During the week of June 7^th to June 10^th there will be a series of 8 e-seminars targeted at EMEA time zones (yeah!!) and audiences, that will demonstrate how to build a multiscreen application (from start to finish) using all the power of Flash Platform, in combination with the device and technology of your choice. It’s a unique opportunity to learn about the power of the Flash Platform and you could have your questions answered by Adobe’s EU evangelists and experts during the interactive Q&A sessions.

Here is the list of the sessions:

• June 7th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT
  Erase the Designer to Developer gap: Adding interactions to your design with Serge Jespers
• June 7th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT
  Connecting your design to PHP services with Mihai Corlan
• June 8th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT
  Connecting a web application to a J2EE backend using Flash Builder 4 with Michael Chaize
• June 8th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT
  Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project with Mike Jones
• June 9th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT
  Going multi-user with P2P in Flash Player 10.1 with Tom Krcha
• June 9th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT
  Developing multi-user applications with LiveCycle services with Tom Krcha
• June 10th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT
  Bringing web Applications to the desktop with AIR 2.0 with Piotr Walczyszyn
• Jun 10th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT
  Code once and run on multiple mobile devices with Mark Doherty

Even if I would have love to see one session on ColdFusion, you should not miss it so REGISTER NOW!

You have probably already heard the news, it’s a pretty big one.

Flex 4 SDK and Flash Builder 4 are finally released.

Flex 4 SDK introduce several improvements including:

• new set of  components (Spark) and support for FXG (graphics interchange format for the Flash Platform)  to create more expressive interfaces.
• improvement of the states that makes them easier to use.
• integration of the Open Source Media Framework’s video class (via the VideoDisplay component).
• many enhancements to the developer productivity, etc…

Flash Builder 4 (next version of Flex Builder 3) has been also greatly improved.

• new designer/developer workflow: integrate easily with ColdFusion Builder and soon to Flash Catalyst
• enable better data-centric development: support service introspection, connect to Coldfusion, php, Java classes, webservices…
• improve productivity: getter/setter generation, event code generation, better refactoring, etc…
• network monitor and Flex Unit support, etc…

ColdFusion is finally getting a real IDE with ColdFusion Builder.

• eclipse based IDE with code insight and code assist support (CFC introspection, UDF, SQL support…).
• integrated debugger
• remote project support
• extensible with CFML: write your own extension (ie. to support a framework) or download already existing one on RIAforge
• integrate easily with Flash Builder

Now let’s see what is the offering:

Flash Builder 4 Standard Edition
full: € 211.75/upgrade € 83.49
not include profilers, network monitoring, Flex unit testing.

Flash Builder 4 Premium Edition
full: € 603.79/upgrade € 277.09
includes Adobe ColdFusion Builder

ColdFusion Builder
full: € 260.15
also includes Adobe Flash Builder 4 Standard Edition !

And I do not forget that Flash Builder 4 (Standard) and ColdFusion Builder are free for education – https://freeriatools.adobe.com/

On March 9, 2010, Ben Forta was in Belgium (with Serge Jespers and Claude Englebert) for a RIA event in Liège. So Steven and I couldn’t miss the opportunity to ask him some questions about ColdFusion. Here is the interview.

Thanks again to him!

I know that I’m a bit late to relay this information, but Adobe is organizing a Flash Platform event in Liege (Belgium) this Tuesday, March 09, 2010 from 2:30 PM – 5:30 PM: Ben Forta himself will be there with also Serge Jespers and Claude Englebert to talk about ColdFusion 9 and the upcoming Eclipse-based IDE ColdFusion Builder, Flex and Flash Builder 4 and AIR 2.0.  If you’re interested in Rich Internet Applications, it’s an event not to miss!

Tickets are still available, registration here. See you there…

Last Wednesday I did an “Introduction to ColdFusion 9″ at the Adobe User Group Belgium for the Flex 4, Flash Catalyst, ColdFusion 9 pre-release event: Other speakers were Serge Jespers, and Maarten Cox. My talk was targeted mainly to non-ColdFusion developers, so I showed only simple features.I tried also to make the audience realize how simple but powerful ColdFusion is and how it could be a great addition to any existing data center (especially with CFaaS/ESL and new integration capabilities).

Peter Elst managed to record a video of my talk (except the last 5 mins I think) – thanks a lot to him! So here is the video and the slides. Hope people enjoyed it even if I think that I could have done better   Next time for sure… 

I wanted to do a quick post regarding those two conferences I attended: if there is no reviews here it’s just because I put them on InsideRIA. I started to contribute with those reviews but I’m planning to do more.

review: Multi-Mania (2M09) is rocking again!

I forget to mention in my review the Award Show at the end of the day, and Live Music from SX who just won the Road To Fame (video below) – congrats to them!

review: Scotch On The Road is waking up the European ColdFusion community!

It was my first SOTR so I was happy to finally meet IRL Andy Allan and Leanne (I already met Kev McCabe last year at MAX Europe). We had also a great Pre-Scotch at O’Neills listening live to the Bible Code Sundays. Stay tuned for SOTR in Brussels, Munich and Amsterdam around the end of October this year!

Those are definitively 2 conferences not to miss in Europe!

Ben Forta just finished his quick European trip (UK, Belgium and Netherlands) to present “a sneak peak at ColdFusion’s future”. I was lucky enough to see him twice: the first time at the European Commission in a meeting room packed of 80 developers, the second time in Brussels in front of 45 developers.

Both presentations started with a quick demo of BlazeDS data push and LCDS built-in conflict management: even if I’ve already seen this demo several times, it’s always nice to see the reaction of the audience. Will BlazeDS replace LCDS Express in Centaur ? No words on that yet…

Second part focused on Centaur and Bolt: I really loved the introduction tag line

” Advancing rapid application development
and turning developers into heroes. ”

Now let’s see what has been shown.

ColdFusion Exposed Services Layer (ESL)

This is a feature for non ColdFusion developers: you will be able to access, using your own language (PHP, .NET,…) and via SOAP or AMF,  integrated CF services without writing any CFML code! Those services includes Query Service, Mail, Generation and Manipulation of PDF files, Imaging, Charting etc…  Those ESL will be also available for Flex/AIR developers via CF-ESL.

For me It sounds pretty interesting to use the same services across different applications/languages instead of having to buy 3rd party extensions (when available),  no?

Local/Remote Database Synchronization (CF/AIR)

Centaur will be able to handle data synchronisation between an AIR SQLite DB and a ColdFusion datasource. It will make easier the development of Offline AIR apps using a ColdFusion backend. W00t!

CFScript Enhancements

Here you will find Explicit local scope for private function variables, implicit getters/setters (Yeahh!), Import & New keyword.

After seeing that I was wondering why Adobe did not decide to replace CFScript with ActionScript 3.0? If you were at MAX last year, you have probably seen this demo of server side ActionScript in Centaur… why maintaining another scripting language so close to AS 3.0? It would have made things easier…  Anyone agree with that?

ORM (Hibernate)

Centaur implements Object Relational Mapping via Hibernate: ORM provides Database vendor independence, caching, concurrency via a representation of your relational data in an Object Model. I’m not that comfortable talking about ORM so I will make that one a bit short. I can only tell you that Bolt has full support for ORM and generate all the code for you, even if we only saw a simple example

Bolt

Bolt is the new ColdFusion IDE: it’s an Eclipse plugin like Flex Builder, so people doing Flex development will be happy with the full integration. It has Server management, server monitoring, services introspection, code generation, etc… what is interesting also is that you can create extension for Bolt using CFML code! So you will be able to create plugins to do code generation in your favorite framework

I think that’s almost everything that has been covered. I was really happy to see some many enthusiastic ColdFusion developers… haven’t seen that for  a while And remember that those features are only a small part of what will be available in the release version.

A last thing to finish: if you don’t know yet Claude Englebert, the EMEA ColdFusion Product Specialist, don’t hesitate to get in touch with him for anything related to CF (events, User Group, promotion, support…)!

I know Ben Forta loves when people are playing with photoshop

First of all I want to wish you a “Happy New Year”. May 2009 be a year full of love, friendship, laughter and “happy coding”

Yeah I know that it’s a bit late to review MAX Europe, but just after the last day of the conference Peter, Pablo and me heard that Adobe was laying off 600 people so I wasn’t very motivated in blogging anything. Then came the holiday season, the New Year and now we are already the 22th… Time is flying by and I can’t keep up ! Should I mention that we were out of water for an entire week at home ? Then I should also tell you that I finally received my brand new MacBookPro (my first Mac!) W00t! Thanks again  Nokia :-)

Back to MAX Europe 2008: I won’t do a detailed review - really useless – instead I will share some personal thoughts. I must start by saying that It was my first MAX conference and I had mixed feelings about it : lots of information was available on the web after MAX U.S. (It was already the major complain in 2007) and there was some negative talks on twitter (pricing, topics…).

General sessions and Sneak Peeks

Really great, especially the “Men in Black” parody. It’s really a nice way of presenting new products or features – they were doing the show ! It was mainly focused on CS4, so after the CS4 launch event that we had few weeks ago at our User Group, I didn’t learn a lot of new things – luckely there were some other impressive things shown that I really enjoyed.

Sessions

As a AIR/Flex/ColdFusion developer it was really hard for me to choose which session to attend. Some were a bit disappointing – skill level is hard to determinate sometimes – while others were great. It’s the same for all conferences in fact

Labs

Definitively the most disappointing thing for me : it’s not due to the teacher, of course, but why the content is based on the examples shipped with the product ? Normally you already try them at work/home and you expect the labs to go further,  don’t you ?

Networking

The best part in any conference I was happy to see some familiar faces (I really wished some others could have been there) , people that I only knew from twitter, some others that I didn’t knew at all. Also seeing all those enthusiastic evangelists in one place was so cool!

Location, arrangements and events

Everything was perfect and very well organized : rooms were quite comfortable, there was enough food for everyone, everyone was nice., lots of free stuff and goodies. I was a bit surprised to see that half of the attendees left the party very early and that evangelists were hiding…

In conclusion I would say that I really enjoyed MAX Europe 2008 but, as suggested by someone else I think, it would be nice to postpone MAX Europe for 6 months after MAX U.S. – in that way, there will be new things to present, new reasons to attend

my Pictures of MAX Europe 2008.

Even if I’m not attending MAX US, I wanted to share what I’ve heard from my twitter friends and the live coverage done by Serge Jespers and Andrew Shorten (special thanks to them!) and give my first thoughts.
 

The Adobe Flash Platform

Even if it has been already used during presentations for at least 2 years now, the branding is now official : under the name Flash Platform you will find “everything you need to create and deliver the most compelling applications, content, and video to the widest possible audience.”: CS4 suite, Flex framework, Flash player, AIR Runtime, ColdFusion, BlazeDS etc… That’s cool!:

It will be easier for me now to say that I’m a Flash Platform consultant than an AIR-Flex-CF [...] consultant

Thermo is now Flash Catalyst

Flash Catalyst enables designers to start from static compositions created in Adobe Photoshop CS4, Illustrator CS4, or Adobe Fireworks CS4 and convert the artwork into applications and interactive content. The output can be a finished Flash SWF or AIR application ready to be published or project files that you can import into Flex Builder.

I’m curious to get my hands on it – what I will do at MAX Europe. Now on a personal thought it’s easier for me to pronounce Catalyst then Thermo! Vdeos of the introduction session here.

public beta of Cocomo is available on labs

Codename “Cocomo” is a Platform as a Service that allows Flex developers to easily add real-time social capabilities such as collaboration apps, audio/video chat, Real-Time File Sharing into their RIA using a hosted services infrastructure (Acrobat.com).

Really, really interesting stuff. I greatly encourage you to try it and share your thoughts on the official forums (or here if you prefer). There’s no details yet on the pricing (free with limited features and a pro or enterprise version ?) but already interesting questions arose like:

The potential for Cocomo for corporate/enterprise applications is substantial, but many (most) corporations will want to host the infrastructure behind its firewall for performance, availability, and security reasons. Are there plans to provide a mechanism for hosting/license the server-side infrastructure for enterprise applications?

FlaCC is now Alchemy and is available on labs

Codename “Alchemy” is a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5.

It won’t be the project that I will look into in priority, but I understand that it’s opening new doors to Fash Platform developers and I know some people who are really enthusiastic about it.

Wave is available in the pre-release program

Adobe Wave is an Adobe AIR application and Adobe hosted service that work together to enable desktop notifications. It allows consumers to opt-in to receive desktop notifications from their favorite publishers. Each notification carries a call-to-action: clicking directs users to a publisher-specified URL, driving traffic back to their site. Unlike e-mail, Adobe Wave has been architected to be a trusted communications channel and consequently minimizes spam and phishing concerns.

Of course, you can implement this in any of your AIR application, but if you don’t have a need for a n application and just want to give desktop notifications, Wave sounds cool. It seems that there’s a market for that (ie. Stitcho).
 

Tour de Flex

Tour de Flex is a desktop application for exploring Flex capabilities and resources, including the core Flex components, Adobe AIR and data integration, as well as a variety of third-party components, effects, skins, and more. It includes over 200 runnable samples, each with source code, links to documentation, and other details. There’s also an Eclipse plugin available that provides a search interface.

Tour de Flex is a really cool application, a mix of all existing “Flex explorers” with tons of extras. A must-have application on your machine! And the best part is that it could be updated, maybe with your own content because anyone can contribute. Nice work to Greg Wilson, Christophe Coenraets and James Ward.

AIR 1.5 launched

In this release, additional capabilities are available :

• Encrypted local database: the new encryption support offers better support for encrypted larger data files.
• Flash Player 10 capabilities: For example, it’s now possible to take advantage of custom filters, blend modes, and fills with Adobe Pixel Bender. AIR 1.5 also supports the new 3D effects, including perspective, correct transformation, and animation of 2D plans in a 3D space (also known as postcards in space). Rich media enhancements include dynamic streaming to improve the quality of video playback based on bandwidth availability as well as support for the Speex codec for delivering high-quality audio at lower download speeds.
• WebKit update:The version of WebKit included in AIR has been updated to a newer version. The updated version includes Squirrelfish, a new bytecode interpreter that improves the execution speed of JavaScript for common actions. Internal tests show that HTML-based AIR applications run as much as 35% faster for many types of operations.

I think that’s all for the products mentioned except maybe Flex 4/Gumbo. The first keynote focused on the mobile side with Flash Player 10 running on several mobile devices - including Android - and a version for the iPhone that just need a final approval from Apple.

After the huge success of FOTB08 in Brighton, Flash on the Beach is going to be rocking in South Beach!

Got the winter blues? Looking for inspiration? If you live in U.S., you should not miss it! The venue will be The Jackie Gleason Theater : it fits the South Beach vibe perfectly, and is a spectacular green and white Art Deco building only two blocks from the beach and one block from Lincoln Road where you will find plenty of bars and restaurants.

Don’t think that Flash on the Beach is only about Flash, it’s about Flash, Flex, AIR, Photoshop, After Effects, Processing and many more. If you are a designer, developer, coder, student, manager, game developer, artist, animator or a newbie, then this conference is for you! Don’t miss this opportunity to see nearly 50 of the best minds in the industry delivering 3 full days of awe-inspiring sessions. April 6-7-8 2009, you know where to go : FOTBM09