James Ward's interview about Flex, AIR, LiveCycle Data Services, the AMF protocol and much more !

In this interview from QCon San Francisco 2007, James Ward discusses Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), Flex and AIR, how Flex helps in the development of RIAs, the changes in ActionScript 3, the Tamarin engine, desktop and offline capabilities, Flex Builder, the Flex developer community, LiveCycle Data Services, the AMF protocol, RIA development trends, and the Flex component model.

One  of my favourite James' answer is the one about Livecycle Data Services. It's the same answer I use to give to customers who ask me about that :

To really build a Flex application, do I have to have LiveCycle Data Services or are there other options to me in terms of integrating with the backend?        

That's a great question. LiveCycle Data Services is something that is optional, but it's something that does a add lot of value. It adds the AMF protocol which is a great serialization protocol to more efficiently move you data across the wire, it adds publish and subscribe messaging, data synchronization capability, PDF generation, WSRP provider support, a bunch of things that people may need or want, but it's not required. You can connect any Flex application built with all the free stuff, the free SDK, to your web services, SOAP web services, RESTful web services, JSON, so there's lots of different ways to do that. There's also open-source products that provide some of the functionality of LifeCycle Data Services that people have looked at too.

Has James got the beard ? Hey man you look so serious with the beard ;)
See you soon !