Adobe Flex Architecture & Frameworks Overview plus Merapi Preview at Chicago Flex / AIR Developers Group

Last week I teamed up with Rhazes Spell to give a talk to the Chicago Flex and Adobe AIR Developers Group. First off, it is great to finally see a user group in Chicago dedicated to Adobe-based RIA technology... It's been a long time in the coming!

I've been involved in the Adobe RIA community for quite some time, and have always been a little dissapointed in my own fair city's lack of organization around an RIA development community (and I suppose by saying that, I am equally at fault!) Granted Chicago isn't a total Flex community virgin... I do recognize the unparalleled efforts of Igor Ilyinsky who's been running the Chicago Cold Fusion and Flex User Group for several years. It probably makes a lot of sense for these guys to gang up and unify in some way, as there is strength in numbers and a solid community of developers should have as much representation as possible.

Anyway, I was asked to give a presentation to the Flex & AIR Group at an event that was hosted at our Roundarch offices. The week leading up to this presentation was pretty jam packed with client obligations and a trip to our New York office, so to get a little help, I asked Rhazes to join me and contribute his thoughts.

Because the Chicago group is quite new, and we anticipated there to be a wide array of folks in the audience, we decided to generalize our presentation and cover some basics on Flex RIA application architecture and an overview of Flex frameworks. After all, when you are new to a technology, getting started on the right foot makes all the difference in the world, and we thought this topic would help the group adopt Flex with fewer introductory frustrations and development dead-ends.

Borrowing some insight from Ali Mills and Luke Bayes's great presentation (and research) on the various Flex frameworks floating around the Internet, Rhazes and I broke things down and gave a "What are frameworks 101" along with an overview of items to consider when defining the architecture your Adobe Flex application(s).

We wrapped up the presentation in about 40 minutes and then I took about 10 minutes to talk about The Merapi Project. It was also great to have some of our friends from Digital Primates at the event, including Louie Penafor who is also on the Merapi team. Louie's created the coolest AIR/Merapi example (I think) to date, which is an AIR application that allows you to acquire images from a scanner using TWAIN. Good stuff, big brain, and a really nice guy at that.
It was also nice to see Mike Nimer, who I consider to be one of the longest-standing members of the Flex community and now one of the primary brains over at Digital Primates.

I gave an overview of Merapi, showed off our pretty nifty MacBook Pro "Gyro" example, also known as "Merapi and Physics". People were interested in the project, and it looks like some of the attendees will come and sign up for the Alpha program for Merapi.

It was great to be able to talk about pretty deep technology with this group, and finish up making the point that all of the bits and bytes would be for nothing if it weren't for the user's that we need to design for.

I can't help but to share my enthusiasm for creative technology and my thoughts around design thinking as it applies to technology and how "we" use technology in our daily lives.

It is the people that make up these local community groups that are going to be the ones that build the applications of the future, and it really is important to help foster the community so that it incubates innovation benefits all of us.

Here is a copy of our presentation slides

View the Video of our Presentation

The Growing Connection - Applying High Tech to World Hunger

What do Google, Wired Magazine, the band Wilco, Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, The University of Ghana, the Galloping Gourmet and the United Nations all have in common?

They all have or have had some involvement in a truly unique grass-roots initiative called "The Growing Connection". The Growing Connection is a grassroots project developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations supported by the folks listed above and many other private and public sector partners.

Ken Waagner, one of my most favorite people in the world, is partially responsible for the success of this project. In his role with the organization (which is too diverse for me to describe), he's been managing their online operations and working to spread the word and set up programs across the country for several years.

So, what is The Growing Connection, and what's so interesting about it?

To understand that, I think you have to first understand a bit about the organization that is really behind the program, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

This organization within the UN was founded in 1945 with a "mandate to raise levels of nutrition and standards of living, to improve agricultural productivity, and to better the condition of rural populations." The organization has worked for decades to alleviate poverty and hunger by promoting agricultural development, improved nutrition and the pursuit of food security - defined as the access of all people at all times to the food they need for an active and healthy life.

The Growing Connection is a program that has been put into place by these folks at the United Nations. Instead of re-creating my own description of the organization, I just ripped the following off of the Growing Connection Web site:

• The Growing Connection links people and cultures in a revolutionary campaign that introduces low-cost water efficient and sustainable food growing innovations hand in hand with access to technology and information via existing and emerging technologies. It provides a sound educational foundation, and offers hundreds of families, both in America and abroad, a concrete opportunity to earn income and climb out of desperation. Perhaps most important, The Growing Connection engages people – a network of committed individuals - in an elegant solution to one of man’s fundamental challenges.
  
  
• How does it work? School gardening programs and community gardens around the world grow vegetables in an EarthBox system. that becomes a common growing platform for all participants. Students grow food, conduct horticultural experiments and share their lessons and experiences with each other using IT connectivity. Through modern IT installations,
  
  
• The Growing Connection participants in a number of countries are directly linked. And importantly, they are also connected to sources of vital information and advice on growing food. Those once the most isolated can now grow, learn, and chose their own opportunities and destinies.
  

I've known about this program for years, and over that time, have seen more and more people get involved in one way or another. With this in mind, it is understandable that while watching Dean Kamen talk about his "water machine" on the Colbert Report, I got fixated on thinking about how the availibility of fresh drinking water (and water for crops) as well as a reliable supply of fresh, safe food, will indeed change the world.

Never before in human history has this been the case. What has been the case, however, is that the formation of each and every sophisticated and robust society in history started with the reliable availability of food and water. (Basically the premise that when people arent' focused on where their next meal comes from, they can work on other things).

I think I am getting ahead of myself here....

So on a micro-level, how do individuals and businesses help to make a difference in the world? More specifically, how can people like you and me help to make the availability of fresh reliable food a reality for the billion or so folks in our world where it is not?

I suppose it is just about getting involved in one way or another. Every little bit helps... and I've listed out some of the ways I've seen people applying innovation to help out The Growing Connection:

Wired Magazine - NextFest 2006

When Wired magazine put on NextFest in New York in 2006, they provided a Growing Connection exhibit. This exhibit, pictured above, relied on fresh food grown using the EarthBox system employed in the Growing Connection program. Hundreds (or maybe thousands) of corn stalks and other herbs and vegetables were grown by Philson Warner's students from New York City.


Google, Inc - Growing Connection Garden

Everyone in the tech industry has heard about the great gourmet lunches that are served up for Google employees. Having eaten in the Google cafeterias, I can personally vouch for this! Where do these fresh and tasty veggies come from? Would you believe that there is an official "Growing Connection Garden" at Google?

The Garden consists of 100 EarthBoxes all planted with vegetables and herbs from different regions of the world. The Garden was planned in cooperation with the Chefs at Google, and made possible with support from Google and the Master Gardeners of Santa Clara County and volunteers from Google, University of California - Cooperative Extension, EarthBox, and TGC.

Rhazes Spell, one of my best pals and co-workers has come up with a concept that would provide for data capture and data visualization of Earthbox performance (soil conditions, oxygen / co2 levels, etc, etc). His idea is directly related to the Open Source project that we are both involved with: The Merapi Project

The idea would be to build an external hardware device that could be placed in the soil and transmit data either wired or wireless, back to a monitoring machine that used Merapi to push information to an Adobe AIR software application that was Web connected. This would allow for real-time data capture from Earthboxes across the globe, with a single user interface for data analysis.

If you take it one step further, you find yourself at Ken Waagner's ultimate vision for the community and social content aspects of The Growing Connection.

Imagine children (and adults) from across the globe working together to learn about food production and sharing tips, ideas and information about their experiences that can benefit others.

There is really no end to the impact that people can make if they only try. As more and more people find themselves drawn to helping out The Growing Connection, perhaps these next few years will be monumental in solving the problem of world hunger. If Dean Kamen can bring water to the world and The Growing Connection can help bring the food...

Well, that would be amazing.

Want to get involved? You can donate to The Growing Connection, contact me so I can put you in touch with Rhazes, reach out to Ken Waagner and let him know how you want to get involved, or contact The Growing Connection folks at the UN.