Merapi says "Hello World" - 1.0 Framework nears completion

This weekend proved to be quite interesting for the Merapi Project. Adam took advantage of the warm weather in Denver and found the motivation to crank through a lot of the items on the project checklist to get the Merapi framework close(er) to being releasable as Open Source.

Merapi has gotten a lot of attention since Adam (and the rest of the team: Alex MacCaw, Andrew Powell, Louie Penaflor, Rhazes Spell, Rich Tretola, Juan Sanchez and myself.) announced that we'd be picking up where "Artemis" fizzled out. We've been contacted by folks from across the globe who are interested in leveraging Merapi for more robust application development with Adobe AIR.

What is it? If you are reading this post, you probably already know. If you are scratching your head wondering what Merapi is all about, you can check out this previous post that gives an overview of the project.

For you that know about Merapi (and who landed here searching for it, or for Adobe AIR and OS/device integration) things are brewing extra hot, and we wanted to get the news out that the initial alpha framework is nearing completion. Once things are buttoned up and we've got some more things fleshed out, we will take the cover off, and fully Open Source it.

Until then, check out what Adam has put up today, the first "real" example of Merapi doing it's thing using a classic "Hello World".

Oh what the heck, I've embedded his video here as well, but you really should head over to Adam's Blog to learn more about this most recent news.

Merapi "Hello World" Example

Some other Stuff - "Localing" and AMF3 Support

One cool feature of Merapi will be to allow developers to do something that we have started calling "reverse remoting"... or for lack of a better term, "localing".

Don't get stuck on the term, but feedback on the concept would be great!

In Flash remoting, an application can call out to query the server application to get info on the state of a variable, object, etc.

Instead of only being able to call out to the server (as in Flash remoting), Merapi will allow your Java application to call "into" your AIR application to get the status just the same.

Also... Another cool thing that has surfaced is that Merapi will leverage some of the open source code from Adobe's Blaze DS, which will provide for full AMF3 support, which means efficient binary data flowing between AIR and your local Java code.

Now, that's pretty cool!

For more information on Merapi's explosion of RIA goodness...

• The Merapi Facebook Group
• Merapi Project Home Page (Current points to Adam's Blog... Site is Coming Soon)
• Youtube Videos (more coming soon)