We felt that the best way to approach solving this issue was to first understand the Flex Framework lifecycle. The lifecyle provides four main stages: creation, growth, maturity and destruction. Adobe has talked about this since the launch Flex but not all developers are familiar with the actual process. Even if you are familiar with the lifecycle, understanding the intricacies and what is available to you as a developer is not well documented or easily digestible. We are seeing a movement of Flex experts researching the topic and trying to provide better insight into the overall process. At Flex|360, RJ Owen and Brad Umbaugh did entire presentation on the subject. At Adobe MAX, there were multiple sessions that covered these concepts.

Yet, even with this kind of coverage, the topic is so broad and deep that many of these sessions have to skim over some of the more minuet details for brevity’s sake. Our own curiosity had been peaked and we decided to pull back the covers of the Flex SDK and take a look for ourselves. Over the last two months we have spent hundreds of hours working on a white-paper (research, discussion, writing and editing) that explores the Flex Component and Application lifecycle. We are proud to announce the release of new DevelopmentArcâ„¢ Article section and the white-paper “Understanding the Adobe Flex® 3 Component and Framework Lifecycle“.

This article is a living document, one that we hope to grow and expand over time. We are always looking for feedback and questions about the content of the article. As you read the document and you find yourself with a question or idea to improve upon let us know! We hope that reading this article is as enlightening to you as it was to us…

[Read The Article]

We finally got loaded and on the runway at 12:30pm the next day but we then got an announcement that a passenger on the plane didn’t have enough medicine to make the flight and the doctors felt it was a life threatening risk, so we had to roll back to the stand and have the passenger exit. This caused another hour delay while the passenger was deplaned. Due to this new delay we missed our 7:50am flight from Heathrow to Milan, and we had to take the 9:50am. Luckily we made that one and finally got into Milan around 1pm Monday afternoon. We were supposed to get in at 9pm Sunday evening. Joy.

Just to add salt to the wound, British Airways managed to lose Aaron’s luggage. Of course we had to wait for all the luggage to come out before we figured this out and then Aaron had to go report it missing. It ended up that it never made it out of Heathrow. Of course both Ashley (Aaron’s wife) and my luggage made it so how they only lost his is mind boggling. The “wait for the luggage” delay made us miss our train from Malpensa (airport) to Codorna (train station in Milan) and we had to wait another 40 minutes for the next train. At this point we just started laughing and sat back and got our first espresso from the airport bar.

We got to our hotel around 4pm and by that point we had no interest in exploring the city. We were hungry but all the restaurants are closed from about 3pm till 7:30pm or so. The typical meal structure for a Milanese is to go to a bar after work, grab a light snack and coffee and then eat dinner around 9pm. We were so exhausted by that time we just decided head over to the conference, register, get our passes, head back to the hotel to call it a night and get room service for dinner. There was no way I could make it past 7pm after a trip like that.

The next day, Aaron and I got up early, ate breakfast at the amazing breakfast buffet the hotel put on (seriously one of the best I have had) and then headed over for our first 9am session. The session went very well, it was standing room only (150+ people) and the audience was very receptive to what we had to say. Aaron was told by multiple people it was the best session they had had so far. By this point, we were totally tech/conference burnt out (North America MAX was intense) so we decided to bail on the conference till our next session at 2:45pm and meet up with Aaron’s wife Ashley. We caught the Metro down to the Duomo, scoped it our and then wandered the central part of town for a few hours. We got a nice lunch and found a fantastic street market that sold all kinds of goods and foods.

We then headed back for our 2:45 session which went over well, but as usual we had a bit of push back from a few designers (I still owe you all a full post on our session, more on this to come I promise!). Outside of some heated discussions with a few designers, the session went very well and we headed back out for more exploring and dinner. That night we met up with Ryan Stewart, Mark Anders, Jim Corbett, Doug Winnie, Ted Patrick and many many other Adobe employees (and fellow hangers-on) for the classic after sessions hotel bar drink-a-thon. We had some killer conversations and Enrique Duvos introduced us to the local drink, the Negroni. Its like a martini but they add Campari to give it some kick and flavor. Doug said it tasted like a combination of shag carpet and wheatgrass, but Aaron and I loved them. Thank you Enrique for showing us the way… next time you are in town we will take you to the Redwood room for Negronis on us.

The next morning we hit the Naviglio Grande Canals and then headed back to MAX to join Doug Winnie for his “Flex Project Workflows” session. Doug built his session around a project that we all worked on together. Aaron and I chimed in on points that we learned over the lifespan of the project and talked about how Flex Gumbo and Catalyst would change the way we operate in the future. After the session Doug was all done with his responsibilities for MAX and we all headed to the Brea district for dinner.

Doug headed back to the States the next morning and Aaron, Ashley and I headed off to a city tour that we had booked. We got to tour the Castello Sforzesco, we had a chance to see “The Last Supper” by Leonardo Da Vinci, we got a peek inside the Teatro alla Scala and we toured inside the Duomo. It was a great guided tour and I snapped a ton of pics of the city. We then grabbed some amazing pizza for lunch, walked the shopping district and drank Pina Coladas at Cova (I ordered Panna Cotta, the waiter heard Pina Colada, sigh). We headed back to the hotel for a nap and then went back to the Brea district for Indian food at the Curry House. We were kind of burnt out on Pizza and Pasta by that time.

Aaron and Ashley headed out the next morning to meet some friends in Switzerland (damn I am jealous) and Heidi Williams (of the Flex Builder team, and my old boss) and I happened to have the same flight so we headed off to the airport to go home. The flight home was uneventful (minus the cold) and I am back home trying to recover from jetlag. Nothing like getting up at 4am wide awake. I have posted a few choice pics from the trip that covers our time in Milan and MAX Europe and I can’t wait for our next adventure!

[ Photo gallery available in blog post. ]

Aaron and I have a TON of notes and thoughts that are being worked on, all thanks to MAX North America. I am sure we will have even more coming from MAX EU. We will both be working on a ton of new posts over the coming few weeks and at the same time we are in the process of getting our DevelopmentArc site proper (don’t forget client work and other assorted projects we are working on too!). More to come on that later. So, for those of you in/from the States that celebrate T-day, enjoy! For those of you that don’t, no worries, you can laugh at us as we Americans stumble around in a triptiphane induced food coma.

Oh, and for those of you that read this blog for Flex/Flash/Technology info, read up on my newest obsession while I am away: Degrafa. Degrafa is short for “Declarative Graphics Framework” and it is a set of Classes that enable you to create simple to complex graphical content using MXML instead of having to write a bunch of ActionScript graphics calls. But that is just the tip of the iceberg, you can actually make component skins (states and all!) using their framework. Its rare for me to get this excited about a new framework, I am usually super hesitant about jumping in, but after a demo at the MAX Birds of a Feather, and now getting my hands dirty in it, I am super impressed. Good work guys!

Highlights

• Flash Catalyst’s (codenamed Thermo) ability to directly import PSD, AI, PNG files, maintain their complete layout structure and content yet the output is a Flex App. Aaron and I will blog a lot more about Catalyst, its current feature set for the public preview and how we see it changing workflows within a project and the community.
• Flash Alchemy, an Adobe Lab technology that translates C/C++ code into ActionScript 3. Alchemy demo’s included the classic Quake port example shown last year, a NES ROM emulator, OGG file reading / playback and encryption functionality using standard open source libraries.
• Dreamweaver CS4’s ability to “freeze” an Ajax application in Live View and the inspect the current state of the application’s JavaScript and the CSS/HTML layout.
• RMFTP – A new video / audio protocol within Flash Player 10 that supports the ability to enable peer-to-peer communication without the requirement of FLash Media Server as a single point of contact / distribution.

Full Notes

• As usual, the 2nd session is all fun and games. They have a hysterical kick off presentation using a “spy theme” where they are looking at new “tech”, very much the Bond meets Q to see the new toys.
• Ben Forta is showing an AIR application that controls home lighting / control. The AIR app is the front end UI to the growing popularity of “smart homes” that have automation systems throughout the house.
• Doug Winnie is stepping up in the “Design Lab”. Go DOUG!
• Looking at Flash / InDesign integration. ID can export XFL which is imported into Flash Authoring. Fully editable. XFL is an XML file format that represents Flash content. This is similar to FXG but is Flash Authoring specific. I am not quite clear on the differences between FXG and XFL, but as I learn more I will share.
• Demoing bones support in Flash CS4 and the ability to save animation presets.
• PSD now has the ability use the image resampling tech demo’d last year. What this means is that you can scale an image vertically or horizontally and Photoshop has the ability to intelligently scale the image to retain scale ratio of core elements within the image. The example they used is the ability scale a picture horizontally of surfers at the beach and the surfers are not scale/skewed but the water and mountains in the background are resampled to manage the scale. Really hard to describe in type, you have to see it fully grasp how amazing this is.
• PSD can now automask out all soft areas across multiple layers, create masks and then resample into a single image. The use case was having a series of photos that each had a section that was slightly out of focus. The new feature enables the user to select all the images and then intelligently blend them to create a seamless and in-focus image.
• 3D image loading and control with in PSD. Can paint on, can add 2D images as skins to 3D content
• Ryan Stewart and NJ are demoing Flash Catalyst
• FC shares the same FLex Project, able to load PSD and keeps all layers and content from the PSD, Aaron and I are doing a presentation on this topic so expect a set of post all around Catalyst.
• Introducing project Alchemy is a conversion/translation application that takes C/C++ code and converts it to AS3, demoed SHA1 SHA2 conversion, zork ports (yes ZORK!)
• They used alchemy to create an OGG vorbis player, a RAW conversion app that imports and decodes RAW files. They then used the PNG conversion from AS3CoreLib to export the RAW file to PNG on the desktop. All alchemy runs cross frame so that it does not affect the rendering of content. This means that as the Alchemy code is running the rendering engine and continue to display and update the screen. This is very important for heavy proccessing like reading in a RAW or OGG file.
• rendering PDF in Flash using C++ code that has been converted.
• They then showed a quake port for AIR and NES Rom emulator
• They are now demoing Flex Builder 4. First import of Catalyst FXP.
• Now showing Cold Fusion Bolt IDE which is an Eclipse Plug-in. Code hinting, completion, coloring, query awareness for Cold Fusion.
• FB4 has the ability to read PHP and CF backend APIs and exposes the API inside FB. This enables FB to handle mapping through the UI.
• FB4 finally has the old Network Monitor feature back! The monitor is like a built in proxy that enables debugging and network communication within the Flex builder IDE. I worked on the Flex Builder 1 version when FB was built on top of Dreamweaver. It was a killer feature that was pulled during the Eclipse port and kept being cut. So glad to see it back in action.
• Ensemble is a new plugin for Visual Studio which enables Flex and .NET integration with an AMF C# application tool.
• Showing AIR using Ajax and Ajax productivity in DW4
• DW4 has the ability to freeze an Ajax application and then you can edit the content / CSS
• Demoing how Google and Adobe are working on the virtual user and the headless player. (more on this later, we have tons of notes from the Flash Internals sessions)
• Flash Media Server (FMS) 3.5 enables dynamic streaming which enables the ability to change resolution on the fly. This can be user or system driven. The amazing part is that when the res change is requested, such as from 420p to 720p video does not lose the current position or even stops playing (if you have the bandwidth)
• They have a new Flash video encoder then enables the ability to toggle quality and provide multiple on-the-fly resolution streams for live content
• They are enabling the ability to pause live streaming video from the Flash Media Server and enable a DVR experience.
• Flash Player peer-to-peer Flash Player communication for video and audio streams using a new protocol called RMFTP

• NYT is working on an amazing AIR app to deliver news content in a very slick and intuitive UI.
• Adobe is working on Flash Player 10 for the iPhone. Its not ready yet, but they are officially working on it.
• AIR 1.5 is now live and supports Flash Player 10 content, it also is the first production application to use Webkit enabled with SquirrelFish

Full Notes

• Shantanu is talking about changes in the market and looking for a seamless experience across all devices. From handheld to TV interfaces.
• Enterprise is changing due the driving forces of web 2.0 interactivity and clients now want the same UI and experiences with large enterprise applications.
• Multiscreen experience is the near future, and will become much more demand
• The Flash Platform is the focus on the idea of the multiscreen format and content delivery. Because the player is available on so many platforms it enables rapid development that can create a unified experience across multiple devices.
• Code name “Thermo” is now called Flash Catalyst
• Flex Gumbo / Flex Builder 4 / Catalyst preview builds are available to the attendees.
• Shantanu is showing how the Flash platform is being used by education and non-profits. They are showing an example by using Bono’s “Project (Red)” and how Flash and AIR are creating a new form of branding and name awareness which is benefiting Project (RED).
• Kevin Lynch (CTO) is coming up to talk about the main tends that are transforming software.
• Client and Cloud computing is growing and now becoming a blend of both technologies. No longer is it just client
• Social Computing, software is becoming less of a solo experience but a group experience
• Devices and Desktop: multiple platforms that we are delivering to.
• The Flash Platform is enabling content (video / audio / data) to be delivered to your audience in a constant method.
• Kevin is demoing Hobnox, which uses Flash Player 10 to create an interactive experience to make music
• Showing 3D / Audio interaction built by gSkinner demoing audio waveform analysis and rendering the audio changes as a 3D animation.
• Showing PixelBender in Photoshop.com and how they have custom effects that can be applied to the image.
• MLB just announced they are planning on using the Flash Platform for the 2009 season. Now all 4 major american professional sports now stream video via Flash.
• AIR is now launched as version 1.5 which has Flash Player 10 and the first production version of Webkit with Squirrelfish. AIR 1.5 now enables encrypted content within the local SQLLite engine.
• Due to the new text engine in AIR 1.5, NYTimes is looking at AIR as a way to deliver to content. This will be releasing a next generation news reader application that can render content true to printed form. The app downloads and caches the day’s new paper (enabling offline access / reading) and will continue to check out RSS feeds (when online) for new content. As the application scales the content re-renders in a layout that best suits the content (including thumb-nailing of images). Columns wrap, words hyphenate the way you would expect. Keyboard shortcuts enable content navigation and access. The app introduces a browse feature that allows for quick navigation of articles by showing a thumb-nailing system for articles that is similar to an image navigation system. The app supports video and text advertising and also all of NYT video access. The app even has the daily crossword enabled so that you can complete it.
• Kevin is now showing an AIR app that is running on a Linux handheld device that is actually running the NYT app. SICK!
• Ann Lewnes and Maria Shirver (First Lady of California) are coming on stage to talk about the California Legacy Trails, which is focusing on education and integration of new technology. The goal is to show and inform people about the history in California and develop online “Legacy Trails” like the ones created in Boston. Focus on women of history, mission trails, wine trails, movie trails, and enable people to create their own trails. These trails are meant to be read online and then they can be walked or driven. Such as an Author trail that shows you their homes and cities. They are using Flash now (just launched this week) and plan to have an AIR app in 2009.
• Back to the cloud. Adobe is showing a new Flex app called “Tour de Flex” which enables users to learn about Flex and the APIs. It also shows the AIR APIs and cloud APIs with code examples. This is not only Adobe cloud services but 3rd party services. This includes realtime code examples and how it works in the Flex language. Now showing Amazon, Twitter and Salesforce.
• A head of salesforce is talking about how Enterprise is expensive, hard, all about upgrades and where “innovation goes to die”. This is changing very quickly due to technologies like Flash and AIR but also the back-end is changing to a new model. The backend is now becoming more selective about what you want to use instead of having to install and manage it all.
• The movement is moving towards remote services that eliminate having to run your own server system. Pay as you use is becoming the new focus and also enables public APIs to build applications for your clients on top of the cloud platform. This removes the management of the infrastructure and enables better innovation.
• Kevin is now shifting over to talking about social computing. Such as collaboration within Flash platform applications.
• Nigel Pegg (an old cohort of mine @ Macromedia) is on stage to talk all about CoCoMo. CoCoMo is a new Flex / server technology that allows realtime collaboration so that as one user interacts in with the app the other viewers can see the interaction (sharing cursor). CoCoMo also enables webcam video streaming and realtime audio through the Flash Player and the application. This is not screen sharing (passing bitmaps), the data that is being sent over the line is only mouse position or graph zoom levels. This is important because secure / sensitive data does not have to be sent over the wire and can be kept locally in the application. CoCoMo comes with a client SDK / Component set that then is integrated into a cloud service that is provided by Adobe. Realtime features include video/audio (which can be peer-to-peer or through the cloud depending on security needs) file sharing and other UI interactions. The platform is now available as a free beta service.
• Adobe is announcing Adobe Wave. It is a desktop app that enables subscriptions to notification data from services such as Facebook or twitter. The tool has the ability to add new services support a common notification API. Another example is the ability tie into Evite’s notification system to inform you with a desktop alert when someone updates the evite or responds to the invitation.
• Kevin is now moving over to Devices & Desktops. Mobile phones are more then 50% of the online / web enabled devices. PCs are only a small portion of the internet bandwidth. They are seeing a trend of people (younger generation) skipping the computer and going to the mobile as the first web enabled device they use. Adobe is now pushing the concept of “Mobile First” which is about thinking about creating content for mobile apps before building / designing PC based applications.
• Adobe is looking at a browsing the web on moblie devices and enabling Flash on the platform. They are looking to not port Flash to a mobile version but to use the full version on the high-end mobile devices. Kevin is showing a Nokia phone running Symbian using Flash Player 10. The content he is showing is not mobile content, but the full SWF loaded from a site, currently NYTimes. He is now showing a Window’s media player using Opera running the lastFM website using Flash Player 10 to play audio content from the live website. He is now showing the full YouTube site on a mobile device.
• Kevin just showed the iPhone but they ARE WORKIJNG on a Flash Player it, although its not running.
• Kevin is now showing an Android phone that is using Flash Player 10 on the OS. Google is fully supporting Flash in the Android OS.
• Kevin is now showing FlashLite on other devices. The current workflow makes the user launch FlashLite and then navigate to the Flash application and then they user has to launch it. The actual application experience is good but getting to it is not. They are working on a new technology called the FlashLite deployable application. This enables a distribution system to enable create stores or even host your own application on your site which enables download and installation.
• Kevin is demoing an interactive Samasung device that is aware of devices. For example, he points the device to a TV and able to push images from the handheld device to the full screen device. he then pointed to another screen and was then able to send images to the main screen. Another person joined the demo and showed how multiple handhelds work together, This works for audio and video and multiple devices can be pointed to the same screen and shared. Kevin is now showing a game and both handheld devices interact with it.

Before we headed over to the meet and greet, Aaron and I put the finishing touches on our session presentations and got a look at our brand new business cards. We are proud to announce our new firm, DevelopmentArc. We will be working hard on the new site (its very much a placeholder) but we have some interesting plans and announcements once we get the site live. Keep an ear and eye out for it.

If any of you are planning on attending MAX, look me up and please say hi. I am always looking forward to a good tech conversation. I am hoping to blog a fair bit from the conference, when time allows and I will be taking notes as usual. I will try to convert the notes to posts over the coming weeks when ever I can sneak in some tim. An interesting point I just read about is that all the MAX sessions will be posted on AdobeTV a few weeks after the conference is complete. I have been throughly enjoying the 360|Flex and Ajax Experience video posts they have been sharing. Lots of amazing content. So I am sure there will be a TON of new content once MAX is done.

So, where have I been all this time and why has this blog gotten so quiet? Well, first there was the session planning, then their is client work, oh and I am in the middle of starting a company with Aaron and moving all our clients to the new firm (more details to come), its also wedding season so I have been traveling around a lot for those and planning my own (well, Xina is really planning it I just help where I can). I am just a bit underwater and trying to take a few minutes to motivate me to write the blog has kind of been tough. Oh, and I just got Fable 2, Fallout 3 and LittleBigPlanet… there just isn’t enough time to do it all!

I will try to blog a bit more in the coming months, especially once we get our company fully launched and hopefully reports from MAX. Until next then!

Hopefully, when I get back and settled in I will have a few more cycles to sit down and write, although looking at my calender and what is planned this may be tough. There are some big plans for this fall and I can’t wait to start talking about them but for now its heads down and work, work, work.

One of the challenges of writing an article like this is first defining your audience and then determining how to cover the topic in the alloted text. The Edge sets a word count guideline and this limits how deep I could or in this case could not go. Personally, I fully support the word count guide because this both focuses the topic and generates more digestible articles. Yet, on a topic as broad and as deep as this one I had to focus more on an introductory guide to coding standards and adoption.

The second challenge is determining your audience. My goal was to create an article that worked for both readers who have never heard of coding standards, and readers that have been using them for years. I always try to create a broad stripe across my reader base because I want to inform as many people as possible. This thought process was kind of beaten into me during my years as a Technical Support rep and team-lead at Macromedia. There is nothing like having to write Tech-notes and email support to teach you how to write to a broad audience.

The main point I wanted to get across with this article is that coding standards are actually much more then just code formating. Code formatting, or code conventions, really focus on how you name variables, methods, classes, etc. Yet, this is just the tip of the coding standards iceberg. One of the least discussed aspects of coding standards is the adoption and implementation practice of code design patterns. As developers, we need to better understand how adoption of patterns, frameworks and micro-architectures help structure our code. Not only do they provided rapid development but they also help guide us into a more structured development process.

As RIA and web application development expands we are seeing a demand for much more complex and scalable applications. Scalability is not just about user load but includes further expansion of features and performance over time. More and more developers are being asked to create applications that have a lifespan longer then just a few months. Some people may gaffe at that comment, but if you look at a lot of “rich” applications up to this point, most have been for marketing campaigns and advertising. The nature of these kinds of projects do not focus on lifespan and version updates. Their focus is on making them work in a short time to meet the marketing deadline and then get them out the door.

With the trend of Web 2.0 (which I hate as a term), the web world is quickly being pushed into the long standing Desktop Software model. This is forcing a lot of us to re-evaluate how we design and develop our online enabled applications. This is a scary yet wonderful time in our industry as we are rapidly adopting and developing new ways of web application design and construction. Due to this push I feel its time to help expose more of us to coding standards. My article is more a call to arms then a definitive guide to coding standards implementation. If you are interested, take a read and add your thoughts to the comments…