Adobe just anounced its plans to open-source the remoting and messaging code found in Live-cycle Data Services.  The new project is called BlazeDS and is deployed as a J2EE application.  This is really huge.  There are many non-adobe or open-source projects to handle AMF remoting including classics like OpenAMF, but most don’t support AMF3 yet or are still in beta stages.

Along with this open-source project, Adobe also released its AMF3 specification.  This should allow the community to develop AMF3 solutions for other languages and platforms.  This is really great news for everyone and helps to move the AMF3 specification closer to mainstream.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/blazeds/

Flash Player now supports H.264 (mpeg4)!  Flash video just got a major kick in the pants. You can actually load .mp4, .m4v, .m4a, .mov and .3gp files using the same ActionScript API that you currently use to load FLV files.  All existing code should now work with these new files formats.  If your video player is run off dunamic data you should be able to just start dropping in quicktime and mpeg-4 files.  Crazy!

A new version of FMS is coming out soon with streaming support for these file formats.

Check out this post by Tinic for a very detailed explination of what the update includes.  I guess it was planned for Flash Player 10, but they got it in this newer version because customers really wanted it.

http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html

Less than a year after Flex 2 was released Adobe hits us with the Flex 3 beta.  Flex 3 has a number of improvements including framework caching and profiling.  Framework caching will allow us to deploy SWFs that don’t include the Flex 3 framework code.  This code can instead be cached by Flash player.  Profiling is something that Flash Player that needed for years.  This allows us to see what our application is doing under the covers and help us debug performance and memory problems.

Adobe has also announced a Beta update to Flash Player 9.  Tinic Uro has a nice post on the details of this upgrade.

Adobe announced recently that their product codenamed Apollo will be officially called Adobe Integrated Runtime.  This finally explains the file extension air.  AIR is a new runtime that allows you to build cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies like Flash/Flex/ActionScript and HTML/JavaScript.

Wow, Microsoft Surface looks really cool.  If its afordable (that’s a big if) I could see a future where this is a staple in many homes.  My wife and I always have a laptop in our living and surface would be great for collaboration.  It’ll be exciting to see where this goes.  My guess is that the price will be high and therefore you’ll only see it in commercial environments.

I’m once again speaking at FlashBelt this year.  I’ll be speaking on the topic of E4X, the new technology for working with XML in ActionScript 3.  I gave a talk on XML at FlashBelt a few years ago and talked a bit about the future of XML in ActionScript including E4X.  Well, that future is finally here.

Patterson Consulting is also a development sponsor of FlashBelt this year.  Its a great conference and I’m glad to be able to participate.  See ya there!

I just switched my blog over to wordpress.  I had a custom ColdFusion blog before and there wasn’t an easy way to transfer over all the comments, so I’m wiping the slate clean.

Apollo is the new cross-platform runtime from Adobe that allows developers to create desktop applications using Flash Player, HTML/JavaScript, and PDF technologies.

This release on Adobe Labs marks the first public pre-release for the Apollo product. Its an alpha release that means it is not full-featured. But the core Flash capabilities and some native OS integration is available.

Developers used to working with Flex in FlexBuilder can install the Apollo extensions for Flex Builder. This allows you to quickly create a Apollo project. This makes it very easy to build and compile an Apollo application.

I’ve just been asked to speak at the DX3 conference in Boston this spring.  I’ll be giving a session about Flex working with various data sources.  Flex can work as a front-end to many different server-side technologies and in this session we’ll examine a few of them and talk about how Flex can communicate with those systems.

I’ll be giving two sessions at the 360 Flex conference coming up on March 5th. The first will be an intro to E4X and how you can use it to make working with XML inside ActionScript much easier and more powerful. The second will be an overview of using Design Patterns within ActionScript 3 and Flex 2.

If you’re unfamiliar with Design Patterns, ActionScript 3 or using Design Patterns in ActionScript 3 this session would be great for you. You should also check out the book Joey Lott and I recently published titled Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns.