Oct 24, 2006 -
Adobe Max 2006::Day 1 - Followup Notes
Posted by
Tariq Ahmed
on 10/24/06 10:44PM
for Technology & Business
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Getting Started With Apollo
- ROOM WAS PACKED. Standing/Sitting room only if you were more than 2 mins late.
- Clearly there's huge interest in Apollo
- Hosted by Mike Chambers
- The goal is to completely abstract the OS by providing a ubuiquitos platform in which to create and deploy applications and regain the TRUE rich capabilities that native desktop applications enjoy...
- WHILE... at the same time using your existing skills. HTML, Javascript, Flex, Actionscript, Flash, etc...
- Total Flash + HTML integration. No iFrame tricks needed.
- How's this to blow you away: Apollo's script bridging abilities can potentially allow you to instantiate ActionScript objects in Javascript. So in JS you could potentially create Draw AS objects to draw stuff...
- Other benefits including application short cuts, drag and drop from OS onto app, cross app communications (e.g if app is minimized send a signal to the OS to blink the minimized icon, or if another app needs access to a resource that your app is holding it can notify you, or vice versa...skys the limit), access to the clipboard, notifications, etc... (Rob Brooks-Bilson... this doesn't sound appealing?!?!)
- Develop an App once...deploy everywhere. A similar sounding theme as I reflect upon how Java started off. I remember when Java was coming out people were tinkering with it, and it was fine on the back end... but what's funny is that even over a decade later, Java still blows for making universal clients. Flex + Apollo DOMINATE out of the gate.
- Mike introduced the concept of 'Chrome'. Chrome let's you control if your app is to use the OS's look and feel, or your own look and feel. And Mike demo'd how super easy it is to implement your own Chrome. The keynote in the morning demo'd run-time changeable Chrome where a video blog feed can transmit it's Chrome (to the end user it's basically like a skin) to the Apollo reader for a branded experience.
- Timeline:
- Currently at Milestone 2, which is about getting many of the basics working
- Working on Milestone 3
- Beta on Labs early 2007
- Final mid-late 2007
- Will there be an integrated DB? Common question, probably not for the initial release, but perhaps in subsequent releases. My vibe is they'll probably try to do built in capability to access local ODBC datasources.
- Update Automation of your Apollo Apps: You can code your app to check for updates and download the latest automatically. On the Sys-Admin side, sys-admins will be able to create push packages to automatically deploy updates.
- Will there be native platform support? Not for 1.0. Again, the idea is cross platform ubiquity. Though, it's not out of the question later down the line (e.g USB, Firewire, Audio Card, Joysticks, etc...).
- Native support for Java and .NET? Looking into it (aka not at the moment).
- Apollo runtime will be free.
- Theorhetically possible to do AS2<->AS3 communications
- Target Platforms for initial Apollo 1.0: Windows, MAC, Linux
- Runtime Size: Target of 5-9 megs
- On Windows it uses the low level Win32 APIs, not the .NET framework
- Webkit engine used for HTML rendering
- This is cool: the HTML is rendered as a bitmap, and flows through the flash pipline, that's why you don't need to do iFrame tricks like you have to do now in Flex. BUT GET THIS: Because it's bitmap you can do image manipulation...like blur effects, etc...Some interesting possiblities there.
Flex Under the Hood: A tour through the Flex Architecture
- Presented by Ely Greenfield
- Standing Room Only Again
- Extremely advanced session. Went step by step but very rapidly of how to make a custom component that works at the low level to provide the ability to create a kind of image catalog interface that is similar to how the iPod does it.
- Display Object, high level, light weight, no skinning, etc... Represent shapes, sprits, and bitmaps. Extending from this is a good if possible.
- UIComponent is the workhorse of Flex. It's where Flex moves beyond Flash, where the UIComponent adds layout capabilities, styling, etc... A good middle option for best of both worlds.
- The Container is the tank, it adds higher level functionality, such as scrolling, clipping, etc... Very heavy weight. You would not want to instantiate hundreds of these.
- The Flash Graphics API
- Based on a 'retain mode' system. Where once you draw it, Flash will maintain it for you until you tell it to go away. VS Windows, if something overlays it, it's your responsibilty to determine what needs to be redrawn later on.
- Although convenient for the developer, need to be careful with the high amt of overhead this can create. E.g if you have 1000 objects, and there's a change, but not visible...you could potentially do a lot of work for no reason.
- VS Flex: It's allll goooooood. LayoutManager handles dealing with that stuff for you.
- Flash and Flex have different concepts of size.
- Flash: What you see is what you get. If the movieClip is 50x50... 50x50 it is.
- vs Flex: (Ely showed a long paragraph of the logic for comical purposes). Flex factors in many things. How big does the object want to be. How big does the user want it to be. How big does the parent of the child want it to be. How big does the developer want it to be. What's interacting with it. Size Metrics: Measured, Explicit, Percentage, Actual.
Increasing Efficiency and Quality with Flex Automation
- Presented by Alistair McLeod
- Very Very Very Very Very super high level basic intro to QA Automation.
- Reality: Bug free software is impossible to achieve (or rediculously expensive if you try to do so)
- Manual Testing helps...but takes time, effort, and money. A limited resource.
- Therefore, maximize what time you have by automating as much of it as possible.
- Automating Build Testing
- Tools monitor source control systems (perform, sourcesafe, etc...)
- Retrievs the latest s/w and builds of the systems
- Verifies if the build is successful
- Ant is one such tool that automates builds, and can be used to conduct build tests.
- Cruise Control
- Some kind of framework forthe automation of tasks
- Open Source tool
- Unit Testing
- Improve the quality of code, reduce dev time, enable agile dev practices
- FlexUnit testing Framework for Flex. Baed on Junit 3.2.
- Test Driven Development
- Write the test BEFORE the code
- Tests then act as a regression act
- Found bugs indicate a test is missing
- Functional Testing
- Test at the app level for user gestures, business logic, etc...
- Quick Test Pro from Mercury Interactive supports flex.
- I actually did an indepth of analysis of this tool awhile ago. It'd ok, you can do things like query a database to find relevant content to test, etc... But it's severely limited in it's scripting abilities and has very poor abilities to group sets of test together and run them as an aggrgate. See review here: http://www.dopejam.com/shownewsitem.cfm?NewsID=215
Using Coldfusion with Flex Data Services
- Presented by Tom Jordahl
- Not too many notes as the content was very code/config centric or diagram centric
- But basically... CFers: Do not fear FDS. It's not as scary as you think it is.
- One interesting note was how everyting on the CF side is really easy, but on the Flex side it's more complex. Kudos to the CF engineering team for always going out of their way to just make doing stuff in CF easy.
- Tom demo'd a CF Client that pushes info (a chat app) to Flex clients.
- Really boils down to registering your CFCs as EventGateways in the CF Admin. And adding a few lines to the FDS config file. FDS takes care of all the rest.
- Not only with just messaging, but also data services (for data pagination, data sync, etc...).
Tags: adobemax06, apollo, coldfusion
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>> This is cool: the HTML is rendered as a bitmap
Will the user be able to select text that way...?
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