MAX 2006 Report

Adobe's MAX 2006 conference is the premier worldwide event for Web developers and designers to hear first hand what is going on inside the company and what new technologies are just around the corner. Experiencing this year's event up close and personal it was well worth the time off work and travel to the city of sin -- Las Vegas, Nevada.

Without a doubt the biggest buzz of MAX was Flex and Apollo.

Flex was a hot topic at the conference with many developers focusing on the new technology stack. For those not aware of Flex it's a rapid way of building what Adobe are calling "Rich Internet Applications" that work the same way in any browser via the latest version of the Adobe Flash player. For a hands-on tutorial of Flex check out a previous article I worte for Builder AU.

The vast majority of developers that I caught up with at MAX are changing the way that they build applications for the browser. The Web developers that were using ColdFusion with HTML and Javascript as well as the Flash guys that were using Flash and ActionScript are making the switch to Flex. Others that I had met for the first time had come to MAX to find out more about Flex - and many of those were from Microsoft .Net and PHP backgrounds.

Mac users were given a nice present at MAX with the beta release of Flex Builder 2 and the Flex plug for Eclipse announced for OS X, both delayed because of issues with the Eclipse 3.2 build. Senior Director of Engineering at Adobe Sho Kuwamoto made the announcement during the first day's keynote and anybody keen to get their hands on either version was able to a couple of days before they we released to the public on Adobe Labs.

Apollo is the code name for Adobes new runtime that will allow developers to deploy Rich Internet Applications on the desktop. It will support applications built in Flash, HTML and PDF, allowing for hybrid applications that could combine all three.

Kevin Lynch, Adobes CTO, demonstrated a number of Apollo applications during the first day's keynote, including one built on top of Google Maps that used a Flash overlay to hold and display a list of vCard driven contacts. Entries from that list could call up locations in Google Maps and fetch driving directions - a really cool mashup of Flash and Ajax working together in Apollo.

Apollo

While at MAX I had a chance to sit down with Mike Chambers from Adobes Apollo team and have a chat about what Apollo will offer.

Firstly Apollo will treat both Flash and HTML equally as first class citizens, running under the hood of Apollo is a version of WebKit - Adobe is not intending to enter the browser business via Apollo.

Apollo is like a mini platform that enables applications built with Flash, HTML & JavaScript and PDF to run on the desktop, providing a low level API that would do things like give them access to host OS networking or the file system. Apollo will support Windows and Mac OS in its 1.0 release; Adobe intends to explore other platforms after that release.

Flex is the current developers tool of choice for the Apollo applications that have been on show. Most existing Flex applications will not need to be re-authored to work in Apollo, unless the developer wants to take advantage of everything that Apollo has to offer.

You will be able to author Flash applications for Apollo in the Flash IDE but they will need to be written in ActionScript 3 so that the necessary hooks for the system level calls Apollo makes are properly supported.

Apollo will be very kind to Ajax developers. There currently is no accepted Ajax standard; the closest thing on offer is the number of frameworks currently available that aid developers in rapid development. The major browsers while similar interpret HTML differently, cleaver Ajax applications require different codebases in order to work "universally".

Apollo offers Ajax application developers the single runtime that they're looking for, and more. It will solve a lot of their headaches, offering them the ability to build applications that will run on the desktop and run offline.

Like the Flash player, future versions of Apollo will be backwards compatible in the way that they support applications built for Apollo. If an Ajax authored application worked in version one of Apollo, it will still work in version five - not all Ajax applications work the same way in the recent release of Internet Explorer 7.

For those of you who remember it, Apollo is not Central 2.0, Central was an experiment by Macromedia that has lead to Apollo. Central contained Macromedia branding that sometimes confused potential users and frustrated developers. Developers are free to build Apollo applications with any kind of skinning that they choose. The licensing for Apollo is one that developers are going to love and the necessary tools like the compiler will be free just as the Flex SDK is also free to developers.

You can keep an eye on the progress of Apollo on the Adobe site including FAQs and release details from the following link: http://www.adobe.com/go/apollo

Flash

While its been previously shown at some of the north American conferences that lead up to MAX it was interesting to see the features of the new version of Flash in action. The ability to import Photoshop files into Flash while preserving the layers and keeping objects, including text, editable is going to make a lot of people happy. The import feature has been well thought out with the hidden attribute of layers being preserved along with support for most of the layer effects.

Another feature of the Photoshop import is the ability to make individual Photoshop layers into separate Flash movieclips and set the Flash stage to equal the size of the Photoshop file.

The new versions of Photoshop and Flash will have another thing in common; a new mobile device emulator for Flash design and testing called Device Central. Emulating environmental conditions like screen glare and operating conditions like the phones time or battery condition will certainly prove useful to developers. The ability to emulate phone CPU performance was also demonstrated.

It appears as though Adobe has for now decided to leave the UI of the two companies (Adobe & Macromedia) products as is. One thing was different in a number of the new product versions demonstrated, Photoshop included, was a new style of collapsible panel that could minimise as an icon to the top right of the application window.

Now that there's a robust development environment for Flex built on top of Eclipse Adobe have turned their attention to improving the developer features of the Flash IDE.

New features were shown that were met with a lot of enthusiasm by the Flash developer crowd. The ability to target an open Flash movie means that the compile and test can now be called from any open ActionScript file - a real time saver.

Debugging has been greatly enhances as well with a new debug workspace and the addition of a Compiler Errors panel that will jump to the offending line of code via a double click. Debugging with a movie is running is now possible.