Adobe MAX 2007 conference: An effective sales pitch for AIR

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, October 2, 2007 @ 12:07 pm

I'm halfway through the three-day Adobe MAX conference, and so far it's a mixed bag. Most of the sessions I chose were from the "Website Application Development" and "Rich Internet Application" tracks. I expected some in-depth technical nitty-gritty, but I got it only during the hands-on sessions. Many of the presentations feel like commercials for Adobe products, while some of the technical sessions have been pretty entry-level.

That said, as an Ajax developer who last played around with Flash around 1998, I'm intrigued by all the buzz Adobe has generated for its RIA tools, especially Adobe AIR (whose Beta 2 release was announced just in time for the conference). I came to this conference hoping to get over the hurdle of my own prejudices and gain a solid understanding of how to use Adobe products pragmatically in my development. I haven't gotten there yet, but I am at least enjoying the chance to see how the other half lives.

Thus far, my highlights include the following:

• Introduction to the Spry Framework for Ajax: Although this one was pitched to Flash/Flex developers who have little interest in nuts-and-bolts JavaScript, it was still interesting to get a peek at Adobe's entry in the Ajax-framework race. As with AIR, Adobe timed the latest release (version 1.6) to coincide with the conference. Spry seems to offer a little bit of everything: some widgets, some effects and your basic cross-browser XHR plumbing. There's nothing here that other frameworks don't already do; the big news for their new release is a me-too, jQuery-esque Element Selector object. But the 1.6 version also pushes the framework's support for standards and progressive enhancement, which is nice. Overall, Spry seems like a decent product for folks who want a basic toolkit that integrates well with Adobe's other offerings.
• Flex on Rails: RoR folks all seem to have an almost preternatural ability to sum up the framework's advantages in a clear, engaging style. The difference with this session was its focus on using Rails to build RESTful web services that can be accessed by a Flash/Flex front end. Rails usually gets props for its tightly integrated model, view and controller, so it was interesting to see how easy you can swap out the "V" in MVC. The more typical "welcome to Rails" stuff was old news to me, but it elicited lots of "oohs" and "aahs" from the rest of the audience. Gotta love the whole "database-powered website in 5 minutes" shtick.
• Hands-On: Deploying Flex and HTML/JavaScript Applications to Adobe AIR: The is one of two sessions that made heavy use of the rapidly evolving Aptana IDE, an open-source, Eclipse-based development environment for Ajax. The presenter bemoaned the fact that conference organizers directed him to focus on Ajax instead of Flex/Flash, but that's what drew me to this hands-on tutorial. Adobe is clearly trying to woo developers from the hardcore HTML/CSS/DOM/JS world - developers like me - to give the AIR runtime a shot. I have to admit, it's pretty awesome to write JavaScript code that has access, through a protected sandbox, to OS features like the file system and drag-and-drop. Doing so within Aptana was easy and intuitive. Our little "hello, world" app didn't do anything that cool, but the technologies behind it have me excited to finally install the AIR SDK that I downloaded several months ago.

Technorati Tags

• Adobe AIR
• Adobe Flex
• Rub on Rails

agile ajax

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1. 

   [...] I haven’t tried to hide my ambivalence about Adobe’s move into the RIA market. That’s why I feel duty-bound to share my positive experience with a newish AIR application: Tumblweed, a desktop client for the Tumblr micro-blogging service. [...]

   Pingback by Pathfinder Development » Mash Note: Tumblweed: Tumblr blogging client written in Adobe AIR, Wednesday, June 4, 2008 @ 2:26 pm

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