As you may have heard, Adobe has decided to rebrand Flex Builder as Flash Builder to go along with the Flash Platform initiative. I actually think this is a really good idea. Flash Player has always been the platform and the vehicle that has allowed developers to deliver amazing experiences for years. Flex is a great framework that I personally use on 90% of my projects, but I don’t think the IDE (Flash Builder) should be limited to a single framework.

The only problem I have with the name change is that it doesn’t go far enough. When I say Flash, what is the first thing you think of? If you’re a Flash developer, you probably think of Flash Professional. This is an authoring tool that has been around for years and until Flex Builder it was our only “Adobe” tool for creating SWFs. It’s NOT a programming tool. Therefore most Flash programmers welcomed Adobe’s attempt at a real programmers IDE with Flex Builder. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than any alternative. (Yes I’ve tried FDT, but I can’t live without the debugger.)

So my problem with the new Flash branding is the name of Flash Professional. This tool is based on a timeline and is geared toward designers. I personally think this should be renamed to Flash Designer. This would help reduce confusion for new developers to the Flash Platform and put clarity into the entire Flash product line.

I gave a presentation at MN.swf Camp on Peer-to-Peer communication in Flash Player 10. That presentation is now up on my presentations page. The Library that I created to simplfy the P2P commcunication is also posted on my labs page.

I also created two sample applications. The first is a Video Chat application that runs in the browser and the second is an Collaborative Shopping application that runs in AIR. The shopping application was created by Jason Grey, I just added the collaborative functionality.

To anyone that has heard me talk about Silverlight vs Flash you know I think the true issue is with the plugin adoption rates. Here is the first attempt I’ve seen that compares Flash Player and Silverlight plugin adoption. I find it interesting that Microsoft doesn’t publish its plugin adoption like Adobe does. But I guess if my plugin was at 16% and the competition was over 95%, then I might not publish it either.

http://www.riastats.com/

I haven’t done anything with ColdFusion in a long time, but I may need to reconsider it as a middle ware between my Flash/Flex/AIR client applications and the database. Adobe released the ColdFusion 9 beta (Centaur) at MAX and one of the features that caught my eye was the object-relationship mapping. This will make it really easy to go from Flex-to-ColdFusion-to-Database using a consistent object model.

Adobe announced the Cocomo beta at MAx last week. This is a service hosted by acrobat.com that allows developers to add real-time social capabilities to their applications. Cocomo also has Flex components that should make building these social applications really easy. You can sign up for the beta on labs.

Once I get some free time I plan on playing around with these new services and components. It looks very exciting. :)

Yes, we’re going to do it again! MN.swf Camp was such a huge success in 2008 that we’ve decided to make it an annual event. It will be held at the Library again this year on Monday, April 6, 2009.

We’re currently looking for people interested in speaking. If this is you, please go to the MN.swf Camp web site and fill out our speaker form. You don’t need to submit your session topics yet. We’ll be holding an orientation meeting for all interested speakers. After that meeting you will have a couple weeks to submit your final topic ideas and selections will be made.

Probably one of the biggest things to happen to Flash….maybe ever. Last year at MAX Adobe gave us a sneak peak at a research project that took C++ code and compiled it into ActionScript. The demo they showed at the sneak peak at MAX 2007 of Quake running inside Flash Player. This got a lot of buzz. Well now they have released the toolkit (Alchemy) to the community. So you can go and start converting your favorite C/C++ libraries to ActionScript.

I’d personally like to see some XSLT and XML Schema libraries ported. And I’m sure there will be a lot of ports of physics and 3D libraries too.

You probably didn’t notice that Flash Player 10 (and AIR 1.5) shipped with a new protocol for p2p (peer-to-peer) communication. The RTMFP (Real-Time Media Flow Protocol) is a new protocol that supports direct connections between two endpoints.

What is the benefit of p2p communication? This will lower the barrier to entry for people to create real-time applications in Flash Player and AIR. No more bandwidth and server management expenses. The RTMFP protocol will also be a higher quality connection since it is over UDP and not TCP like the RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol) used by Flash Media Server. RTMFP will re-establish a connection if there is a brief outage and maintain a session even if the client’s IP address changes.

This new protocol could be used for a number of applications like: text chat, VoIP conversations, video chat or multi-player games/applications.

Adobe announced Stratus the week. The is a hosted rendezvous service that allows two endpoints to establish a p2p connection. Once the connection is established the service is no longer used to send the data between endpoints. Stratus is currently in beta, but is not yet available for developers to start playing with it.

You can see a few of the RTFMP details in the ActionScript 3 Language Reference (see NetConnection).

When I first started looking at AIR and SQLite I thought to myself, “someone should write an object relational mapping framework to map objects to and from SQLite.” Well someone did. FlexORM handles mapping of relational objects to and from SQLite and eliminates all the messy code for doing this manually. I can’t wait to use this on my next AIR project. Thanks to Nate Chrysler for pointing this out to me.

Ecma just recently announced that the long standing EcmaScript 4 proposal is dead in favor of focusing on the EcmaScript 3.1 proposal. According to the announcment, they will eventually work on EcmaScript 4 again, but under a revised plan. ES4 as we know it in ActionScript 3 appears to be dead. Specifically concepts like namespaces and packages will be dropped entirely.

So what does this mean for ActionScript 4? Will Adobe actually remove features to keep it compliant with Ecma?

Ecma has been split for a long time on the direction of EcmaScript. there are two camps, Microsoft has been pushing the EcmaScript 3.1 arguing that EcmaScript 4 is too much for the web (whatever that means). The other camp is lead by Mozilla and Adobe pushing for the evolution of EcmaScript with the ES4 proposal. I agree with the idea of EcmaScript Harmony. Ecma should be unified. But its unfortunate that the “standard” is now behind the ActionScript implementation.