Catch me @ RIA Workshop by Adobe in Pune on 30th April ’08

People complain to me that Adobe is doing events only in Bnaglore. But, I can assure you that it is not so. Though we have doen events like the RIA  Architecture Summit in Bangalore, we have also done stuff like the Flex Boot Camp in Hyderabad.

Now, we are coming to western India. Adobe is conducting a one day RIA Workshop in Pune on the 30th of April 2008. I will be in Pune to be one of the speakers in the event and also very excited to meet the pune community. If you want to get in touch with me, feel free to walk upto me at the venue.

If you havent registered, you can register online here or follow the instructions below… Looking forward to seeing you there.

BRIO, CoCoMo and the Private Beta…

I got a mail from a guy yesterday, asking about BRIO & CoCoMo. I thought I should write about them here…

BRIO

BRIO is the code-name of the next generation of Adobe Acrobat Connect that is built on Adobe Flex. You can got to Adobe Labs and try it out the beta here. You can also provide any feedbacks/bugs on the Brio Forums.

Brio beta allows you to:

• Host unlimited online meetings with up to 3 meeting participants.
• Interact with easy-to-use screen sharing, chat and whiteboards.
• Access your meeting instantly with a personalized, easy-to-remember URL.
• Distribute documents and files to meeting participants.
• Use integrated VoIP, teleconferencing and multi-point video.

CoCoMo

CoCoMo (Common Collaboration Model) is a set of Flex Components that allow you to do realtime collaboration using the Adobe Connect backbone. Earlier, this wouldbe only be possible using a Connect Meeting, but now we have decided to release the CoCoMo SDK that lets developers integrate these services within their own applications. BRIO is actually built using CoCoMo…

You can see an in-depth discussion and technical demo of what CoCoMo is and how to program using CoCoMo in this webcast by the CoCoMo Team. CoCoMo is in private beta and there is a long waiting list currenlty for the same.

Here are some examples of Apps built using CoCoMo

• BRIO 🙂
• CoCoMo + Yahoo Maps

Given the fact that many of you may not even know that CoCoMo is out there, I tried to reach Fang Chang, the Sr Product Manager for CoCoMo. He said that though the waitlist is fairly long, he can try to accomodate some people who can give quality feedback.

So, if you are looking to get into the CoCoMo project private Beta, drop me a mail at my mail id mentioned on the Contacts Pod on my blog. It will be great if you can include a small description of what you are looking to build, so that it is easier for the CoCoMo guys to choose who should get in.

community.adobe.com/ion

The DevNet team at Adobe recently released the Community Help (Beta). The community powered search is designed to help people find the best answer to their question, no matter where the answer may reside. The answer that you want to find may be within Adobe.com, in the DevNet or on a blog in the community.

So go check it out and don’t forget to provide feedback…

“Top 10 Mistakes when building Flex Applications” – My 2 cents

InfoQ.com (Information Queue) is an independent online community focused on change and innovation in enterprise software development targeted at architects, technical team leads, developers and project managers.

Recently our very own James Ward, teamed up with the team at InfoQ to write an article on “Top 10 Mistakes when building Flex Applications”.

Adobe India Flex Team Blogroll

I have heard from several quarters that the Flex team in India is not as active as the rest. Actually people are grossly mistaken.

In Flex3, the India team worked on the Data Visualization part of the release, which included the AdvancedDataGrid, OLAPGrid, Charts..etc. They have been contributing greatly on the forums, actively answering the questions there and also writing blog posts on the same.

Anyway, the intent of this post is to list all the team blogs so that people can subscribe to those they are interested in…

• Ananth P.N (Director of Engineering for Flex & CF) – Blog | RSS Feed
  

The Engineering Team Blogs

• Sreenivas Ramaswamy (flexpearls) – Blog | RSS Feed
• Sunil Bannur (sunban) – Blog | RSS Feed
• Sameer Bhatt (techrays) – Blog | RSS Feed
• Jyoti Kishnani (flashpoison) – Blog | RSS Feed
• Kaashif Ahemed (flexvenom) – Blog | RSS Feed
• Srinivas Annam – Blog | RSS Feed
• Satish T J (flexmadeeasy) – Blog | RSS Feed
• S R Prakash – Blog | RSS Feed

The Evangelists

• Harish Sivaramakrishnan (flexgeek) – Blog | RSS Feed
• Anirudh Sasikumar (anirudhs) – Blog | RSS Feed
• Sujit Reddy (theevangelist) – Blog | RSS Feed
• and… me, Raghunath Rao Thricovil (raghuonflex) – Blog | RSS Feed

What I have also done is that I have used Yahoo Pipes to combine all these feeds into a single RSS Feed that you can subscribe to… Go grab it here !

To any Yahoo Pipes guys out there… Yahoo Pipes is not validating the feeds from WordPress, but it is doing so for Blogspot. So it shows the correct names for those blogs are on blogspot, but unable to do the same for the ones on wordpress…

DataPush & Remoting in Flex with Java, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby and more…

“Data Push” has been a top requirement for most people who build enterprise style RIAs. Being an evangelist who meets a lot of customers, the ability to do data-push was probably the top of the list for most of them. Datapush is so poular because there are no slew of requests flowing around, but only updates sent when required

The next on the list the ability to increase “performance” of connection with their respective backends. The key to this is to use a binary format (in the case of ActionScript it is AMF) which will then increases performance, allowing applications to load data up to 10 times faster than with text-based formats such as XML or SOAP.

Action Message Format (AMF) is a compact binary format to serialize ActionScript object graphs. Both data-push and remoting is made possible due to the AMF specification. But, data-push is achieved based on a Comet-like implementation with AMF3 over HTTP.

Many are clueless what options are there when it comes to interfacing their application to their backend technologies to achieve the above requirements. What many don’t realize is that

See you at BarCamp Bangalore

I will be wandering around at Barcamp Bangalore 6 on 19th and 20th April at IIMB. Really looking forward to it. Mrinal wanted to organize an RIA Collective but this time the BarCamp guys have decided to do away with collectives thingy 🙂

Me and Harish (my partner in crime) are planning to do sessions on Rich Internet Applications development with Adobe Technologies, specifically Flex & AIR.

I hope to meet up with various and varied kinds of people. If you are developing, want to develop or just curious what the hell RIAs are, feel free to hunt me down for a chat…

You can reach me on my mobile – +91 98866 41157 and I look like in the pic on the top right of this blog page. See you all there !

Update (16th April):

Had a discussion yesterday with Anirudh (my colleague), Mrinal, Lakshman (Infy) & Pandurang (The MS Evangelist). We drew up the basic framework of sessions and can be seen on the BCB6 Sessions page, under the title “The RIA Story”. Already have plans of covering Flash, Flex, AIR, AJAX, GWT, Silverlight, WPF among others, anyone else who want to join the fray, contact Mrinal and we can plan it accordingly…

AdvancedDataGrid Performance Poll

Sreenivas Ramaswamy, a senior engineer in the Flex Team has put up a poll on his blog on what areas we should look at to improve the AdvancedDataGrid. Please go ahead and make your vote…

Click here to vote…

If you would like to send a sample showing poor performance in a particular/general context please do by sending a mail to sreeni.

RIA Architecture Summit 2008

The RIA Architect Summit on 3rd April 2008 was a really exciting affair. We had gurus like Ben Forta, James Ward & David Wadhwani (GM & VP Platform Business Unit, Adobe) on stage.

The event started off at a very small scale with just 100-150 people planned. But as we started inviting people the demand just went through the roof, that we had to open it up. We finally had over 400 people attending the event that saw the venue logistics being stretched to the limit.