Andrew Shorten

Whilst there are hundreds of publicly available AIR applications that you can download from the AIR showcase, the Adobe AIR Marketplace and other third-party sites, there are some that you might not have seen - the AIR applications that various teams within Adobe are using on a daily basis to improve personal productivity and provide convenient access to internal systems.

I think it’s great that we’re using our own technology to solve business problems - it really demonstrates the capability and robustness of our platform and I hope that by showing some of the applications here, it might provide some inspiration as to how you could use Flex and AIR within your organization or for a customer.

If you’ve attended an Adobe event then you may have seen the Adobe Directory demonstrated - this has to be one of the most useful and widely used tools we have inside Adobe.

Adobe Directory does exactly what it says on the tin - providing convenient desktop access to a directory of all 7,000+ Adobe employees; it works both online and offline, automatically synchronizing local data with our LDAP servers, it can show where an employee sits on an office plan and when connected to the VPN, will show a photo of the employee and their busy/free status using information from Microsoft Exchange. A new version of the application is currently in the works which integrates with ‘Pacifica‘ to provide presence and direct dial capabilities from within the application.

We’ve actually released the source code for a generic version of the directory so that you can build your own company directory application - you can get it here.

Making sure that we provide great customer service and technical support is the job of Adobe’s Worldwide Customer Care organization. To help streamline the process for Adobe employees to request assistance for a customer, the team created the Adobe Customer Care Response Tool - an application that provides a convenient way to submit new issues and track existing support cases.

The tool was built using Flex and is made available as an AIR application, with ColdFusion providing all the necessary back-end services. Given that sales representatives, pre-sales consultants and other field staff are often on the road, the provision of an application that has full offline and data synchronization capabilities makes it far better than a browser-based solution.

Along with evangelists, the other group of Adobe employees who probably spend the most time traveling is the pre-sales team; consultants who support customers who are evaluating Adobe’s solutions, such as Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro and LiveCycle ES. Providing a productive way to capture the interaction a consultant has with a customer, so that the sales, pre-sales and, if necessary, support teams can see what is happening in an account has long been a challenge - with trip reports, either as an email, an entry to a team blog or as a PDF submission process, never quite solving the problem.

To overcome the limitations of trip reports the pre-sales team has recently implemented the Adobe SE Notebook as an AIR application. This application provides a convenient way to record activities, raise issues and submit product enhancement requests, and, as with the Adobe Customer Care tool, this has full offline and data synchronization capabilities, allowing consultants to review and update information whilst on-site with the customer.

The final application I wanted to highlight really plays to Adobe’s strengths - delivering a great experience. The Adobe Presentation Tool provides a way for Adobe’s sales and pre-sales team to deliver more engaging customer presentations - expanding upon the usual PowerPoint slide-ware, to deliver a multi-media rich presentation that leverages Adobe’s technology.

One of the challenges of having a large field organization is ensuring that everyone has the latest version of slides - the Adobe Presentation Tool solves this by automatically updating the core repository of slides available within the application, while still enabling full editing and re-ordering of custom slides so that employees can prepare personalized presentations.

So, that’s a quick round-up of some of the AIR applications we’re using within Adobe. I’m sure there are plenty more I haven’t come across or that are in the works… my vote for the next internal application to be built would have to be for submitting our expenses. Maybe one day

… is a question, that as an evangelist, I’m often asked. As momentum behind Rich Internet Applications continues, with an increasing recognition that there is a need to develop and deploy software applications that can span browser, desktop and device, and a choice of RIA-enabling technology platforms becoming available (from Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, Apple and others), it’s inevitable that more time needs to be spent evaluating technology options for a RIA project.

Undertaking due diligence for the selection of a technology platform is an important part of any project however and one of the challenges can be trying to identify the key differentiators of Adobe’s platform, given the breadth of information available on our site and the array of technology components that make up the platform (Flash Player, Flash Authoring, Flash Lite, AIR, Flex SDK, Flex Builder, BlazeDS, LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle ES, Flash Media Server, etc).

I thought I’d try and boil the answer down to five or six key points that I think should be considered if you’re evaluating Adobe’s platform. My aim was not to reproduce our corporate marketing, but rather distill what has resonated with the customers I’ve been speaking to about our platform; additionally, I thought I’d try and do it without mentioning a whole bunch of individual product names/brands (something which we normally do!). As always, feedback welcome on this via comments.

So, here goes… (relatively lengthy post ahead):

#1 Capabilities

The first, and possibly most important question, when considering RIA technologies, is to evaluate whether Adobe’s runtimes (which exist for browser and desktop) provide the features that you’re going to need on your project.

There are core framework capabilities, such as the provision of visual controls, layout managers, vector graphics rendering, data services, data binding and a robust event model, as well as core runtime attributes, such as small download size, high performance and cross-platform availability, that are required in order to deliver a Rich Internet Application; these will likely be provided by all RIA platforms over time.

So, what unique capabilities does Adobe’s runtime provide?

This is not a definitive list, but comparing the market right now, webcam support, microphone support, bi-directional text, graphics card acceleration, native 3D effects, bitmap manipulation, printing support, H.264 video playback and a high-quality VoIP audio codec are some of the differentiating features that you can take advantage of when building a browser-based RIA on Adobe’s platform *.

In addition, the ability to deploy your RIA using a desktop runtime means that you can access capabilities not offered within the browser environment - including, but not limited to, native windowing, native menus, full filesystem read/write access, client-side database, clipboard access, drag and drop, encrypted local storage, integrated HTML/Flash/PDF rendering, network detection and file-type registration.

#2 Ubiquity

For web-based deployment, convenient, instant-on access to Rich Internet Applications is important - it’s what people expect from using their browser. Should you need to go beyond the capabilities of the browser, you can leverage Adobe’s browser-based runtime, either as a part of an existing AJAX application, or to deliver a complete RIA, confident in the knowledge that it’s already deployed to 98% of Internet-connected computers.

As demand for richer, more engaging applications continues, Adobe is uniquely positioned to be able to “update the web” through the rapid distribution of our browser-based runtime - the latest version of which achieved 63% availability on Internet-connected computers within just three months. Additionally, Adobe builds and simultaneously ships this for Windows, Mac and Linux desktops, providing a consistent and supported runtime across these different operating systems.

#3 Deployment Flexibility

Whilst the browser represents one way to access Rich Internet Applications, we have an opportunity to further enrich the user’s experience by considering the most convenient and appropriate medium upon which to offer applications, content and services.

Adobe’s desktop runtime removes some of the restrictions imposed by the browser, enabling RIAs that persist on the user’s desktop, have fully-customized user interfaces, offer convenient desktop functionality (such as drag/drop, cut and paste and pop-up notifications) and can access both local and remote data.

The ability to build web and desktop applications, from a single code base, using either Adobe’s RIA development framework or AJAX frameworks, means that the barrier to creating desktop applications has been lowered significantly; and, just as with our browser-based runtime, these desktop applications can be deployed consistently to Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems **.

Going forward, as part of the Open Screen Project, Adobe has committed to delivering consistent runtimes across not just browser and desktop, but mobile phones and other consumer electronics devices.

#4 Proven Technology

Adobe’s RIA development framework has been in the marketplace for nearly four years, over which time we’ve seen a significant number of Rich Internet Applications be deployed by customers - the best place to see several hundred examples of these is at our showcase site.

We’ve made a significant investment in building a RIA platform, and so we’re also leveraging this to provide the next generation of Adobe software and services - from Photoshop Express to Adobe Media Player and the recently launched Acrobat.com applications, all of which are great examples of highly scaled, highly available applications distributed over the web.

#5 Expressiveness

The word rich in the term RIA is notoriously hard to define; while richness can be influenced by the convenience, relevance or satisfaction experienced from using an application, there is no doubt however that visual expressiveness is a huge part of what helps us differentiate an RIA from other web-based applications.

Adobe is continuing to lead the way in defining the expressiveness of applications that can be deployed over the web; with the next release of our runtimes adding features such as 3D effects, programmable graphics filters, advanced text layout and hardware acceleration, we’ll see rich and immersive online experiences that simply aren’t possible today. In addition, we’re continuing to work on exposing new features, tools and workflows to designers using Adobe Creative Suite, so that they can fully participate in the creation of Rich Internet Applications.

#6 Openness

Adobe is committed to supporting open source activities; contributing to existing projects such as SQLite, WebKit and Eclipse, ensuring our runtimes are available on open source platforms and delivering key RIA components (such as the development framework, the virtual machine used in our runtimes, and our remoting and messaging technologies) as open source code. In addition, Adobe has also released the specifications for a number of file formats and communication protocols so that third parties can build tools, runtimes and servers that utilize these formats.

As part of the Open Screen Project Adobe is working with a number of industry partners to ensure that we can extend our browser and desktop runtimes to mobile phones and consumer electronics devices; as part of this initiative, Adobe removed all licensing costs for deploying these runtimes and removed licensing restrictions for several key formats, including SWF.

#7 Innovation

With a history of disruptive innovation, I’m pleased to see that Adobe is continuing to lead the way in the RIA market. Sure, there’s always more work we can do to improve designer/developer workflow, fix bugs, improve documentation, etc, (all of which we’re doing), but who else right now is building large-scale RIAs with their own technology and exposing it to millions of customers, who else is extending the reach of RIAs to the desktop so that they work across different operating systems and who else is enabling enterprise-level RIAs with support for real-time collaboration, data push and online/offline data synchronization?

There’s lots more to do as we work with customers to define the next generation of software, and we’re always looking for feedback, bugs and participation to help us get there.

So, now you know why I think Adobe’s platform is a great choice for building RIAs, I encourage you to join the thriving development community, download an SDK or two and start building an application :)

* includes Flash Player 10 features.
** Linux version currently available as a pre-release, due for final release before end 2008

There’s a whole host of (relatively) new resources available which either focus on providing information about Rich Internet Applications, or which aggregate the most relevant news from the RIA market. In case you’ve missed them here are the resources that I’ve been looking at recently:

RIA Buzz newsletter

This newsletter is produced by Adobe every six weeks and provides a good summary of what’s hot in the RIA market; with links to essential articles from the Adobe Developer Connection site, details of forthcoming events and the ‘metablog’, a round-up of what’s been blogged about within the community, this an invaluable resource to ensure you stay up-to-date.

The nice thing about subscribing to this newsletter is that you’re not signing up to get any other communication from Adobe - so all you will receive is one newsletter approximately every six weeks. If you want to get a feel for what you’ll get then you can take a look at the May 2008 issue online.

Subscribe to RIA Buzz

Inside RIA

This site is part of the O’Reilly network and brings together some of the big names from the RIA community, including Andre Charland (Nitobi), RJ Owen (EffectiveUI) and Andrew Trice (Cynergy Systems), to provide news, comment and articles related to all aspects of RIA design, development and standards. This site doesn’t just cover Adobe technologies, so you get a good balance of coverage from across the RIA landscape.

There is a great 20-part development series entitled ‘Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA’ written by Tony Hillerson that will be of interest to anyone who is looking to build a large-scale application using Flex, Java and Live Cycle Data Services.

Visit Inside RIA

RIA on Alltop

Finally, the newest of the RIA resources is provided by Alltop. The idea behind Alltop is pretty simple - collect news and articles from “all the top” sites on the web. There’s a huge selection of topics available on the site, but if you’re interested in RIA development then you’ll want to check out http://ria.alltop.com once a week to get a snapshot of what’s new.

Visit RIA Alltop