Category Archives: flash collaboration services

Rundown of the MAX News

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The press releases just crossed the wire and we have a ton of news coming out of MAX. Plus more surprises in store for tomorrow. For those of you not here you can still check the keynotes out. I’m hosting the online side of the MAX keynotes and we’re doing some fun stuff before and after the keynotes to give you a sense of what’s going on at MAX. As you can tell from the rundown, there’s some fun stuff today.

Flash Platform Runtimes

We’ve been saying all year that Flash on mobile devices is a push this year and we’ve made a lot of progress. Today at the keynotes we’re going to be showing off Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones. This is the version of the Flash Player that we’ve been working on so hard this year. We’ve been working with some great partners including Nvidia and ARM to optimize the player for those devices and create a quality mobile experience.

Possibly more important is that the number of companies committed to the Open Screen Project continues to grow. Today we announced that RIM is joining the Open Screen Project, which means that Blackberry will be supporting Flash Player 10.1. Google is also on board. We’ll have public versions of Flash Player 10.1 for Palm, and Windows Mobile later this year with Google Android and Symbian following shortly. Developers will have mobile bits in their hands soon.

We also announced AIR 2.0, which is going to give Flash developers a lot more native hooks into the operating system. A lot of the developers I talked to wanted it and so that’s what the team did. Mike Chambers talked about some of these features at Flash on the Beach. Another cool feature of AIR 2.0 is the ability to record from the microphone without going to a server. getMicrophone can now be a reality

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Tools

We also have public betas of both Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst that are available today. I’ve been really impressed with how far Flash Catalyst in particular has come from Beta 1 to Beta 2. It’s a lot more polished, has more functionality (including video) and feels a lot more fun to use. If you checked out Beta 1 and found it lacking, you should check out Beta 2. We’ve also made big progress on Flash Builder and I’ve been a very happy camper using the tool full-time.

Servers

Some very cool stuff is also happening on the server side. We’ve released ColdFusion 9, a spectacular release with some great features including the ability for you to consume ColdFusion as a service from inside of your Flex application without writing ColdFusion code. I’ve also been playing with the LiveCycle Data Services release and its modeler plug-in for Flash Builder. The team has focused on model-driven development making it easy to generate and create a model, and then link that model directly to your Flex application. It helps by generating all of the assemblers and you can directly modify the user interface just by changing the model.

Finally we’ve got some Flash Media Server news. We’re adding support for HTTP streaming, which will include support for content protection. We also have released the Collaboration side of Flash Platform Services and announced pricing so you can jump in and start adding collaboration to your application.

If you guys have any questions (sorry I don’t have more fleshed out info, it’s a lot of news), feel free to drop me an email – ryan@adobe.com and I’ll try and answer what I know.

New Project: Flex Collaboration Library

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I’ve been digging deeply into the dark crevices of Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS) for my session on creating collaborative components at MAX this week. One of my examples is a collaborative map so I relied heavily on the Yahoo Maps example that ships with the AFCS SDK. One of the things I like about the Yahoo Maps example is that it includes a class that extends ArrayCollection and includes some hooks for collaboration. It’s essentially a collaborative ArrayCollection, and I rewrote parts of it for my own example and have found it to be very useful across a lot of my projects.

I realized that it could lower the barrier to entry on AFCS if some of the Flex classes that people rely on a lot had “automatic” support for collaboration via AFCS. So I took the class I created based on the Yahoo Maps example and tried to make it as “drag-and-droppable” as can be for someone who wants to start using AFCS. It merges two concepts, the ArrayCollection concept, and the CollectionNode concept from AFCS. CollectionNodes let you store any piece of data on the server and let multiple people add/change/remove information from the collection. Events are fired so that any time someone changes a piece of data it can be updated across all of the connected clients.

What I’ve done with my SharedArrayCollection class is put all of that logic into a single class that extends ArrayCollection. Developers can use the SharedArrayCollection just like they would use an ArrayCollection but the difference is that the SharedArrayCollection is automatically enabled for multi-user collaboration with AFCS. The only major difference is that instead of listening for a collectionChange Event you listen for a CollectionNodeEvent.

I’m still hacking out the basics and after MAX I’ll try to provide an example use case so people can see exactly how it works. I’ve put everything up on GitHub under the Flex Collaboration Library project. I’m hoping to make the SharedArrayCollection more bullet proof and then create more AFCS-enabled Flex classes and components. Let me know if you find a bug or if you find this at all useful.

The Full Flash Platform Services Story

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platform_servicesToday we announced the release of the distribution side of Flash Platform Services. Most of the action is on Techmeme but I liked the ReadWriteWeb post, the TechCrunch post, and the VentureBeat post specifically. Distribution Services is the one that’s new and the goal is to let you track your application across a number of different screens while also simplifying the distribution mechanism. There are also hooks that will let you easily bring in advertising so that you can both track and monetize your content. The first thing people will think of is widgets, and that makes sense because a lot of the “sharing” aspect, which we’re partnering with Gigya for, will remind people of the widgets they’re able to place on Facebook, MySpace, blogs, and other places. But as Serge’s MAX Widget shows, these can be more complicated applications as well. So while widgets may be the first thought, any one of these three threads–sharing, tracking, and advertising–can be brought into an application of any size. So regardless of what kind of application you’re building, these services should be helpful.

Show me the money
One thing this allows you to do is easily monetize your content. The money side of this is that advertisers or developers can buy installs and pay a fee (starting at one dollar) per successful installs. You can also target this a bit, so if you want to make sure a high number of people are embedding your widget, you can promote it via the network and you’ll be charged a fee anytime someone embeds or installs your content. On the profit side, you can also offer to host advertisements via our network. We’ll give you a specific CPM (cost per thousand impressions), we estimate around $5, and pay that out to you.

Mobile
These services also work with mobile devices. This is one of the slickest features I’ve seen demoed because when a user wants to install a shareable mobile application, they’ll get an SMS with a link to the application. When they click it, our distribution service detects which device they’re on and will push out the correct version of the application. Currently we support Symbian S60 phones, Windows Mobile, and the iPhone. That doesn’t mean you can use Flash on the iPhone, but you can create an iPhone version that can be pushed out with our distribution network.

The Rest of the Services Story
There are three parts to the Flash Platform Services initiative; Distribution, Collaboration, and Social. Distribution is what we announced today, Social will make it easy to integrate social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and Collaboration has been in beta for a while, you know it as Flash Collaboration Service. All of these will have a pay-per-use model and will provide added functionality or easy integration for developers. The Flash Platform is the most cutting edge technology on the web. The full range of things it lets developers and designers do just doesn’t exist on any other platform. As a result, we’re able to do some very interesting things when it comes to collaboration, tracking, distribution, or integration. The goal of these services is to make it much easier for any Flash Platform developer to accomplish those things. Lowering the barrier to entry for things that make Flash so powerful is going to be beneficial for a lot of developers.

AFCS Presentation to BAADAUG Slides

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I just posted the slides for my BAADAUG presentation on Adobe Flash Collaboration Service.

I had a great time with the group and I appreciate them putting up with a brand new slide deck. I’ll be giving a version of this over at the ActionScript Conference in Singapore, so if you’re in the area, you can still register!

In The Bay Area? Come Check Out AFCS

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I’m going to be presenting at the Bay Area Application Developer Adobe User Group today (Tuesday) on Adobe Flash Collaboration Service. It starts at 6:30 at Learn iT!. Here’s the blurb:

Ryan will walk us through how to getting started with AFCS, show us how to use the default pods that are delivered with AFCS, and how to extend existing components to make them collaborative. Finally he will show us real world examples of AFCS in action.

The Web Way vs the Wave Way vs the Flash Collaboration Services Way

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afcs_logoAnil Dash has a post worth reading up on his blog that talks about the “Web Way” versus the “Wave Way” and why Google Wave won’t succeed because it doesn’t really fit the same pattern of successful web technologies. He makes 4 general points to define the “Web Way”:

  • Upgrades to the web are incremental. Instead of requiring a complete overhaul of your technical infrastructure, or radical changes to existing behaviors, the web tech that wins is usually the sort of thing that can be adopted piecemeal, integrated as needed or as a normal part of updating one’s websites or applications.
  • Understanding new tech needs to be a weekend-sized problem. For a lot of web developers, long before they start integrating a new protocol or platform into their work, they hack together a rough demo over a long weekend to make sure they truly grasp how it works. And a weekend-scale implementation on a personal site usually translates roughly into a 90-day implementation cycle in a business context, which is a reasonably approachable project size. (In tech, three days in personal effort often translates to three months of corporate effort.)
  • There has to be value before everybody has upgraded. This is basically a corollary to Metcalfe’s Law. While we know networks increase in value as they add more nodes, the nature of web tech is that, in order to be worthwhile, it has to provide value even if the people on the other end haven’t upgraded their software or web browsers or clients or servers. Otherwise you’re shouting into an empty room.
  • You have to be able to understand and explain it. Duh.

The entire post goes on to explain details of where Wave fits and where Wave fails. But as I read it I couldn’t help see it as a ringing endorsement of Flash and especially Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS). Before I dive in, I understand that Anil’s “The Web Way” has an inherent requirement that everything be “open”. Flash and AFCS probably won’t fit in most people’s definition of “open” as it relates to the web. In this case, I think that’s part of the benefit. Anil looks at Wave from the developer perspective and he provides a list of technologies required to use Google Wave and add real-time collaboration to your web application:

  • Federation (XMPP)
  • The robot protocol (JSONRPC)
  • The gadget API (OpenSocial)
  • The wave embed API (Javascript)
  • The client-server protocol (As defined by GWT)

That’s a lot of stuff for a developer to know and understand if they want to start building something that interoperates with and leverages the technology behind Google Wave. Now think about a Flash developer who wants to add real-time collaboration to their web application. They’ve got no real new protocols to learn (RTMP behind the scenes but not necessarily exposed in such a way that developers need to understand it), no new languages to learn, no new client-server protocol, it’s just ActionScript and(/or) Flex, and some new APIs. Then your application is real-time enabled. So let’s look at the four “Web Ways” and see how they apply to AFCS.

  • Upgrades to the web are incremental. With the pods and APIs for AFCS, it’s pretty damn easy to just integrate it with your current application. There is no rewriting from scratch and you can literally just add an AFCS component and enable collaboration for your application. As you dig deeper, the service gets more complex and you can do more with it, but to start, it’s dead simple.
  • Understanding new tech needs to be a weekend-sized problem. If you’re a Flash developer already, all you’re learning are a few new APIs. You still have to understand the fundamental issues behind real-time collaboration if you want to create complex components, but you’ve got the core development skills to create those applications so you can focus on learning the theoretical stuff and not the code stuff.
  • There has to be value before everybody has upgraded. This is my favorite, because it’s one of the benefits of Flash. AFCS has 2 versions, a Flash Player 9 version and a Flash Player 10 that adds some more audio support. If you’re targeting Flash Player 9 then 98.8% of the web can see your application and with Flash Player 10 it’s 86.7%. No one has to upgrade anything to see your new real-time enabled application.
  • You have to be able to understand and explain it. With AFCS you can easily add real-time collaboration features like video chat, whiteboarding, and shared data into your Flash-based application. I think that works.

Now again, I understand that openness is a pretty core part of what the web is. But there has always been a trade off between openness and innovation when it comes to the web. And even in cases where “open” can be innovative, like with Google Wave, everyone else has to catch up. With AFCS, even though it may not fit with the wider definition of the “Web Way” you can take advantage of the cutting edge technology that everyone is excited about and ensure that it’s 1) easy to build and 2) easy for your customers and users to view.

Thanks to Sachin for tweeting the link to Anil’s post. I didn’t take the time to read it until I saw he did.