Monthly Archives: December 2005

Moving to Seattle

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I have been kind of quiet the past couple of days because I was flying back to Seattle for a job interview which I accepted yesterday. I have really enjoyed being a part of the Learning Lab at the Wharton School, and I will be keeping my eye on what they’re doing because I think in the next year they’re going to be doing some really cool stuff with Flex. They have a quality team and all the resources they need to really build great web applications.

The new job is for a small interactive advertising agency, WorldClass Strategy, and will be doing mostly ColdFusion programming. The company has a great business model, a really good team, and I am going to be able to go in and make a big impact right away. The online advertising space is only going to grow and it?s going to be cool to be a part of that.

I’m really looking forward to getting back into some serious ColdFusion coding because I think it’s a great language and because I’ve been doing Flex development, I’ve pretty much just been writing CFCs. The company has looked at Flex and now that it’s going to be priced at less than $1,000 dollars, I’m hoping to sell them on using it for some of their projects. If nothing else I’ll be playing with the alpha in my spare time and I’ll still be blogging about Flex.

I’m also very excited about moving from Philadelphia to Seattle. My office is one block away from the original Starbucks, which will be dangerous, and I’m also going to be going into a huge technology heartland. While I feel a little bit like Frodo and Sam going into Mordor, I’m pumped about the idea of getting involved in the Seattle CFUG and finding people in the heart of the evil empire (or is that Google now?) who are passionate about Macromedia Adobe products. Combine that with all of the Seattle bloggers who are talking about the next great things in technology, and I think I’ll be right at home. Maybe I’ll even see Robert Scoble at the grocery store.

We’re moving in mid-January, so if you’re in the Seattle area and have some tips on apartment hunting (or even just general moving), I’d love to hear them.

Don’t Hate the Term Web 2.0

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Richard Shaw wrote a piece titled Web 2.0? It doesn’t exist and a lot of people have been saying he’s right. Richard McManus, a writer whom I really enjoy, went so far as saying Web 2.0 is dead. R.I.P. Dave Winer chimed in and it’s on the front page of Memeorandum.

Thankfully, Michael Arrington came to our defense. Web 2.0 is a great term. Sure it’s used by the marketing guys, sure it’s a nebulous, amorphous term, but it’s our term, and it’s a great way to represent all the new, great stuff that’s changing the web. We really are shifting the entire paradigm that is web development. Perhaps VCs are pouring a lot of money into these companies and creating “Bubble 2.0″ but that doesn’t change the fact that huge things are happening.

The web is really exciting again, money is pouring in, products like AJAX, Flex and Lazlo are brining a new level of sophistication to the web and talented companies are taking advantage it by creating really amazing products. Is the definition of Web 2.0 hard to “pin down”, sure, but what’s happening is hard to pin down. Embrace that innovative spirit, create something awesome, and call it Web 2.0, that’s what this is about. Rally the troops.

The Market Cap of Flex And a Customer List

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I am kind of a Wall Street dork, so I set up something over the weekend that I have been wanting to try out – the Market Cap of Flex (you can see it in the side bar). Essentially, I took the Flex customer list over at Macromedia’s site, did some research, and found websites and more information for all of the companies. For those companies that were publicly traded, I also got the ticker symbol. Now every night, I go out and find the closing price of the stock and calculate the market cap of each company for that day. Then I aggregate them and display it on the side bar as well as in graph format on the Flex page (in the link bar).

Now, will a company’s market cap change just because it’s using Flex? Doubtful, but it is an interesting way to look at Flex’s adoption and also what kinds of companies are using it. I’ve also made my company database searchable, so you can click on the Flex link above and take a look. If your company is missing (and I want to get both private and public companies), send me an e-mail. Hopefully I’ll also be able to link to example Flex applications or talk about how the companies are using Flex. If you work at one of the companies, again, send me an e-mail and let me know how you’re using Flex.

Adobe/Macromedia in The Economist

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I usually read The Economist cover to cover every week (okay, sometimes I skip the Britain section). Unfortunately, the business and finance sections are near the back, so I don’t get to them until later in the week. This weeks Economist had a small article about the Macromedia/Adobe acquisition which was quite good, but I didn’t see it until today. If you have a few minutes it is a fun read.

And you have the added bonus of supporting the Economist’s ColdFusion website.

Okay, Maybe I’m Starting to Get Apollo

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I love posts that make me smarter. I’m not talking about my posts; I’m talking about comments on my post. I posted about not getting Apollo late last night and since then, people have stepped up and really fleshed out what Apollo can be and what it “brings to the table” so to speak. The comments by Jesse and Philippe are much better than anything I could have written, so I want to put them on the front page. Hopefully Jesse talks about this a bit more in his blog, because I think he brings a lot to the web as a platform discussion and he has made some good points before.

Comments
Philippe Maegerman
I hope they are going towards something like Screenweaver/Zinc, giving the ability to produce desktop applications that wrap swf files.
This way we could have file I/O, maybe ActiveX integration etc …
If for once they could produce something that is cross-platform, it would be the cherry on the cake :) )

JesterXL (Jesse)
Flash needs a better way to deploy desktop applications. mProjector, Zinc, etc. while cool, are not endorsed by Macromedia, nor capitalize on their products’ feature set.

Web browsers do the integration points Philippe talked about that are so integral applications. For example, can you do a File > Save As in Delicious? No. You could, but it’d just save an HTML page, not a document that has meaning to your data. The biggest problems with web applications is people’s data is stored everywhere; people are relinquishing control of their data.

One user’s computer going down isn’t a big deal. Flickr going down is.

While I love the attitudes of people claiming that web applications can eclipse desktop applications, I think they are smoking crack. The desktop owns. While we’ll all be connected 100% someday, it makes business sense to create solutions that support occasionally connected scenarios, like now for instance.

Ryan Stewart
Jesse, you make some interesting points, and I really enjoyed reading your post a while back about your views on the whole web-platform phenomenon. Perhaps having a flash-based solution that will allow you to access data offline makes the most sense right now. I can see it would be cool to have access to your Del.icio.us tags or your Flickr pictures online, but what I don’t see is a large group of people using that feature. Sure people are relinquishing hold of their data, but I think they’re doing so consciously and fully aware of what that means ? some limited access. I’d be curious to hear more of your thoughts on this.

Philippe Maegerman
Some cool things u had in screenweaver for example was the ability to drag&drop files/directories from your desktop or other on your flash application, integrate ftp capability etc …
The local disk file access is cool too, especially since flash 8, you could easily build an application like Picasa to manage your pictures, modify (with the new BitmapData features) them and save them locally (binaryData).
Desktop applications + flash are way too cool in some cases ;) )

JesterXL (Jesse)
I’m sick today, so you won’t get much… coffee’s keeping me from collapsing on the floor unconscious.

Delicious is a bad example because it’s for bookmarks, implying an always-on scenario.

2 things, though. First, I’m not always online. Therefore, I shouldn’t have to be just to use applications. Word works fine on the plane at 30,000 ft. when there is no wireless, unlike Writely ( http://www.writely.com ) which does not. I can open my .doc file before a meeting and edit it whereas with Writely, I have to wait till I’m connected.

Second, the experience in the browser blows. Case in point, go here:

http://dev.jessewarden.com/captivate/flexpanelmanagement/

Notice how crammed those mofos are in the browser? Now, go here:

http://dev.jessewarden.com/captivate/flexonthedesktop/

SOOOO much more usable, less crammed, and more manageable. People could argue I shouldn’t be doing Windows metaphors in the browser, and my retort is the browser should f’off; I didn’t want to use it anyway… and I didn’t, cast off the chains, and used mProjector.

Screen real-estate isn’t the only reason, though. Philippe yet again makes some good points about functionality. Integrating with FTP, sockets, drag and drop… all of the low-level functionality you expect from a desktop application as well as the OS integration you just won’t ever get in a browser, no matter how cool Flash gets. I’ve seen some impressive things with Java and ActiveX via .NET… but even they hit a ceiling of user experience being sacrificed. At the end of the day, if you want the ultimate experience, you aren’t in a browser.

Google rocks because it works. But, it’s just a textfield with a search button. Word rocks because I can save docs, edit text, and I don’t need an internet connection. If the world suddenly becomes Wireless, I can see how Writely has a future and Word becomes less of a desire; let them manage my docs vs. my desktop. Windows Live is an example of Microsoft seeing this vision.

…however, the world isn’t wireless, and everything isn’t connected yet. So what do you do in the meantime? Make Apollo.

Now those are great points, and great examples of reasons to bring Flash to the desktop in the form of a universal client. Now I get it. But I do still wonder about the goal. Are we now trying to bring Rich Internet Applications to the desktop? Is this a full frontal assault on Windows Vista and a way to make Flash more appealing for traditional .NET desktop developers? The Flash platform seems to be growing up in a big, big way. I’ve been shown that there are a lot of benefits of this growth, but I do wonder how far away from Flash’s core competency (the web) we can go before the benefits that Flash player bring will no longer apply to the development.

I Don’t Get Apollo

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I caught Matthew Cahill’s take on Apollo through JD, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about so I wanted to post something like a response.

I don’t get Apollo. I don’t understand what the benefit is supposed to be, I don’t understand who the market is, I don’t understand what the hype is about. To be clear, I was at MAX, I watched the presentations, I’ve been following the news and reading about the “universal client”, but I still don’t get it.

I like Matthew’s post because I think he and I see Apollo similarly, but I don’t like it. The web is such a great platform! Why is Macromedia trying to create a separate software platform that runs independently of the browser? To compete with WinFX? WinFX sucks! It is an attempt to run rich internet applications on top of an operating system on top of the web. Cut out the middle and build for the web.

Apollo has been touted as the heir apparent to Central and I’ve heard talk about syncing data offline, but we aren’t far away from the net being everywhere, so why would you ever need to go offline. Maybe that’s still a few years off, but its coming.

Matthew goes on to talks about opening the standards which I won’t get into, but I just can’t see why Adobe would focus so much energy on Central’s successor. Then again, it’s only December, and I’ve been known to be totally off base. We’ll see.

Conference on the Future of Web Apps – But Where’s Flex?

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There’s a one day workshop in London on February 8th that looks interesting. It’s The Future of Web Apps and both the speaker lineup and the content look very impressive. It seems like it would be great for anyone who is going to be in London and is interested in web applications (although I am only one of those).

One thing is striking however; there isn’t any mention of Flex or Flash. I’m curious if anyone has any thoughts on why that is? Is it because AJAX and Ruby On Rails are both free and therefore ideal for startups? Is it that Flex and Flash don’t really fit in with the speakers or classes they’re having? What gives? You can build some pretty amazing web applications with Flex, so why not talk about it at a conference on the Future of Web Apps?

Mr. Chizen or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Acrobat

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I talked to someone here at Wharton today who is fairly familiar with Adobe’s products and has a good handle on the history of LiveCycle and what it does (and more importantly, what it tries to do). In fact for anyone who is curious about the beginnings of LiveCycle, I suggest this article – Getting Reorganization Right: How Bruce Chizen Drove Change and Innovation at Adobe Systems – at Knowledge@Wharton (it’s worth subscribing to if you’re interested in business, but the article is syndicated [here]) . It’s a good read and in it, Bruce Chizen talks about the ability to make money off of a free product, Acrobat, by making it the standard and then building infrastructure up around it. Part of this infrastructure is LiveCycle.

Now I know a lot of us dislike Acrobat. When word first broke that Acrobat and Flash were being combined, it set off a small firestorm. Acrobat however, does some really cool stuff. The problem is that 90% of Acrobat users are just using it to view documents on the web. (If only there were some kind of company that Adobe could acquire with a tool that could streamline viewing web documents.)

After looking at LiveCycle, I think ColdFusion can empower developers and take advantage of what makes Acrobat good. For instance, Adobe has some cool PDF form features. You can do validations Flash forms, and Flash forms are perfect for the web, but lets say you want to create a secure form with a digital signature. Or you want a form that someone can download and work with offline and you want to include a barcode? Those are difficult (if not impossible) to do with Flash Forms, but what if you had <cfform format=”pdf”> that you could build that kind of functionality into. We could create powerful, dynamic PDF forms on the fly that play to Acrobat’s strengths.

In heavily regulated industries or in industries that have a lot of paper requirements, being able to generate forms with those kinds of features built in is a huge achievement. Putting that functionality into ColdFusion would be great for the product. Adobe Acrobat is bloated, unwieldy and overkill for most of the things it’s used for, but it really does have some value if used correctly. Hopefully the ColdFusion team and the LiveCycle team are talking to each other about these kinds of features.

Late Thoughts on ColdFusion and the CFDJ Article

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This interview at CFJD made the rounds yesterday. Since I love ColdFusion and I was nervous about its future, I wanted to chime in, but I wanted to take a bit of time to think about it. The article is great, and if you haven’t read the whole thing yet, Steven Erat has a good summary. After I read the article, I spent quite a bit of time checking out LiveCycle and I’m impressed with the product. I also think ColdFusion has a bright future for both developers and shareholders.

The article touches a bit on the integration of Adobe’s products and ColdFusion, but I think the greatest benefit to ColdFusion is something else. With LiveCycle, Adobe presented a great solution to business problems. Their Intelligent Document Platform has a lot of clients, and really addresses a problem that businesses have – document management. This may seem small to those of us who work in development, but it’s a huge deal and a lot of big companies are using LiveCycle to solve that problem.

I realize this post takes a very ColdFusion-friendly slant (perhaps unrealistically so), but imagine ColdFusion running all of the back end processes of the LiveCycle suite. Not just integrating some of the features, but actually running them. That would be instant, large scale penetration for ColdFusion in a meaningful way. ColdFusion is already a great product without LiveCycle, but I think it suffers because Macromedia didn’t have the clout that Microsoft or Sun have. The merger with Adobe helps that, and by integrating it closely with LiveCycle, gives ColdFusion more credibility at the enterprise level.

A look at the Adobe system integrator partners shows that a ColdFusion/LiveCycle solution would be working with big time companies who would require a lot of ColdFusion developers. I wasn’t here for the transition from Allaire to Macromedia, but from what I’ve heard, it was a nervous time followed by a renaissance. I think we’ll see that here. Adobe’s relationship with large firms across a variety of industries is going to be great for ColdFusion.