s it; if I’ve missed something, let me know!

adobe, flash, iphone, web authoring

Adobe hoping to marginalise Flash-free iPhone

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We got a few more clues about Adobe’s iPhone problem at a press conference today with Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch. There is no doubt about the importance Adobe attaches to the device. “Flash needs to get there in order to stay relevant on the web”, says Lynch, though there was some ambiguity about whether he meant the iPhone specifically, or the mobile web in general.

Yesterday’s announcement of Applications for iPhone, a feature of the forthcoming Creative Suite 5, solves a problem for developers wanting to port Flash applications to iPhone apps for Apple’s App Store, but does nothing for Flash content in web pages. Here’s the page you get if you follow a “Get Flash” link using an iPhone:

Note Adobe’s slightly more aggressive wording in the latest version of this page: “Until Apple eliminates these restrictions, Adobe cannot provide Flash Player for the iPhone.”

So what if Apple continues to refuse Flash – something which some users would actually welcome? Lynch made reference to the number of hot new Smartphones now appearing, including Palm Pre, Android phones, Windows Mobile 6.5 phones, and Nokia’s latest devices. He then referenced the early history of the PC, when Apple was first to market with a mouse-driven GUI but lost out to Windows in the mass market, and suggested that history might repeat itself, as these new devices incorporate many of the features for which the iPhone is popular.

The implication is that if Apple continues to be Flash-free it might lose market share to others; and that this might happen anyway thanks to the iPhone’s premium price and closed platform.

This may be wishful thinking. Closed or not, Apple has built up impressive third-party support for the iPhone and it will be hard to tempt existing users away.

Still, in the absence of any other possible strategy, it’s a reasonable one to try. We will not know the impact of having the full Flash player on Smartphones for a while yet, but if it successful, more of Apple’s customers will ask for Flash to be supported.

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adobe, flash, internet, open source, web authoring

Three reasons why Adobe Flash is hated

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In the Adobe-shaped bubble of MAX 2009 in Los Angeles, Flash is the answer to everything, almost. That impression was reinforced yesterday when Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch spoke of his ambition to make AIR, the Flash-based out of browser runtime, into a universal runtime for SmartPhones, as I reported yesterday on The Register.

Many users and developers have a different perspective, and you can easily find examples in the comments on the piece linked above. I was also struck by the loud and spontaneous cheer accorded Opera’s Bruce Lawson when he presented HTML 5 as an alternative to Flash and Silverlight at the Future of Web Applications conference last week.

So why is Flash hated? Three main reasons come to mind.

The first is because most of the Flash content that we see is marketing and advertising. Most users prefer web sites that are ad-free, or at least where the advertising is low-key. On the marketing side, there are still plenty of occasions where you want to skip the intro. When I link to Adobe’s home page for MAX 2009, I always link to the Sessions page, not the home page which auto-plays a Flash movie with sound – because I think users would rather get straight to the content, rather than be startled or embarrassed by an unexpected broadcast. Fellow journalist Jon Honeyball tweeted recently:

using a blocker to rid myself of unwanted flash nonsense on web pages. And most of it is unwanted and unnecessary rubbish

A more nuanced angle on this same problem is that Flash developers are inclined to add a little bling to their applications, even if it is not marketing as such. Users who like applications that are sparse and lean react against this.

The second reason is that Flash can be detrimental to browser performance. There are two angles on this. One is that bugs or performance characteristics in the Flash Player, combined with perhaps badly written Flash content, can cause slowdowns or at worst lock-ups in the browser. The other is that much Flash content downloads a lot of data, to create its multimedia effects. This makes Flash pages larger and therefore slower. It is a consideration that matters particularly on mobile devices with slow or intermittent connections, which is why not everyone welcomes the prospect of full Flash on every SmartPhone.

Third, there are those who do not regard Flash as part of the open web, and want to see web content that can be rendered completely without the use of a proprietary runtime, and web standards controlled by a cross-industry group rather than by a single vendor. There could be political, ethical or pragmatic reasons behind this view; but it is one that is still strongly felt, as shown by the reaction to Lawson’s comments at FOWA.

Before you tell me, I realise that there are also plenty of reasons to like Flash; and I am not going to attempt to iterate them here. My argument is that even those who love Flash need to recognise that users with negative perceptions may have good reasons for them. From this perspective, Apple’s resistance to Flash on the iPhone is a force for good, since it compels web developers to continue offering non-Flash content.

It also follows that anything Adobe can do to mitigate these problems will strengthen its campaign to get Flash everywhere. I am thinking of things like improved performance and reduced memory footprint in the player, and better handling of errant applications; demonstrating lean and mean Flash usage in its own sites and examples; and continuing to open the Flash runtime and its future to cross-industry input, even at the expense of relinquishing some control.

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adobe, flash, google, internet, web authoring

Web video ascendant as Flash goes mobile

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It is one of those days when separate announcements reinforce a single message.

On the technical side, we’ve had Adobe’s announcement, here at MAX in Los Angeles, of Flash Player 10.1 which will bring hardware accelerated HD video to a number of smartphones, including Windows Mobile, Palm Web OS, Google Android and Symbian. Blackberry maker RIM is also on board. Spot the missing Smartphone – though who knows, there could be an Apple-shaped announcement too at any time.

Users on the other hand do not care what software is delivering their video, they just want it to work. England’s numerous football fans will care even more about that now, since the forthcoming World Cup qualifying match with Ukraine will apparently be shown only on the Web, on a pay-per-view basis. Actually it is not quite web-only; you can also to out to watch it in the cinema, harking back to the days when few had TVs at home:

Fans will be asked to pay between £4.99 and £11.99, depending on when they sign up, to watch the match on their computer and it will also be screened in selected Odeon cinemas.

I’m particularly interested in the developer angle. Web video is programmable, and where Flash goes, so too goes the ActionScript runtime. One angle is social media, which the BBC talked to me about at the end of last year in the context of iPlayer. It will be fun to see this and other innovations as the possibilities opened up by web broadcasting sink home.

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adobe, software development, Uncategorized, web authoring

Book review: Web 2.0 Architectures

This is an excellent read, though it was not what I expected from the title. It is written by three people who are always forthright, sharp and insightful, and who live on the Web: James Governor, Dion Hinchcliffe and Duane Nickull. Nickull works for Adobe, and the book labelled as part of the Adobe Developer Library, but don’t let that put you off if you are a Java guy, or a PHP developer, or a Microsoft Platform person: this is about concepts and patterns, not specific products.

So why was it not what I expected? Well, I thought it might focus on the challenge of developing highly distributed applications, looking at what it takes to make such applications reliable, performant and scalable. I know even from my own dabblings that decisions about where to locate different pieces of logic and handling things such as authentication, transactions and security are tough problems with which many of us need help. However, this title rarely descends to that level of detail – though it is a little unpredictable in that respect. The authors do find space, for example, for several pages on common mistakes in designing web forms, reflecting I imagine their level of frustration at how often they encounter them. Inconsistent, yes; but forgivable.

What you do find is detailed and often brilliant attention to the definition of terms. What is architecture? What is a model? What is a pattern? What is a Mashup? What is a Rich Internet Application? What is Service Oriented Architecture? What is a Reference Architecture? And of course, What is Web 2.0? These discussions are pithy, illustrated with real-world examples, and convey the authors’ enthusiasm for the new era which is now upon us.

As you read the early chapters you feel that this is all leading up to something big. That’s correct, but again it might not be what you expect. In fact, this feels like an introduction to a much longer book that is yet to be written, a fault which can only be excused by the idea that it is you, not they, that have the task of writing it.

Here’s a short extract from a section called The Timeless Way of Building Software: Inspiration for the next generation of Web Software:

Take a look at some of the great web software, such as Google’s search page, Flickr, or Delicious. They all have that unique yet unhurried grace that comes from perfect ease and natural balance. But what do they have in common exactly? They are beautiful, ordered and harmonious. But especially, and what strikes to the heart, is that they live. They are the perfect blend of logic and emotion, of the machine and the human experience, intrinsically intertwined and symbiotically embracing each other.

If you find this excessively rhapsodic you will probably not like this book. Note the title though: this is a Web 2.0 book as well as an architecture book; and a couple of pages on from the above quote we learn the significance of that:

…this timeless way of software architecture represents a more complete reconceptualization of what we thought we knew. We can give this place, where common sense and logic collide with humanity and society, a name.

We call that place Web 2.0.

And that is pretty much how it ends.

Overall it’s a great read, written I suspect in haste, accounting for the odd sloppy phrase or two, but always fluent and enjoyable. Recommended for those who are thoughtful about what it means to do software today.

View on Amazon.com: Web 2.0 Architectures: What entrepreneurs and information architects need to know

View on Amazon.co.uk: Web 2.0 Architectures: What entrepreneurs and information architects need to know

.net, adobe, cloud computing, facebook, flash, javascript, microsoft, open source, ruby, software development, twitter, visual studio, web authoring

Future of Web Apps cheers the independent Web

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The Future of Web Applications conference in London is always a thought-provoking event, thanks to its diversity, independence and character. That said, it is a frustrating creature at times. The frustration on day 1 was the barely functional wi-fi, which ruined a promising interactive application called HelloApp, built with ASP.NET MVC. HelloApp would have told us who we were sitting next to, what their interests were, their twitter ID and so on. Microsoft must be disappointed since the developers, some of them more used to technologies like PHP and Ruby, said how impressed they were with the framework and Visual Studio. The poor connectivity was a shame, and a bad slip-up for a web application conference. Even the speakers had to work mostly offline – cloud devotees beware.

Ryan Carson at the Future of Web Apps London, 2009

FOWA has been at London Excel recently, but this event was back to its earlier venue of Kensington Town Hall, more crowded but a better atmosphere and easier to get to. I suspect a little downsizing, but much prefer it. Organizer Ryan Carson has his heart set on enabling start-ups, proffering business advice and uniting developers, designers and money folk, though many attendees are not in the start-up category at all. When revealing the results of a survey showing that many web app hopefuls had less then 1000 site visitors a month he shook his head despairingly “you’re never gonna build a business on that kind of traffic”.

Carson has excellent contacts and the day kicked off with Digg’s Kevin Rose on how to get those visitor numbers up – he should know if anyone does. Rose exceeded my expectations with tips on massaging your visitor egos, avoiding analysis paralysis, hanging round event parties to meet influencers even when you can’t afford to attend the event, and even how to hack the press.

After that the day was disappointingly low-key, at least until midday. Then we got Francisco Tolmasky from 280 North and it all changed. Tolmasky’s line is that we should use pure web technology but with the richness of desktop applications, and to enable this he’s put forward cappuccino, a JavaScript framework inspired by Apple’s Objective C and Cocoa – Cappuccino uses Objective-J. This now has a visual development tool (web-based of course) called Atlas, and in Tolmasky’s demo it looked superb. See here for more details.

The surprising twist is that after developers told Tolmasky that they (or their companies) were not willing to trust code to the web, 280 North came up with a desktop version of Atlas with the added ability to create desktop applications as well. I am not clear about all the runtime details, though it no doubt involves webkit, but Tolmasky’s differentiator versus alternatives like Java or Adobe AIR is that Atlas uses only web APIs.

We heard a lot at FOWA about social media, how to use it for marketing, and how to integrate it into applications. Cat Lee from Facebook gave us a breathless presentation on how simple it is to hook into Facebook Connect. It was OK but it was a sales pitch, and that never goes down well at FOWA. 

The later afternoon sessions were excellent. Bruce Lawson of Opera gave us an entertaining overview of how HTML 5 would make life easier for developers. There was nothing new here, but nevertheless a revealing moment. He showed some rich media working in HTML 5 and made the comment, jabbing at Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, that the web was too important to place control in the hands of any one vendor. A loud and spontaneous cheer went up.

This was echoed later when Aza Raskin of Mozilla gave us a browser-centric view of social media, suggesting that the browser could broker our “social graph” by integrating with multiple identity providers. Raskin’s line: social media is too important to be in the hands of any one vendor.

The Guardian’s Chris Thorpe gave a bold presentation about how the Guardian wants to embed itself in the web through its open platform. Like most print media, the Guardian has many challenges around its future business model (disclaimer: I write for the Guardian from time to time); but Thorpe’s presentation shows that his newspaper is coming up with an intelligent response, promoting interaction and building out into the wider web rather than erecting paywalls. Having said that, maybe the Guardian will try other business models too; it is a journey into the unknown.

Overall a day for social media and the open web, and a good antidote to the more vendor-centric conferences at which I often find myself. Next week, for example, it is the Flash-centric Adobe MAX; and having heard very little about Flash at FOWA that will make an interesting contrast.

.net, adobe, flash, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Flash spell check developer upset by competition from Adobe Squiggly

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Grant Skinner is the developer of Spelling Plus Library, a spell checking engine for Flex, Flash and AIR. He is displeased that Adobe has now released Squiggly on Adobe Labs – a free component that does the same kind of thing. Skinner refers to the general lack of commercial Flash components:

One of the things that the Flash world really lacks is a strong commercial component marketplace. We have a thriving OSS culture, which is awesome, but while it is very prolific it rarely creates highly reliable, documented, and well-supported libraries. It’s a weakness of the platform, especially when you look at the hundreds or thousands of enterprise class commercial components available for languages like Java or C#.

It is an interesting point. I have always found it intriguing that the commercial component market is so much dominated by Microsoft, thanks perhaps to its early success with VBX and then ActiveX controls for Visual Basic. Despite the maturity of Flash and its popularity among developers, I can more easily name companies with commercial Silverlight components than Flash equivalents – companies like Devexpress, Infragistics, ComponentOne, and Telerik.

Skinner is therefore upset that Adobe has picked a spell checker for its free offering:

When Adobe spends a large amount of resources building a spelling component that directly competes with one of the few successful commercial components in the Flash world, it frustrates me.

though I imagine the impact on his sales is a large factor in his reaction.

The truth is that component vendors always have to play this game of trying to stay ahead of what developers can get for free, either from open source or from what is bundled into the core SDK.

Note that Intel’s just-announced AppDeveloper program for Atom netbooks includes a component marketplace for AIR. I am not sure how significant it will be, but it is another outlet for Flash component vendors.