The CF9/Flash Builder 4 user group tour stops in San Francisco tonight and I happen to be in town, so I'll be there too! Come hear Ben Forta discuss and demo the next CF server, Bolt (the upcoming CF IDE), and FB4. Fun for the whole family! http://groups.adobe.com/posts/1792afd95c

UPDATE: Thanks so much to everyone who sent me a note. I expected a handful of developers and received dozens! At this point I have enough volunteers. Stay tuned, though - after we complete the investigation I'll share some of the results here. Tim

To help with internal discussions about the kinds of developers we're serving with a release, we use something called developer personas. These are made up, composite characters that represent a type or class of developer. To help everyone feel a connection to the developer, we give them a name, a place of employ, hobbies, the whole nine yards. Well, one of our personas for Flash Builder 4 is named Debbie Elliott, and I need to find a few good Debbies to help us out!

Debbie is probably like many of you. She is a web developer at a medium sized manufacturing company where she builds mostly database apps with a web front end. She's good with SQL and uses ColdFusion or PHP for the scripting. She knows some Javascript, but wouldn't consider herself an AJAX whiz. Most of her apps run inside the firewall, so while she likes to make them look good and be easy to use, she doesn't have the services of a designer. She is interested in adding some rich content to her apps, maybe building some AIR apps, but there just hasn't been much time. She knows about Flex, but hasn't gotten around to trying it.

So...does this sound like you? I need to find a ColdFusion Debbie and a PHP Debbie who would be available to try out our software. The good news is, neither your name nor your gender need match our Debbie. But I would like to find someone who falls into that general mold and who hasn't played with the new Flex beta or really has any Flex experience per se. What we would do is ask you to try to build a simple application and share your experience with us. It should take anywhere from a couple of hours to a day, depending on how well we did our jobs!

In return, you'll have the good feeling of knowing you helped shape Flash Builder 4. Oh, ok: we'll try to find some way to say 'thank you' beyond just saying 'thank you.' I just can't suggest anything here.

The one catch is you'd need to be available to do it in the next few days. We'd like to get feedback on your experience by the end of the week or over the weekend.

Sound interesting? Send me an email with a bit of info about your skills & background to buntel at adobe dot com. Please put [Debbie] in the subject line, and I'll get in touch if you fit the persona!

Thanks! Tim

Today InfoWorld posted a "first look" beta review of Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder. Check it out here. Good comments on the data-centric features, " Builder 4's new data service wizard makes very quick work of importing and introspecting back-end services and binding them to UI objects[...] Just by dragging and dropping, I was able to take a standard query function on my data source, import it into Builder, and bind the result to a data grid in my Flex UI in no time at all."

It's great to start hearing this kind of feedback. Let me know how you're faring with the beta. Making your ColdFusion apps a bit richer?

It was an exciting (and late night) last night watching as the Flash Builder 4 Beta became available on Adobe Labs (at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashbuilder4/). We're all extremely proud of this preview and can't wait to see what you build with it! There's a great selection of content on Labs to help introduce you to the release - tutorials, videos, articles - but you may also want to find out more at your local user group. We'll be visiting dozens of cities this month with all the details on the Flash platform, including FB4 and Catalyst, and the upcoming releases of ColdFusion (and Bolt!). For more info, see http://groups.adobe.com/groups/ab704331ab.

Tim

Looks like the proverbial cat is already out of the bag on this, but due to some technical difficulties last night this post never appeared. Alas, it sounds as though the reaction from folks has been positive! So, here's my take on the new name for the next version of Flex Builder.

It's been somewhat challenging to deal with one codename for both the upcoming version of Flex Builder and Flex SDK. We've been referring to both as Gumbo, but as you know the IDE and the framework are really two separate parts of the overall Flash platform. So today we're going to not only clarify these upcoming versions, but also bring some additional clarity to the products' naming.

The next version of Flex Builder will be named Flash Builder 4. It will be the same Eclipse-based IDE with a new name and lots of great new features. This is a name change to the commercial product only, and does not affect the Flex framework or Flex SDK. Flex is the open source framework at the core of the Flash Platform, including Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst.

What does this mean for you as a Flex developer? Just more amazing features in the next release. You're still a Flex developer. A person who uses Dreamweaver to create HTML content for a browser isn't called a Dreamweaver developer; he or she is called an HTML developer. It's the same with Flash Builder; you use the Flash Builder tool to write applications using the Flex framework or pure ActionScript for applications that will run in Flash or AIR. And Flex Builder 3 is still Flex Builder 3.

Of course, for me this release is about a lot more than a clarification on the branding. We have an incredible release on its way with killer features for designer/developer workflow, data centric development, and coding productivity and improved testing and deployment capabilities. You can experience it all for yourself with the upcoming Beta of Flash Builder 4 on Adobe Labs: watch for it this summer. I can't wait to see what you do with these releases! Tim

Hi, Adobe is conducting an in-person user study on using the next version of Flex with ColdFusion to create data driven applications. The sessions will be conducted at Adobe's San Francisco office on March 31, so we're looking for some local CF'ers to participate. You don't need any prior Flex experience, in fact we're rather folks who have had little to no Flex experience since we're testing how well the features work for a new developer.

You will need to be able to attend in person on the 31st for a 2 hour session. There is a compensation available for your time. If you're able and interested, please fill out the brief survey at http://tinyurl.com/cf-study

Thanks! Tim

Thanks to the more than 300 folks who signed up to be in our pre-release to start testing the Flex/ColdFusion workflow planned for our upcoming release. I've just passed along names to our pre-release program manager, so you should be receiving an invitation in the next few days.

Once the program is under way, I'll be hosting a series of online events to help with your evaluation: we'll have Connect sessions where we'll demo the features and let you interact with the product team to learn more. In the mean time, I'd like to make a few posts about the basics of these new features. Hopefully this will be of interest to other folks who lacked the time to participate in the testing, but who will hopefully join our public Beta later this year.

Service-Based Development
At the center of the new Flex Data-Centric Development (DCD) features is a services-based model for building apps. Here's the rough picture of how it works:

1. Create a service with CFML (a CFC or set of CFCs that implement your logic, like CRUD functions)
2. Create a new Flex Project
3. Go to the Data/Services Panel or Data Menu and select "Connect to Data/Service"
4. Point FB at your CFC
5. Click Finish

That's it really. FB introspects your CFC and builds a design-time model representing all the datatypes and operations in your service (it also creates the required AS classes, but more about that later). You can then start binding service operations to Flex components by just dragging and dropping the operations onto the components (to have a datagrid display the results of your getEmployees function, for example). When you're ready to synchronize changes between the data on the client and the server, the new client-side data management features allow you do do so with a single line of code (myService.commit()). But again, more about that later.

I'll spend some time in the coming days drilling into more detail on each part of the DCD workflow. The thing to remember is that this set of features will completely change the development experience for developers who have either found Flex difficult in the past or who have been reluctant to try Flex doe to its complexity. If you can write a CFC (or generate it with a single click when Bolt comes out...) and point to it from FB, you can build a Flex app.

So, I look forward to seeing many of you on the pre-release forums. And for those of you who are going to wait a bit, stay tuned for more DCD info.

Since MAX last fall we've been showing off a new set of features in the upcoming version of Flex Builder aimed at making it much easier for data-centric web developers to deliver rich Flash user interfaces atop their existing server-side logic. A huge target for these features are the half-million strong ColdFusion developers out there. Just last night here in Boston we had a demo of Bolt - the new ColdFusion IDE currently under development - and Flex Builder and the reaction from the attendees was very positive! If you've seen the demos, or have wanted to try using Flex but have found it difficult or not productive or powerful enough, here's your chance to impact the direction of the product.

Prior to our public Beta later in the year, we would like to invite a select group of ColdFusion developers into a private pre-release program for Flex Builder. You'll get to work with the new data-centric development features, interact with members of the product team, provide feedback, and generally help shape the future of Flex. Now that development is coming along, I'll start blogging about some of the features - but it's far better to try them out for yourself!

If you're interested, please fill out this brief survey. You don't need to have any prior Flex experience - in fact, we'd rather hear from folks who are just doing ordinary apps; data intensive, departmental Intranet apps for reporting or data entry/management, whatever.

I hope to hear from you! Tim

I went straight from MAX into two full days of meetings in the Adobe San Francisco office, so I don't quite feel like I've had a chance to unwind and reflect. But I can say that MAX 2008 North America was a great event. Our best attendance ever at the tenth conference (yes, I was there since the first Allaire DevCon in Boston), amazing sessions, a brilliant night out at the Academy of Sciences and De Young Museum, and (yes) a goofy Day 2 Keynote. The best part was getting to show of so much about what we've done so far in Gumbo, the next generation of Flex Builder. Here are a few of the highlights we demo'd:

• Integration with Flash Catalyst (formerly Thermo)
• New Themes support, including some great new sample themes from Effective UI
• Built-in Flex Unit support
• Getter/setter generation
• ASDoc tooltips
• Event handler generation
• Conditional breakpoint debugging
• New data connectivity approach (about which I'll write later)
• Client side data management (also a juicy future topic)

That's just a few of the features, too. Our demo session ran an hour and we were coding right up 'til the end - literally; the AV crew was kicking us out since it was the last session on the last day, and Tom Lane was still typing code! So, I'm off for a few days and then flying to MAX Milan to do it all again. Hopefully somewhere in between I'll be able to start describing some of these features in more detail. Stay tuned...

As soon as I finish up MAX 2008 in San Francisco and Milan, I'm very glad to have the opportunity to speak at the second Flex Camp Boston (http://www.flexcampboston.com/) taking place December 12 from 8am-5pm at Bentley College, Waltham. Last year's Boston event was a huge success, so if you're in the New England area (or would like to spend a weekend in Boston, my home town) I heartily encourage you to attend. I'll be presenting a talk on the future of Flex that will combine the best information and demos that we're sharing at MAX. It's your only chance outside of MAX this year to see what's coming in Flex Builder, and the features are definitely worth seeing! So go, register NOW!