Merapi is Live!!!

Yesterday afternoon I had the chance to do a final pass on the Merapi code that Adam Flater has been working so hard to wrap up, and after a "thumbs up", was able to post it to the Merapi Project Web site and finally approve/enable the 300 or so alpha users that we selected to participate in the program.

This is a pretty great milestone for the Merapi Project team, and (as we see it) the RIA development community as a whole. By bridging Java and Flex/AIR we are enabling developers to connect the two, allowing them to build more experiential user interfaces for their Java Applications and by allowing them to access the power of Java and Java libraries in thier Flex/AIR applications.

Much thanks to the rest of the folks on the Merapi Project team, especially Adam Flater. Without Adam's hard work, bright mind and determination Merapi would not exist... so thanks man!

While Merapi was created to help extend the functionality of Adobe AIR applications, it is the hope of the Merapi Project team (and the community as a whole) that future versions of Adobe AIR will not need Merapi to build more robust AIR applications.

You can sign up for the Merapi Alpha and download the code at the Merapi Project Web site.

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

RIAPalooza Recap - Thoughts, Photos & My Presentation Slides

The inaugural RIAPalooza event turned out to be quite successful and interesting for everyone who attended. For photos, check out the stream on Flickr and also view the Twitter stream.

I find that a lot of conferences become clouded with sales pitches disguised as presentations and force-fed information that is designed to push agendas of one form or another. This is why RIAPalooza was such a refreshing difference.

As an event that was conceived, planned, and put on by members of the Chicago development community, RIAPalooza was really focused on honest expert opinions and group discussions about the various platforms available for RIA design and development.

I was honored to be able to give the conference opening presentation on Friday evening. As usual, I couldn't help but to talk abou the importance of user experience and about how the technologies that we now have as part of our design and development toolkits are much less about technology and more about enabling people to take creative ideas and bring them to fruition.

In my presentation, I gave an overview of the last 13 years of user interface technologies that we've had at our disposal and how they've evolved to the fantastic tools that we have today. In addition, I shared some concepts with the audience that I believe will be instrumental in the next 3 or so years as we continue to work as creative problem solvers with a flair for digital end-products and both online and off-line user experiences.

Here is a copy of my presentation

After my talk, all of the speakers that were in attendance joined me in front of the conference attendees for a rather lively panel discussion. There was no topic for the panel, rather "just ask what you want to ask". This format lead to some rather interesting and unexpected topics. One would think that most of the questions would be related to specific technologies or "the how" of Rich Internet Application development. Instead, the audience seemed to focus their questions on other topics, all of much more interest to a guy like me! Some of the items that were touched on:

• What business factors go into deciding which RIA platform would be best for me?
• How can I convince my upper management that user experience matters and that we need to build more experiential software?
• How do you convince large corporations to adopt new creative technologies? What is the justification?
• Are plugins an issue? Whether it be Adobe Flex or Microsoft Silverlight, users need a plugin. How do we justify this?
• How is the process of designing and building a Rich Internet Application different than the Web sites or software that we have been building?

As you can imagine, the panel of experts had a lot to say! The information that was shared with the audience was spot on and extremely useful and I am sure that the panel discussion added a lot of value for those in attendance. The panel, which was supposed to only run for a bit and end prior to 9:00 PM went over and we were still taking questions when the facility started turning off lights and kicking us all out. That doesn't happen often, and was a sign for me that the presentations for this conference were going to be really valuable and interesting.

The rest of the conference (on Saturday) was filled with back-to-back knowledge sharing and expert insight into RIA design and development and because of the mix of presenters, covered the range of tools and technologies available in the market.

I spent the majority of my time speaking with Josh Holmes and Mike Labriola. Josh is a new Silverlight/RIA evangelist from Microsoft and Mike is a friend, fellow Chicagoan and perhaps one of the most wicked Adobe Flex architects on the planet. Mike is the founder of Digital Primates and works with Jeff Tapper and Mike Nimer... some of the brightest minds in the Adobe enterprise development community.


Josh and Mike teamed up to give a co-presentation on RIA best practices from both a MS and Adobe technology perspective and didn't only provide some great information, were great together and highly entertaining. I really hope to do some more talks with these guys and would love to seem them tag-team again at some larger events.

Personally, I found that the information presented by the handful of Microsoft staffers at the conference to be really valuable. As the guy who manages Roundarch's relationship inside Microsoft's "Mercury Agency Professional Program" I am often more focused on strategy and creative idea generation than "how to build" things. For someone who is generally a bit further away from the code than I sometimes should be, the information that was presented was worthwhile to say the least.

I learned a lot from Corey Miller and Anthony Hendley, clearly experts in MS Silverlight, WPF and XAML and was blown away by the expertise that both Corrina Barber and Tim Heuer showed (and shared) regarding Silverlight development and designer-developer collaboration and workflow. Very valuable and eye-opening stuff, and critical to anyone that is going to embark on a Silverlight-based project.

I was also really pleased to hear some of the ideas that have been brewed in my fair city of Chicago as Ka Wai Cheung (From We Are Mammoth) talked about his project that combines .NET with Flex and is essentially an online application built in .NET that builds Adobe Flex applications. It is innovation like this that really inspires me (and should inspire everyone!)

Lastly, Geoff Cubitt, President of Roundarch, showed off some of the applications that we've built in both AJAX and Adobe Flex and talked about how application development changes when moving from non-rich to "richer" to "very rich" UI technologies. People really "got it" when he showed off the demo application that we've developed for Fast (enterprise search) with an Adobe Flex UI. Fast was just purchased by Microsoft so it was great to show another example where technology from both Adobe and Microsoft have been leveraged to create a killer user experience.

All in all, it was a great experience and I was fortunate to have met some of the interesting people that I did and have such great conversations. It is a real testament to the will of the "community" that events like this are taking shape across the country (and world). It is thrilling to see that a lot of the ideas that I've been harping on for years becoming accepted by the masses and that the community as a whole is now focusing on technology as a means to create better user experiences.

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)