Space of Flex/AIR technologies

Minor version 1.5.2 of Adobe AIR was released last Friday. It is basically a bug fix, security and some reliability issues release. You can get it from here http://get.adobe.com/air/ when installed you can update your *-app.xml namespace to use new version!

Tour de LiveCycle is a desktop application designed by the Adobe Evangelist team to serve as both an introduction to Adobe LiveCycle ES and an extensive reference tool. We have organized over 1,000 pages of content into a hierarchical tree that you can use to explore the areas most relevant to you. Whether you need to build a full application or you just plan to spend 10 minutes getting a feel for LiveCycle ES and the kinds of problems it can help you solve, Tour de LiveCycle can help.

You can find more info here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/livecycle/tourdelivecycle/

Here is the badge that you can use to install Tour de LiveCycle:

You can also check Tour de Flex which is very powerful demo of Flex and AIR technologies:

Adobe AIR is a winner of Webware 2009!!! It was awarded in Infrastructure & Storage category biting other products like: BitTorrent, Carbonite, DropBox, Dropio, Facebook Connect, Mozy, OpenID, Windows Live SkyDrive and YouSendIt.

This is really great news and that means industry is recognizing incredible potential of Adobe AIR which brings true cross-platformability with developers productivity.

You can find more info here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13546_109-10237765-29.html

At the beginning of April (09.04.2009) Polish Ministry of Finance released their first Adobe AIR based application e-Deklaracje Desktop. This application lets its users submit annual tax declarations electronically and monitor their status. In Polish tax legislation every citizen is obliged to settle his income for previous year with tax office by the end of April. Historically e-Deklaracje project was initiated by Ministry of Finance in 2007/2008 but with less success and wide range adoption due to electronic signature requirement. By that time it required special hardware readers for digital signatures that are not commonly adopted in Poland.

This year Ministry of Finance has prepared change in legislation that was later signed by President of Republic of Poland that allowed sending annual declarations without qualified digital signature. Still to ensure proper security level users had to provide their personal information like: first name, last name, date of birth, NIP – tax identification number, PESEL – personal identification number and declared income from previous year. In reality this set of information is more than it was required in traditional paper based declarations (that’s the case with income from last year). I guess all this information gives better identity verification than traditional way where anyone can send his declaration by post or bring it in person to tax office (where no one asks for any id).

After only three weeks of availability over 77000 citizens have sent their declarations electronically (UPDATE 18.05: latest information from MF website states that 89000 declarations were sent, I guess those that forgot to do it till the end of April are still submitting)!!! This is incredible result taking into consideration such a short time, I believe next year we can expect this number to multiply couple times when people will have it available since January.

I’m also proud to say that local Adobe team (Tadeusz Chełkowski, Tomasz Lichota, Bartek Soin and of course myself) supported this project from very beginning with our technical and RIA experties.

Why Adobe AIR?

Ministry of Finance had couple of major requirements that had to be met by that type of application:

1. Cross-platform support – solution had to work without any compromises on all major operating systems like: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
2. Usability – it had to be easy to install and natural to use for inexperienced users. With badge installer on MF website it just couldn’t be made easier.
3. Security – give the users confidence that application they are installing was really issued by Ministry of Finance.
4. Interoperability – integration with SOAP based backend services.
5. PDF forms support – already existing PDF forms developed in previous year could be reused with small adjustments supporting non-qualified signature.
6. Desktop integration – required desktop features:
   

• Reliable local storage for drafts and sent declarations offline persistence;
• PDF forms templates and documentation local caching;
• Notifications mechanism for asynchronous confirmations (declarations receiving and confirmations service works in asynchronous mode with response time up to 24 hours).

As you can see all of above make Adobe AIR perfect fit for that type of applications. In my opinion the most important features in case of any application issued by public sector institutions are: cross-platform support, usability and security.

We had some stories in Poland in the past of applications written only for Windows platform with closed protocol specifications that ended with Linux users taking legal actions against publishing institutions. Adobe AIR built-in cross-platform support resolves this issue, I actually observed very positive feedback especially on Linux forums after e-Deklaracje release. Some comments stated that this is first time Polish government institution has noticed that there are also other OS’s than Windows.

In terms of usability there are two important factors, first of all installation process to make it as smooth as possible, ideally with small footprint, dependent runtime, tools and libraries automatic detection and installation (badge installer was resolving most of these, except Adobe Reader installation). Another factor is availability of experienced UI designers and developers. This is Adobe’s strong field with great community of Flash and UI design experts.

From the security perspective for application that gathers and sends out user personal information is important to give users confidence that the application was distributed by trusted entity and any communication with backed services is done through secure encrypted channels. Application issuer verification is Adobe AIR built-in feature with signed install packages.

You can check it out yourself on MF website: http://www.e-deklaracje.gov.pl/index.php?page=do_pobrania

This is how the application looks:

e-Deklaracje Desktop main window

Declaration fill window

History window

Last week I was presenting at WSHE university in Łódź/Poland. Here is a great review written by Michał Zwoliński, its in Polish…

Yesterday I finished three part series of Flex/AIR bootcamp at Politechnika Warszawska. Students could learn what is RIA and how to build Flex and AIR based applications. I would like to thank BEST (best.warszawa.pl) students organization for helping me organize whole event!
Here are some photos from the event!

Aptana has just released beta version of its ActiveRecord.js which is an ORM JavaScript library that implements ActiveRecord pattern. It also works with AIR and in couple of other environments:

• Google Gears (client-side persistence)
• In Memory (if no SQL server is available on the client)
• Adobe AIR (client-side persistence)
• SQLite and MySQL (via Aptana Jaxer, the open source Ajax server)
• additional environments (like HTML5) expected to come through working with the community on the project

And here is the example:

var User = ActiveRecord.define('users',{
    username: '',
    email: ''
});
User.hasMany('articles');
 
var ryan = User.create({
    username: 'ryan',
    email: 'rjohnson@aptana.com'
});
 
var Article = ActiveRecord.define('articles',{
    name: '',
    body: '',
    user_id: 0
});
Article.belongsTo('user');
 
var a = Article.create({
    name: 'Announcing ActiveRecord.js',
    user_id: ryan.id
});
a.set('name','Announcing ActiveRecord.js!!!');
a.save();
 
a.getUser() == ryan;
ryan.getArticleList()[0] == a;

You can find more info here: http://www.aptana.com/blog/rjohnson/activerecord_js_released_as_beta

Last week I had a presentation at Grill IT event located in Wrocław/Poland. I was covering Flex/AIR technologies in context of RIA. During the presentation I showed my little Flex/AIR application called SpinIt (you can follow this link to give it a try) that demonstrates code/components reusability between Desktop and Web applications.

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For those of you that don’t like to configure your AIR application badge manually I recommend to check out this new Badger application, it can be found here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/badger_for_air_apps.html

This is really very cool and simple app, I think it would be nice if it was included into Flex Builder or part of SDK in the future releases.

For Polish community I posted a short intro on: http://blog.flextech.pl/2008/09/24/badger-10/

P.