Marco Casario | RIAvolutionize the web

Apollo will have an embedded SQLite database

Great news from the Adobe side. Now that Ryan Stewart works for Adobe I hope he will give us more and more news like this :

Apollo will have an embedded database - The Apollo team has been working on adding SQLite to Apollo for a while and today it’s official that we’re going to be including it.

Gears opens the doors for offline Flash applications - Flash is a great way to deliver applications in the browser. The fact that Adobe and Google are talking and the fact that Gears is an open source project means that adding offline support to your Flash application is a possibility.

Gears and Apollo should have consistent APIs - Google and Adobe are working together with the aim of making the APIs for accessing the SQLite database similar for developers. The vision is that any Gears applications could be ported to Apollo (and vice versa) using roughly the same data structure that they use in Gears. The parallels will be great for developers.

Read the entire Google Gears with Flash and Apollo post

Creating a Flex 2/Livecycle Data Service application with EJB3 - Part II

In the first part I showed how to install Livecycle Data Services under JBoss and how to set up the enviroment to start developing an EJB3 application with Flex 2 (you can read the full article here : How to install and develop using Flex 2 (FDS) and EJB3 projects - Part 1).
In this second part we create a Java project to develop our Enterprise Java Beans.
I'm using JBoss application server with the Livecycle Data Services 2.5 downloaded from the Adobe Labs.

Before coding we need to install some libraries on the JBoss side. So create a lib folder under the project's folder EJB3_LCDS. We'll have this fodler structure :

EJB3_LCDS/lib

Copy and paste the following libraries from the JBOSS_HOME/client to EJB3_LCDS/lib :

jboss-aop-jdk50-client.jar
jboss-aspect-jdk-client.jar
jboss-ejb3x.jar
jboss-ejb3-client.jar
jbossws-client.jar
jbossall-client.jar
jbossjmx-ant.jar
log4j.jar

Now we can set the Build Path from the Project Properties of our Eclipse IDE. Select the EJB3_LCDS project and right click the mouse. From the contextual menu choose Build Path>Add to Buid Path.
We're ready to code our classes.

Create the Stateless Session Bean that represents the easiest EJB you can develop. It's a bean that gives you the information about the bean component the life cycle of which is related to the life of the client.

One of the new features of EJB3 is that it's enough to create an interface with the methods and a class that represents our bean.
No more several classes and configuration files to create like in the past verison of EJB.

My package is com.ejb3lcds.business so we create our Interface in com.ejb3lcds.business.IService

/**
* Interface
*/
package com.ejb3lcds.business.IService;

import javax.ejb.Local;
import javax.ejb.Remote;

@Local
@Remote
public interface IService {

    /**
     * Method that returns just
     * @param pA
     * @param pB
     * @return the result of the operations
     */
    int multiply(int pA, int pB);
}

Now you have to be patience because I have to go working so I must stop.
In the next post I'll create the service bean class.

The Google Gears API will also be available in Apollo

I missed the first time I read it but in the Google Gears  press release you can read this quote from a Kevin Lynch comment :

"We're very excited to be collaborating with Google to move the industry forward to a standard cross-platform, cross-browser local storage capability," said Kevin Lynch, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe. "The Gears API will also be available in Apollo, which enables web applications to run on the desktop, providing developers with consistent offline and local database solutions."

Wow ... Now things gonna be more and more interesting.

Offline Web Applications with Google Gears

Yesterday during the Google Developer Conference, Google announced Google Gears.

Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs

Have a look at the examples that run  with Google Gears  :

• Simple Database Demo - Store and retrieve values in the database
• Simple ResourceStore Demo - Capture a URL and display it while offline
• Simple ManagedResourceStore Demo - Capture a versioned set of URLs atomically and update them together
• Simple WorkerPool Demo - Perform a long-running computation without blocking the browser UI

Adobe Coldfusion 8 beta available to download on the Labs

Adobe has published on the Labs the new Coldfusion 8 public beta :

Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 is the highly-anticipated upcoming major release of ColdFusion.  The public beta release provides developers with the opportunity to begin building applications with new ColdFusion 8 features as well as test their existing applications on the new version.

Get the Coldufsion 8 beta and don't miss the articles published for this release on the Wiki.

The birth of a new programming language : LOLCODE

I'm trying to remeber if this is my first time ....
Anyway these days a new programming language is born : LOLCODE.

I don't know anything about that but I wanted to point it out :)

Flex 2.0.1 Hotfix 2 available to download

Adobe has released today the second hotfix for Flex 2.0.1 :

Flex 2.0.1 hotfix 2 is a collection of bug fixes that have been completed since the Flex 2.0.1 Hot Fix 1 was released on March 16, 2007. This hot fix is being released in conjunction with LiveCycle® Data Services ES 2.5. Customers who are installing LiveCycle® Data Services ES 2.5 do not need to install this hotfix.

You can have an overivew on the list of bug fixed on the Adobe site.

Flex 2 vs Microsoft Silverlight - First Round

Microsoft Silverlight has been announced and you can find many posts and articles around the net about this technology.
I was very interested about Silverlight and I tried to go deep to better understand what it offers and how it could differ from Flex 2.
I would like to create a comparing table to

These are notes I wrote so far :

- Starting from the scratch : the Silverlight plugin has about 0% penetration at the moment. Flash player is everywhere
- Silverlight seams to be very .Net dependent. Flex is totally independent to server side technology used
- It does not offer J2EE integration and enterprise messaging. Flex offers  Flex Data Services (now Livecycle Data Services)
- No support for Linux browsers/systems. Flash Player runs on Win, Mac, Liunux, Sun Solaris
- SOA( WebServices and XML) based services only. Flex has three RPC services : HTTP, SOA and Remote Object (with AMF3)
- Low information about Silverlight Mobile. Flex is not mobile (so far) :))

Instead, what impressed me it's the video capabilities of Silverlight. At the moment this is the only feature that could compete with the Flash Player capabilities.

It leverages the VC-1 codec and it supports HD DVD and Blu-ray and the DRM features.

In the next days I'll feel more confident so I'll give you more detailed informations and comparing notes.

Apollo porting of Kuler desktop is available for download

I received an email from Sami Iwata, the kuler community manager at Adobe, that pointed me out the release of Kuler Desktop developed in Apollo is available to donwload in Adobe Labs :

After the  sneak peek at the CS3 launch event, the cross-platform kuler desktop (built in Apollo) is available for download on Adobe Labs, along with the required Apollo Runtime. The kuler desktop offers the same RSS feed functionality as the kuler Apple Dashboard Widget but with a new form factor (see image). Users can view RSS feeds of the highest rated, most popular, and newest themes from the kuler site, search thousands of titled and tagged themes, search by kuler user name, and copy theme Hex values to the clipboard.

Thanks for the update Sami ;)

How to use Flex in J2EE enviroment: presenting Flex at the Java User Group Meeting

Today I'm in Milan to hold  a session on Flex 2 adn Java integration.
I had the opportunity to present it for the italian Java User Group meeting.

I'll show how Flex could be useful for Java developers and how to integrate it into J2EE enviroment. It will be very fun to discuss with talented and expert Java developers and to see how they feel with this technology.

All the information with the agenda on the Java User Group site.