Today, we are really excited to be able to announce a big personal change. Ben and I are joining forces, full time, for the first time. What are we doing? We are joining Mozilla to create a new group with the charter to create developer tools for the Open Web.
Mozilla is placing a big bet, not only on us, but in the developer tools space.
Why are we doing this? Ben and I are passionate about a couple of things: compelling software and developers. In various roles in the past, we have built tools that attempt to make developers productive. We are huge advocates for the Open Web, yet we feel that tools are lacking on our collective platform. We want to help make a difference.
As we ramp up this new group, we will be looking at the problem and seeing where it makes sense to step in. We are going to be experimenting, and thinking about how to make developers lives better in different ways, so we aren’t expecting to see traditional tools come out of this group. Also, we don’t want to do this alone. We want to involve the entire community which is one reason that we are so excited to kick off this work at Mozilla. We believe that we have a unique opportunity to put developers first. We can build these tools in the open, with total transparency; the Mozilla way.
We respect the work being done by other vendors, and very much want to work together. We can’t wait to reach out early-on in the process, involving companies that believe in the Open Web like we do. Together we can drastically improve productivity, allowing developers to build compelling user experiences.
We are just getting started. As soon as we come up with some ideas, we will be sharing then with you and asking for community participation in various forms. You, the Ajaxian community, have been phenomenal over the years, and we can’t wait to do more together.
Continuing their march into the RIA space, Adobe announced today the official release of AIR v1.0 and Flex 3.0.
Adobe has taken the beta off of the wrapper as their have released both AIR 1.0 and Flex 3.0.
As Ajax developers, Adobe is trying hard to get us developing applications, not just Flash folks. They have a place for us to start with AIR:
The new Adobe AIR runtime enables Ajax developers to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) that deploy on the desktop. AIR applications run across operating systems on the WebKit HTML engine and are easily delivered using a single installer file. With Adobe AIR, Ajax developers can use their existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications that combine the power of local resources and data with the reach of the web.
The AIR runtime and SDK has gone through an especially long beta cycle (since June 2007) to ensure that both security and compatibility with existing frameworks was achieved. Some key new and/or updated features include:
Enhanced Desktop Fucntionality: Drag and drop to the operating system, copy and paste between applications, launching of AIR applications from the desktop or the browser, and run in the background with notifications.
Data Access: Adobe AIR now provides both synchronous and asynchronous access to the local file system, as well as structured data within a local database. This database is implemented using the open source SQLite database.
JS Library Support: Most major Ajax frameworks can be used to build AIR applications. Supported frameworks include jQuery, Ext JS, Dojo, and Spry. Adobe AIR integrates JavaScript and ActionScript to allow cross-scripting between the two languages, and integrated rendering of Flash and HTML content.
Security: Applications built on Adobe AIR can only be installed through a trustworthy install process that verifies that the application is signed via industry standard certificates, providing users with information about the source and capabilities of the application.
Adobe’s Flash-based RIA development platform, Flex, continues to mature and has been picking up steam in both the corporate space as well as sites such as blist and Scrapblog who have embraced Flex whole-heartedly. Some of the new features in Flex 3.0 include:
Intelligent coding, interactive step-through debugging, and visual design of user interface layout
New capabilities for creating RIAs and building applications on Adobe AIR
Integrates with Adobe Creative Suite® 3 making it easy for designers and developers to work together more efficiently.
New testing tools, including memory and performance profilers and integrated support for automated functional testing, speed up development and lead to higher performing RIAs.
One of the most compelling parts of the Flex announcement is the fact that Adobe has released the Flex SDK under the open source Mozilla Public License.
Adobe Open Source Site Launch
Finally, Adobe announced the launch of their new Adobe Open Source site which aims to “presents the definitive view into open source activities at Adobe, including details regarding projects that Adobe participates in and hosts.”
The new…website is designed to keep you up to date on Adobe open source activities, within Adobe as well as with the larger world. It will also be the point of entry to our source code contributions, including Flex, BlazeDS and others. We’ll post news items, tell you where to see us, and keep you in touch with some of our favorite bloggers.
Currently, the site houses the Flex SDK, BlazeDS and Tamarin projects, all of which have been open-sourced by Adobe.
Aptana has coordinated the release of their AIR plugin that includes support for Jaxer which allows you to write AIR apps that run on the desktop that include server-side code, written in JS, that can run on your backend server.
Hitting a “1.0″ release is a big deal (as is a 1.0.1 ;), so congratulations to the entire Air team. Adobe is working hard to raise the bar in the RIA space by giving developers more tools with great functionality. 2008 is panning out to be an interesting year in web development.
Ben and I are at Adobe Engage today, and hope to find out more about Adobes plans in the coming year. We are live twittering using the #engage hash tag.
To end with something a little fun, and since it was the Oscars tonight:
NOTE: Rey and I both wrote a post on this big release. This post is a conjoining of both posts into one
My guess is that you have notice an uptake of news this week. That is for a couple of reasons:
It is the end of the summer, and people are probably working again. As such, we have seen a huge increase in submissions and interesting news out there
Rey Bango has joined the ranks as an Ajaxian. He has been adding a lot to the Ajax community for quite some time, so it is fantastic to have him contributing directly to Ajaxian through his own insightful posts.
Welcome Rey. Here is his bio:
Rey Bango
Rey Bango is Vice President of Business Development for Ext JS and member of the jQuery JavaScript library’s Core Project Team. With over 18 years of experience, Rey brings a unique perspective to RIA development having built true desktop applications for 8 years prior to moving into web programming and being keenly aware of the challenges involved in building desktop-like web applications.
He has developed a wealth of knowledge stemming from his work with such technologies as client/server, OOP, PowerBuilder, Sybase, ASP, ColdFusion, DHTML, & Ajax. His blog can be found at reybango.com.
On a side note, the rotating snippets at the top of the site are getting a little stale aren’t they. Since you as a community are all more witty than the few of us, I thought that you may have some ideas for new bylines. Take a shot in the comments!
If you haven’t already submitted your presentation idea for The Ajax Experience in San Francisco July 25-27, too late! The call for papers officially closed last week. We received over double the submissions we received in the last call and are hard at work reviewing them. Thanks to all of you who submitted a paper. We’re stoked at how universally interesting this year’s batch are; it’s going to be a great show.
We’re also pleased to announce that the Ajax Experience conference registration site is now live. Check it out at www.ajaxexperience.com and sign up today. With the call for papers in the review stage, obviously there’s going to be a ton of content at the show not yet represented on the site, but you get the idea.
You may also notice that ajaxexperience.com now redirects to ajaxexperience.techtarget.com. Earlier this year, we joined forces with TechTarget to co-produce the Ajax Experience conferences and to bring more resources to running Ajaxian.com. Ajaxian has been getting less and less of our time through the years as our lives have gotten busier and we felt like it was time to get some help as we move into the future. This means you can expect to see more content from us and more features on the site (e.g., resources for people who are new to Ajax and don’t find a stream of news stories as helpful as more remedial content, a section devoted to the frameworks, a *regular* podcast, and so forth).
Thanks to TechTarget for agreeing to help out and we hope to deliver great content to you for years to come.
