As I begin, it’s ten minutes to 8:00am. We have a half hour until the first keynote of 360Flex Atlanta starts. Attendees are streaming into a line to get their badges and the first schwag of the conference. Adobe provided AIR 1.0 t-shirts for everyone, and they’re pretty damn sweet. Doug McCune and I stole ours from Tom and John’s room at midnight last night. For my fellow attendees, I assure you that there’s more cool stuff on the way.

In case you didn’t hear it from the MXNA zombies, Flex 3.0 and AIR 1.0 have officially gone live on Adobe’s website today, February 25, 2008. Rich Tretola was telling me last night that his first post about the then-codenamed Apollo appeared on his blog in late 2006. Has it been that long? I guess it has. At MAX 2006, Flex 2 posters were hot off the presses and that version of the framework was only about six months old. Mike Chambers was chilling at a little booth in the back corner of the conference passing out red Apollo t-shirts and showing people very early builds of this new and exciting technology on his laptop.

Matt Chotin is up at the podium preparing for the keynote and chatting with Ben Forta. Up past the projector screen, you can see OMNI Hotel’s glass elevator coming down with more attendees. The keynote will be in an open area of the hotel. If I had one of the rooms with balconies on my right, I’d be relaxing up there next to one of the matching plants that each room seems to have. It would be a unique view of the whole scene that I wouldn’t be able to pass up.

I see Deepa sitting in the first row to support Matt. Should I Stay, Or Should I Go? just played for a few seconds on the speakers in front. The seats are filling up, and I’ve overheard a few folks talking around me. Not everyone realizes that AIR 1 and Flex 3 are available right now. Some people are talking about Flash on the iPhone. That subject will never go away until it becomes a reality, I think.

Matt’s laptop is finally on screen after much ado around the projector. He’s getting some websites ready to show us. The hotel’s wireless is getting pounded by geeks like me, and I’m impressed that it’s staying pretty strong. We’re about to begin.

The Keynote Begins

Matt is “wowing [us] with his awesome PowerPoint skills”.

What’s available today? AIR 1.0, Flex 3 SDK, Flex Builder 3 Standard and Pro, Blaze DS, Adobe’s Open Source websites. The Flex SDK is available in two editions. The Adobe Flex SDK is the official release supported by Adobe that includes the Flex framework and compilers. The open source Flex SDK will be considered separate with different licensing and packaging for its intended audience. More on that in a bit.

Flex Builder Professional includes charts, AdvancedDataGrid, and OLAP, along with the profiler and automated testing support. Originally, in Flex 2, this was only supported by QTP, but Matt says that several more testing frameworks (I heard Borland, IBM, and one or two others) are supported now or will be supported in the near future.

Matt says he doesn’t want to focus much on Flex 3 today. It’s been out in beta form for a long time, and we all know the details. He gives us a quick overview of the available tools, pricing, and upgrade options. Next, he mentions the iLog Elixir components with maps, charts, and more. Adobe is the official distributor of the components, and they’re available for $799.

Matt’s going to demo several AIR applications. The first is AOL’s Top 100 videos. It’s a pretty sweet looking app with a big grid of video thumbnails. The poor wireless can’t handle watching one of the videos right now, but thankfully, I can keep blogging. Ted Patrick showed it to folks at Yahoo! a month or so ago, and it’s pretty simple and cool. Now, Matt is showing a NASDAQ app with cool charts. I only caught a quick look at it. The Parleys.com application has cool transitions between views similar to Adobe Media Player. It displays video presentations and interviews from user conferences. There’s a slide view similar to Adobe Connect, and there are some awesome controls for switching between video, slides, and navigating through a recorded talk.

Now we’re looking at the Google Analytics Reporting Suite application. Google is helping the developer build the app. They were impressed with the guy’s ability to scrape the Google Analytics site and build a powerful application based on that data. I’ve heard people say that they prefer this app to the actual Google Analytics site. That’s very cool. The Allurent Desktop Connection is an e-commerce app. It has some cool features like being able to pick a color and seeing all the products in the catalog that are available in that color. You can either use a simple color picker or grab a color straight from an image. The Digimix application is a cool sequencer built on AIR. Reminds me of my old days playing with Sonic Foundry ACID and other audio apps.

Adobe Rocks the Backend

Ben Forta isn’t going to talk about ColdFusion. We’re going to look at LCDS, BlazeDS, and Flex-supported backend technologies. He’s talking about how Flash Player natively supports things like regular web services, but he’s focusing on Flash remoting for a moment. Before, using Flash remoting was pretty hard in many situations. It was easy in CF because it was supported out of the box. Now, with BlazeDS available as an open source project, Flash remoting will be far easier for developers that use other backend technologies.

What’s the difference between LCDS and BlazeDS? Both have Flash Remoting and Messaging. LCDS also has data management features like data synchronization and conflict resolution that Ben explained was a pretty useful way to ensure that multiple database transactions don’t conflict.

We’re about to see a preview version of LCDS that will go into public beta next month on Adobe Labs. LiveCycle is a J2EE app that supports many platforms. Many components for LCDS are available pre-built. I see email components, encryption components, LDAP, PDF, database queries, but there’s a huge tree of available categories. There’s an interesting visual builder for these components, and we’re taking a look at LiveCycle Workspace, the default Flex app for users to view LiveCycle data. Full source code is available for this app, and developers can build their own views of the same data.

What’s Open Source and What’s Next?

The Flex SDK source code, including compilers and the debugger, are available under the MPL. The bug database is open, of course. Daily builds of Flex can be downloaded, and the roadmap is available for the world to view. The open source SDK is available as a download with only the MPL code, if desired. This version can be used with a separate add-ons package that contains everything from the SDK that doesn’t fall under the MPL (like the debugger Flash Player). Lots of flexibilty here for the open source purists. BlazeDS reference implementations are available for Java and CF, and Adobe is working with the community to provide other implementation for technologies like PHP, ASP.NET, etc.

How will the community integration work for Flex 3? To start, Adobe engineers will be handling most of the work, but Adobe plans to let the community start to patch the framework through bug reports, and eventually, some non-Adobe folks will get commit rights to the code repository.

According to Matt, Flex 4 was recently codenamed “Gumbo”. What do they want to do in this version? Improve collaboration between designer and developer through Thermo. Accelerated development from concept to reality quickly. Improving workflow. “Horizontal platform improvements” that benefit everyone (faster compiler, for example). Finally, they want to broaden the scope of Flex to expand the range of apps that can be built with it.

We get a quick look at Flash Player 10, codenamed Astro. New AS3 text components built on a new text engine (named Vellum). Hydra, a custom pixel shader language. Simple 3D effects. They won’t replace Papervision, but they will certainly help make Papervision better. Mainly, we’re hearing the same stuff that Adobe announced at MAX. However, this is the first announcement I’ve seen publicly about the implementation of a new Vector type in ActionScript. We’ll have typed Arrays. Matt says you know you’re at a developer conference when that’s the feature that got applause over the others. You may remember the Vector class from my overview of ECMAScript 4 a couple months ago.

The keynote ends with a hilarious video put together by Matt and the Flex team. Lot’s of self-deprecating humor and friendly jabs at fellow Flex teammates. Matt shows that he’s everyone’s friend with pictures of him sporting a thumbs up and a cheesy smile with frightened Adobeans. Doug McCune’s infamous Panel border bug gets featured too. Head over to Matt’s blog to view the Flex: Behind the Scenes video.

That ends the 360Flex day one keynote. If you’ll excuse me, I need to eat something and think about taking a nap. The Adobe party is tonight, and I want to be well-rested. Plus, I have my session Building Components That Use Item Renderers at 8:30am tomorrow. Seriously, with the timezone shift added onto my complete lack of sleep, that’s just plain mean. I’ll get my revenge, Tom Ortega. You just wait.