Technical Evanglist for Flex @ Adobe
James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe. Much like his love for climbing mountains he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early 90's; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid 90's; then Java and many of it's frameworks beginning in the late 90's. Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front ends for Java based back ends. Prior to Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems.James Ward - RIA Cowboy
Flex / Ajax / Java / J2EE / Open Source / Linux
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Dave Carroll of salesforce.com has posted a very cool Apollo Widget that pulls data from Salesforce and uses the Flex Toolkit for Apex.
Very cool stuff!
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
On Monday I presented at the Salesforce Developer Conference in Santa Clara. It was a great conference! The keynote was especially exciting because it kinda turned into the Flex/Apollo show. Near the middle of his keynote Marc Benioff went on about how great Adobe is for innovating with Flex and Apollo. He then brought Kevin Lynch on stage who did his usual Apollo demos, which filled the crowd with “Ooos” and “Ahhhs”. Then they brought up someone who built some amazing Salesforce based applications. And guess what? It was a Flex app running inside a Salesforce S-Control! Then Adam Gross and Parker Harris from Salesforce took the stage to present even more Flex applications! It felt for a second like I was at Max!
I was pretty excited to see all the broad uses of the Flex Toolkit for Apex which has been the catalyst for Salesforce jumping further into the Flex & Apollo world. The Toolkit started as one of my “plane projects” where I took the existing Salesforce JavaScript library and did regex replaces on the code, moved the prototype stuff to proper classes, added static typing, and finally got the thing to compile. Thanks primarily to Dave Carroll and Ron Hess from Salesforce as well as Seth Hodgson from the Flex Data Services team, the Toolkit evolved well beyond a “plane project” and is now being used in demos and production applications!
Back to the conference… Throughout the day I stopped by the Adobe demo pod to show demos and give out Apollo books. Dave Carroll and I also co-presented a one hour session to a packed audience of about 250.
The use of Flex and Apollo in the Salesforce world is taking off! Like I said in my session on Monday… Salesforce is revolutionizing how we build back-ends! Flex & Apollo are revolutionizing how we build front-ends! Bringing these two technologies together is a perfect match!
Now on to the Salesforce Apollo Sample…
AccountTracker2.air - Apollo Sample (Requires Apollo Alpha)
This Apollo application is one of the samples we are working on for the Flex Toolkit for Apex. It has some cool offline data sync capabilities. However currently the sync is only one way and some of the application is just smoke and mirrors (the chart data is fake because I was in crunch mode getting this ready for the Web 2.0 conference). But it really does pull most of its data from Salesforce.com and syncs data and files to the local system so that it works offline. I can’t take credit for much of this application. I did some polishing but most of the work was done by Dave Carroll and Ron Hess from Salesforce. They have both put in a ton of work to the Toolkit and the samples. So big thanks to them!
If you want to see how to start building Flex and Apollo applications using the Flex Toolkit for Apex, check out these resources:
http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/2007/04/17/the-open-source-flex-and-apollo-toolkit-for-salesforcecom/
http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Flex_Toolkit
http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Tutorial:_Creating_Flex_Salesforce_Mashups
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
This week I’m in Vegas for a few presentations. First one is at the Interop conference on Wednesday. Interop is a fun place for me because I get to hang out with networking / sys admin folks. In a past life I was a sys admin (thus the reason why I love vi). 
On Thursday night I am presenting at the Vegas Adobe User Group and really looking forward to meeting some of the Flex friends I’ve only known via email, blogs, twitter, etc.
I was also supposed to present at the local JUG but the meeting was canceled because there was a conflicting conference that everyone was going to be at. Oh-well. Time to go lose money instead!
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling when the guy I learned Java web programming with starts saying things like:
“For me, Flex is clearly the way to go.”
The whole article is a great read for those evaluating the Rich Internet Application landscape.
Jon, we are glad to have you “Thinking in Flex” and can’t wait to see what you build!
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Bruce and I recently hosted an eSeminar about Flex and Java. Check out the recording:
http://seminars.adobe.acrobat.com/p87391680/
