The View from the Peanut Gallery

If you haven’t yet voted for your preferred Flex/AS3 framework, please do! 500+ developers weighing in will give us a decent sample from the community. We’re getting there! Thanks folks.

Vote here

Hi folks,

We’re looking to prioritize our work on sample applications for Gravity. We’d like to include examples that highlight a layered architecture with some of the more popular frameworks out there in the community. Please pick your top two below!

There’s a good chance additional sub-projects will pop-up under the Gravity umbrella in the future leading towards a top to bottom solution for Flex development. With that said though we feel it’s best to keep the bits open and interchangeable so folks can take what they need. Especially the OSGi-inspired runtime. We’ve followed the spec as close as we could given the constraints of AS3 and the Flash player.

p.s. We’re currently in the “queue” for our Adobe Labs release of Gravity. Adobe is a big company and there are i’s to dot and t’s to cross. Thanks for your patience!

You can catch the official news release or head over to John B. Harris’ blog post for more info and screenshots. From John’s post:

“Announced today, LiveCycle® Workspace ES2 Mobile, for the iPhone®, BlackBerry® smartphones and Windows® Mobile smartphones, helps organizations save time and money with faster electronic approvals.

When approval tasks only show up in email, they tend to become a needle in a haystack depending on the amount and quality of email received.  The LiveCycle mobile application provides a dedicated task list “inbox” on the device where people can easily view tasks that have been directly assigned or delegated to them.  The delegation view is ideal for shared queues or providing vacation coverage.”

If you’re one of the fortunate ones attending Adobe MAX in L.A. next week, an upcoming Labs project codenamed “Gravity” (ActionScript OSGi plug-in framework inspired by OSGi) will be showcased in two sessions:

Vibes, Twitter, and Enterprise Microblogging

Join the Adobe@Adobe team to explore new features of ColdFusion 9 and LiveCycle Data Services used to power a nifty Adobe AIR application called Vibe. The team will dish on how you can leverage Hibernate ORM and RTMP to streamline the process of building a rock-solid enterprise microblogging platform. Add in a dash of Twitter and you have an app that enhances your work/life balance. This session will expose you to insanely great solutions you can leverage in your enterprise.

Speakers: Ron Nagy, Venkatesh Yadav

Products: AIR, ColdFusion, Flex, LiveCycle DS

When: Wednesday, October 7, 2009: 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm (Twitter: #adobemax397)

How Social Are Your Enterprise Networks?

Come learn how the Adobe@Adobe team is integrating social networking within an enterprise context leveraging industry standards. The team will explore trends around social networks at the office, microblogging, bridging the gap between internal and external content, and how to leverage various platforms to drive acceptance. Companies around the world have been trying to find ways to enhance global collaboration. This session will arm you with the knowledge to foster your own globally scalable workforce. You’ll walk away with example solutions you can put to work immediately.
Speakers: Chris Mayo, Venkatesh Yadav

Products: AIR, ColdFusion, Flex, LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle ES

When: Tuesday, October 6, 2009: 9:00 am – 10:00 am (Twitter: #adobemax257)

Be sure to hit up Venkatesh with questions, he’s well versed in Gravity. Just tell him I sent ya.

Gravity is an ActionScript framework that offers a modularization strategy inspired by implementation of OSGi . In short, it’s a dynamic plug-in framework for ActionScript, Flex and AIR applications. While geared towards addressing challenges in the Enterprise RIA space, there’s nothing stopping developers from using this technology any time their project(s) call for modularization and loose coupling.

One exciting feature in the pipeline will be support for plug-ins compiled under different versions of the Flex SDK. This allows developers to roll out new functionality without having to refactor and re-compile existing code. (We are not using Flex modules under the hood) Another important goal was to avoid being prescriptive as to how you actually develop your application code. i.e. Gravity will “play nice” with the likes of Cairngorm and other frameworks/best-practices.

As for the history of this project, it’s been used internally @Adobe and in product dating back a couple of years now. (and yes, we deserve some lashings for not getting this out sooner) Throughout that time momentum of OSGi has continued onward and upward, particularly in the Java and mobile space. More recently, in the Flex realm with the release of Potomac. Potomac takes different approach than Gravity but is exciting to see and offers further validation of OSGi in the client space. (They’ve got a great IDE plug-in as well) The more the merrier!

The initial Gravity release will contain the framework, ASDocs and supporting documentation (not extensive at first, more of a quick start) as well as sample projects. Look for it on Adobe Labs in the coming 2-3 weeks! We’ll be following the open source model adopted by the Flex SDK team in due course.

Cheers,

Stacy