The fact of the matter is, not only is Adobe Consulting leveraging FlexUnit each and every day on our projects, but we continue to be advocates to our customers of using FlexUnit on their projects. But more importantly, I wanted to just put out a short blog post to update you with a few things around unit-testing and test-driven development with Flex.
A new user-experience for Flex Unit
First and foremost, we're eating our own dogfood/sipping our own champagne, and our user-experience practice within Adobe Consulting is working with our technology practice to get some better insight into HOW we unit-test our projects, how we leverage the tool, in order that we can release an update to Flex Unit with an improved Flex-based user-experience.
A Code Coverage tool for Flex Unit
I don't want to post too much here, for fear of stealing Alex Uhlmann's well deserved thunder; Alex has been working for some time now with the counsel of our consulting practice, and with our engineering team, to ensure that projects built with Flex 3 can be instrumented by a test coverage tool he is developing. If you were at Sascha Wolter's Flash conference in Germany some weeks back, you will have seen Alex sneak this tool and talk about test-coverage in detail there.
If, as a Java Developer who works with JUnit, you are familiar with Clover, then you will have a good idea of what we plan on releasing for FlexUnit. The test coverage tool will give you a clearer understanding of where your unit-tests written with FlexUnit are successfully exercising your codebase, and where you need to focus some unit-testing attention in order to ensure that code cannot "break undetected" by your test-suite.
Our user-experience team is also focussed on understanding the task flows and usage patterns of the code-coverage tool in some of our current projects, in order that we can also release this tool with a useful, usable and desirable user-experience.
I'll ask Alex to blog much more about this tool in the weeks ahead.
Ambitiously, we hope to have both tools available to you for download as early as possible in the new year; however, if you are using FlexUnit then a new user-experience and a companion test-coverage tool is on it's way...
Let's start with clearing up some uncertainties. In our Adobe Consulting Birds of a Feather, we played a few games with the audience to warm things up, including a game where 3 consultants would make a statement each on a topic, only one of which was true, and the audience had to correctly guess which one was true.
So the two lies about Cairngorm were that "we're building a lightweight version of Hibernate for AIR, and because it's lighter than hibernation, we're going to call it Slumber". That was a lie. And we also said we were going to rename "Cairngorm" to "Mount McKinley" so people would stop complaining about how to pronounce it. But that was a lie as well. So neither of these 2 things are fact :)
We've pushed the changes we pushed out as beta through to Adobe Labs, as you saw on Alistair McLeods blog. So that's now the stable version of Cairngorm for you to develop against.
I want to be very clear, in case it hasn't been - if you are continuing to build RIA with Flex and Cairngorm, and these RIA are front-ends upon Service Oriented Architectures, where you are invoking services and handling their responses - whether that be RemoteObject, WebService or HTTPService - then the current microarchitecture remains our advocated architecture for you. We have no intention of changing that in a future version of Cairngorm, so please don't hold out waiting for anything else because you think there might be big change a comin'. There's not.
However, we've been doing a LOT of deep-thinking around data oriented architectures, which are the kind of architectures that evolve as you begin to leverage LiveCycle Data Services, in particular the data management features of LCDS. Peter Martin presented a deep-dive into that current thinking - and as he preluded his presentation with, we aspire to solidifying this thinking into repeatable best-practice that we can bake back into Cairngorm. However, right now our thinking is strategy and architecture as much as it is reusable classes that we'll bake into Cairngorm. Alistair McLeod is going to give this presentation in Barcelona, and we'll be opening up discussion online as well about some of our thinking, and we look to compare our data points with many of yours before we bake this into Cairngorm. What I do see happening however, is that Cairngorm Enterprise will evolve to include best-practices for data oriented archtiectures as well as the current best-practices we advocate - and will continue to advocate - for more service oriented architectures.
Exciting stuff.
We also care a great deal about making Cairngorm developers more productive; we plan on sharing some work that we have been doing around Eclipse plug-ins to increase your productivity, but it's early days yet and we've not had the bandwidth we hoped for to drive this into the community. Hold tight, but it's coming!
If you're going to be in Barcelona, please drop by and say hi - I'll be giving my talk on Design Led Innovation again, which I really enjoyed delivering in Chicago. It's easy to get into the details of architecture and design patterns, but it's also nice to pull up to 35,000 feet from time to time, and remember that our job is to "build THINGS that PEOPLE will USE" (to paraphrase my colleague, Simon Smith, who leads Adobe Consulting's User Experience practice. I'll also be presenting in the Flex Best Practices panel.
Hope to see you in Spain...
]]>So I'm going to wait until after MAX Barcelona before I post any summary of the MAX conferences - and I'm taking a week off after Barcelona to recover! But suffice to say, it's incredibly fun times right now, and MAX Chicago was testament to the cutting edge we're all slicing and dicing with right now!
But before I head over to Spain, I wanted to draw attention to a blog post that my colleague Simon Smith has made. Simon is one of my partners in crime at Adobe Consulting, leading our User Experience practice on a global basis. One of the most exciting things for me joining Macromedia and then Adobe, was the opportunity to work alongside such a great bunch of critical thinkers, information architects and user-experience designers on our consulting projects. As well as my own team hiring in the technology practice, Simon's team have jobs open on a worldwide basis - check his Designers Wanted blog post and then drop us an email, or come and say hi to me in the weeks ahead.
Likewise, if you want to cut code on "either side of the glass" with Adobe Consulting in the technology practice that I lead, then I'd personally like to hear from you as well. We're definitely at an inflection point in the industry, and if you have what it takes to take us to the next one then you know where to find me.
]]>Monday, 2pm, RIA Technology Zone of Exhibit Hall
Peter Martin is a Technical Architect with Adobe Consulting, based in Edinburgh (Scotland). Tom Sugden is a Senior Consultant with Adobe Consulting, also based in Edinburgh.
Peter and Tom will whiteboard various Adobe Consulting strategies for creating client-side models in Rich Internet Applications for use with LiveCycle Data Management Services. Hear Peter and Tom discuss some of the implementations and architectures they have considered, from implementations of the presentation model pattern [Fowler] to domain object models – all lessons learned and applied during the 12-month delivery of a complex data management services application in the manufacturing industry.
]]>Tuesday, 2pm, RIA Technology Zone of Exhibit Hall
Venkata Adidam is a Senior Consultant with Adobe Consulting based out of our Washington Office. Herve Dupriez is a Technical Architect with Adobe Consulting based out of our London Office. Both Venkata and Herve have deep implementation experience around our LiveCycle Product Set.
In this chalk and talk session, Venkata and Herve will discuss some of the architectural options available when creating eForms solutions that leverage PDF; our teams continue to apply established design principles such as MVC whether they are developing Flex or AIR based RIA solutions, or eForms solutions using PDF.
]]>Monday, 4pm, RIA Technology Zone of Exhibit Hall
Danny Saikaly is a Principal Architect with Adobe Consulting, based out of our office in Ottawa.
Danny is going to stand at the whiteboard, and talk about strategies and solutions employed by Adobe Consulting that will enable you to take an RIA built in Flex or AIR and then leverage and invoke services in the LiveCycle ES platform. Furthermore, he’ll talk about the different strategies for seamlessly rendering a PDF within a Flex application, and communicating between the PDF and Flex application.
There are some incredibly compelling solutions to customers when you are able to take the data captured in an RIA and them move it effectively and efficiently around an organisation's back office, or between the digital world and the paper world, by leveraging LiveCycle ES. You're going to hear a lot more about LiveCycle ES at MAX, and I'm confident that this is going to become a service platform upon which more and more Rich Internet Applications in the Enterprise are built! Learn the technical plumbing at the whiteboard with Danny, see some of the business problems that are being solved when you combine these technologies during the keynote and elsewhere at MAX, and you'll leave Chicago ready to add this value to your own RIA in the enterprise!
]]>Monday, 3pm, RIA Technology Zone of Exhibit Hall
Brian O'Connor is a Senior Technical Architect based out of our Newton, Ma. office.
Brian is another architect who has been spending a tonne of time building RIA in Flex and AIR with LiveCycle Data Services. Brian will whiteboard some strategies for high-performance paging of large data sets on LiveCycle Data Services. This will all be lessons learned from some mission critical financial service applications delivered by Adobe Consulting with Flex and LiveCycle Data Services.
]]>This is one of the things I love about working with talented teams of designers and developers; when you walk into a project office, see someone at a whiteboard with a pen in their hand and a bunch of people standing with hands on their heads, or arms folded, or slumped in deep thought in a chair, you know that some innovation is about to happen. You know that a best-practice is about to be born. You know that some hitherto fundamental truth is being challenged, and the outcome will be an advance in the state of the art, or the currently accepted doctrine.
When I walk into an office, and there's a team of Adobe Consultants standing around a whiteboard, it's just great to stand at the back and listen for 5 minutes (though they'll probably drop a few comments in the blog saying that I don't stand at the back for very long, and tend to grab the pen).
So -- this format of discussion is coming to MAX, and Adobe Consulting are going to be standing around 5 different whiteboards. A number of our consultants are going to lead whiteboard discussions on topics that have come up on their various projects, and we hope that some of you will join us, stand around, challenge, participate, and who knows, maybe the outcome will be some more doctrine challenged, some more best-practice emerging, or some more dark corners illuminated.
We'll be covering Flex, LiveCycle Data Services, buidling Flex apps on top of LiveCycle ES service-oriented architectures, some PDF Form Design architectural patterns, and some User Experience Design discussions. I can't wait to see these sessions!
I'll follow up with details of each of the chalk and talks; see you round the whiteboards.
]]>It's gameshow time folks! In the Adobe Consulting Birds of a Feather session, we're going to facilitate a session in gameshow format - that's Adobe Consulting versus the rest of the world - with a session called "Adobe Consulting knows everything about Flex, LiveCycle ES and User Experience Design".
4000 attendees. Whatever! Bring it on!
We plan on a fun, interactive but ultimately spirited and educational discussion that covers all of the above topics - we'll mix some panel-based discussion that will include the audience and their thoughts, with gameshow rounds, where we'll pit 20 Adobe Consultants against everyone else in the audience, using a variety of gameshow formats from television shows and radio shows that most of us are actually too young to remember (except George Neill) !
Can we take a topic given by the audience and talk authoratively about it for one minute, without hesitation, repetition or deviation from the topic? If we can, it's a point to us - if you buzz us out for hesitating, deviating or repeating, you the audience can try and get to the end of the minute on the topic and win the point for YOUR team. But watch out, Brian O'Connor and I can talk for a minute about on just about anything.
Or challenge us to dodge ball; throw questions at us, and if we get 'em wrong, our team mates are out, but if we get them right, we're pulling them straight back off the bench. If we know everything about Flex, LiveCycle ES and user-experience design then you ain't getting any points...and we'll all be in the game at the end of the round!
And more to be revealed on the night...
In between the gameshow rounds, we hope to run a BOF session as spirited as last year, where what felt like half the development community engaged in a hugely collaborative discussion around the topics of interest.
As Ted Patrick has posted, there'll be food and beer -- round up your evening by taking on the might of Adobe Consulting!
(Note: though strictly speaking we know everything about Flex, LiveCycle ES and User Experience Design, some of our team who know the answers to the questions you ask may not be available on the evening in question. We reserve the right to guru in absentia)
(Note2: If I see any of the Flex or LiveCycle Engineering team in the audience, then Adobe Consulting will file enough enhancement requests to ensure you don't have a weekend between now and next March. You have been warned)
]]>Tuesday, October 21:30 pm - 2:30 pm
So I'm really looking forward to this one; Joe Berkowitz of Allurent has agreed to chair a panel called Flex Best Practices" with myself, Anatole Tartakovsky of Farata Systems, Dave Colleta of Virtual Ubiquity (the Buzzword guys!) and Dave Wolf of Cynergy Systems.
Joe has a great agenda of topics together to chair the discussion with, including General Flex Development best-practices, Architecture (Frameworks and Patterns, Model Driven Development, Flex/HTML Integration), Quality issues such as unit-testing, integration testing and continuous builds, workflow between designer and developer teams on RIA project, and tooling to support such processes.
Ultimately though ultimately the discussion will be driven by the direction the audience takes us in. I understand from the MAX audience that we already have close to 200 of you registered for this panel session alone, so it proves to be a spirited and insightful 2-way sharing of our collective experience!
]]>Monday, October 1 3:15 pm - 4:15 pm
Tuesday, October 2 9:15 am - 10:15 am
So at Adobe Consulting, we talk to our customers about "Design Led Innovation" as a way of thinking about how to apply Design-thinking and take a Design-led approach to creating applications that are not just soundly built upon our technology, but useful, usable and desirable not just for our customers, but for their customers.
Taking a departure from my usual "cram as much architecture and code into 60 minutes without pausing for breath" presentation style, I'm going to pull up a little this year, and use the opportunity to share with you our philosophy on application design and development, inspire you I hope with as much of the great work that we've been delivering for our customers (much of which is still pending legal approval for me to show you :) ) and to share with you the approach that we take to design and deliver this work, and help you understand the skills that our contractors and partners can bring to augment our own delivery team.
One of the most rewarding differences for me working for Adobe Consulting rather than iteration::two, is that I no longer have a dynamic tension to resolve between "how much knowledge do we share and how much do we keep for our competitive advantage". Instead, I carry a remit, among others, to ensure that we are enabling the partner and design and development communities, and helping them to be successful - often through working alongside us in engagements. I hope that my talk resonates with many of you, whether you are information architects or visual designers, Flash Developers, Flex developers, LiveCycle Developers a Java Developer or someone who has seen the Silverlight.
I'm going to talk about design and development methodology; since I first installed Flash, I've been a passionate advocate of agile development in the design of Rich Internet Applications, and I'll talk some about how the agile approach dovetails so nicely with innovation and design. My colleagues from our User Experience Practice, including Simon Smith (our Worldwide Practice Director for User Experience Design), Peter Baird (Mr Style Explorer) and George Neill (our most senior European UX guy, who has been designing and delivering RIA since Jeremy Allaire first coind the phrase) will be hovering around beside me I'm sure, and will no doubt step up with observations on our methodology and approach.
But hopefully, more than that, I'm going to get the opportunity to share with you the way we think, the way we apply our technology to solve business problems, the way we apply design to solve business problems, and share with you the insights that led to the applications that I share with you on stage.
This is a public version of a presentation the team and I have been delivering to customers the world over - this is how we get our customers thinking about embracing technology. I can't wait to get you thinking like that as well.
]]>Tuesday, October 2 2:45 pm - 3:45 pm
Wednesday, October 3 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Peter has been technical architect on an incredibly complex project for one of our customers who you will be seeing and hearing quite a bit about at MAX this year. The project - for a customer in the manufacturing industry - is an incredibly rich and beautiful dashboard experience built in Flex, that sits upon the customers existing J2EE infrastructure. The project has been man-years of development, and continues to platform upon LiveCycle ES to introduce intellectual property protection, process management and workflow and secure exchange of 3D CAD drawings between manufacturers in an online marketplace.
The application takes tremendous advantage of LiveCycle (nee Flex) Data Services, in particular the use of data management services. Peter and the Adobe Consulting team (many of whom will also be at MAX) on this project have driven a tremendous amount of best-practice around the use of Data Services and Data Management Services.
They've wrestled with a number of tradeoffs in the design of client-side models, and how Data Management Services plays in a Cairngorm environment. They've also drawn out and captured a tremendous numbers of "Vroomisms", the internal term for the gold-dust of knowledge that Jeff Vroom (of the LiveCycle Data Services team) continues to sprinkle on the team !!
I've seen Peter's talk, and it's going to be laden with information for anyone working with Cairngorm, LiveCycle Data Services and Data Management services.
]]>I'm going to throw a few blog posts out highlighting where you'll find us; it's a great opportunity to connect with the community of designers and developers, share with them some of the great work that we're doing and see the great work that you're doing. We're always on the lookout for talented partners, contractors and designers who we can help grow their businesses around our technologies by having them work alongside us as we make our customers successful. If that could be you, then I look forward to connecting with you in Chicago!
]]>The talk I'm giving is called "Design Led Innovation", and talks of the Design approach that Adobe Consulting takes to creating innovative human-centered solutions that are able to fuse business needs with end-user needs upon Adobe (and other) technologies.
The talk takes place in Edinburgh; with the Edinburgh Festival in full swing, it feels like most of the world is here right now, so if you need a short break from the insanity, I'm speaking at the Microsoft Offices (I can't think of a better place to demonstrate what we've been delivering with Flex and AIR over the last few years) on George Street, at 6pm tomorrow. I'll be talking about our philosophy of Design Led Innovation, demonstrating some of the work that results from this philosophy and sharing some insights into "how we do it".
Event details including location and times can be found here
It's a talk I've given to customer, analysts and usergroups in the past, and will be a prelude to some of the things I'll be sharing at MAX in Chicago and Barcelona later in the year.
]]>John Dowdell commented on his blog, "I think this announcement is more significant than it may appear". John is absolutely correct - I think LiveCycle ES is a massive step-forward for enterprise software developers, including (but not limited to) RIA developers who focus on delivering RIA solutions that might be termed "enterprise scale".
In this post, I'm going to begin to focus on what LiveCycle ES means for Enterprise RIA developers.
Enterprise Rich Internet Applications
But before I progress; let me make something clear in my terminology - there is no complex of superiority or "my RIA is better than your RIA" when I use the term enterprise. When I was running my own software consultancy, I used to employ the phrase "Enterprise RIA" to differentiate the kind of applications that we were trying to deliver with Rich Internet Applications, versus some of our colleagues in other consultancies who were building more interactive applications upon the Flash platform.
When we were talking about Enterprise RIA, we were talking about rich and immersive user-experiences, delivered with Flex, that sat upon new and existing infrastructure within an enterprise software stack. Our typical customers were financial services organisations, many of whom who were (and many who still are) engaged in initiatives to deliver service oriented architectures (SOA) within their organisations, exposing their internal business systems and processes in such a manner that they might be consumed easily and consistently across their organisation, achieving the much touted benefits of reuse and business agility (the ability to more rapidly deliver new and innovative solutions). Within Adobe, our enterprise focus extends beyond financial services to also include Government, Life Sciences (Healthcare) and Manufacturing organisations.
So when I talk about delivering Enterprise RIA, I'm talking about building Rich Internet Applications that sit within these kind of infrastructures. I'm talking about solutions where the rich and immersive user-experience that an RIA promises to deliver is only part of a much deeper engagement with the customer; where behind the "apply for loan" button there is a rich orchestration of services responsible for address verification, online decisioning, kicking off the generation of a printed form that needs to be sent to you for signature, for the long-lived process to spring back into life when your application form has been received by you, signed (what we call a 'wet signature'), posted back to the organisation and when received, entered back into the system (hopefully without any manual rekeying of your form with the information you previously entered - you don't believe this happens ? You have too much faith in the organisations you typically engage with), approved, before your loan is approved, you are notified by mobile phone and email, and the appropriate documentation is sent to an output server to be automatically printed, stuffed into an envelope, shipped to your address, before being added to your online portfolio of products the next time you login to your bank. That was a big sentence, with lots of clauses. But you can see the RIA front-end was one part of that clause - the tip of the proverbial iceberg as it were. So much more has to be orchestrated to happen in order that your engagement with the organisation you just applied for a loan with is an effective and memorable one.
I'm not saying these "Enterprise RIA" are any more ingenious, valuable, well-engineered, worthy of praise or innovative than the other applications you may be building - scrapbooks, fully fledged online word processors, photo editing applications and timesheet management systems are equally impressive applications of RIA technology. However, it's less often that these applications reach so far back into the depths of an enterprise, where the experience of the customer engagement can be as impacted by what happens after you click the final button as what happens to get you are guided more simply, more easily and more effectively towards that button click.
So that's a big segue; but I just want to be sure that no-one feels disqualified when I talk about Enterprise RIA, but simply recognise that I'm describing a particular category of Rich Internet Application, that sits firmly upon existing enterprise infrastructure within an organisation. That's the kind of stuff my team are building, and I know it's the kind of stuff that many of you are building also. And these are the kind of applications where I think LiveCycle ES becomes a powerful set of tools for you to deliver your Enterprise RIA with.
So if i'm building Enterprise RIA, what's LiveCycle ES offering me ?
So when we operate in vertical markets like financial services, government organisations, life sciences or manufacturing, there tends to be a lot of processes and a lot of paper.
Proceses to change your address, or to take a 6-month payment holiday on your mortgage. Forms to be completed when you want to file a tax return, prescriptions that need to be renewed or medical reports that need to be securely exchanged throughout a healthcare provider, or RFQs that need to be submitted to potential suppliers, with securely attached CAD drawings that should not be inadvertantly sent outwith the receiving organisation before bids are collected and the contract awarded.
When people think about PDF, they often think about a read-only document format. In fact, when you see people asking about alternate clients to Reader, often what they are missing are the sheer number of things that can be done with a PDF other than simply rendering a document electronically. PDF forms can be edited electronically - online and offline, they can be digitally signed, they can be secured (rights managed), they can be assembled on the fly by compiling a document from document fragments and merging PDF templates with dynamic data. Electronic PDF forms can be adorned with two-dimensional barcodes, the barcode image representing the data entered into the form - once that form is printed and signed, the barcode can be scanned to immediately extract the data from the paper form and eliminate the previously necessarly manual rekeying following a wet-signature step. And much much more.
Adobe LiveCycle comprised a number of products that were able to perform these manipulations of PDF documents, enabling enterprise software developers to create enterprise software solutions that more effectively moved paper around an organisation, and orchestrated processes where there were journeys that crossed the online digital world to the offline paper world, and back again.
Adobe LiveCycle ES delivers all of these different services within a single enterprise run-time - a service oriented architecture delivered as an integrated J2EE solution that blends electronic forms, process management, document security and document generation services.
If you're an RIA developer or a development shop that recognises the benefits that Rich Internet Applications can bring to your customers, and to your customer's customers, then you're probably building solutions that have as many challenges to solve under the water-level, on some of these areas, as the tip-of-the-iceberg user-experience that you are addressing with RIA. And this is where LiveCycle ES really strengthens your end-to-end proposition to your customers.
If you want an example of the kind of solutions I might be speaking about, the LiveCycle ES pages do a great job of breaking out some of the recurring solution patterns that we have observed in some of our target vertical markets:
I'm sure some of these solution patterns are familiar to you, and I'm sure you face many more with your own customers.
LiveCycle ES - Solution Services in a Service Oriented Architecture
One way to think of - and a correct way to think of - LiveCycle ES, is as a service oriented architecture (SOA) that exposes a number of different services that are useful in the delivery of end-to-end Enterprise RIA solutions. When you take a look at the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite Solution components, then the CreativeSuite analogy is a good one. Just as you might employ Dreamweaver to manipulate some HTML, then employ the services of Flash when you wish to create an interactive animation that targets that Flash Player, and then employ the services of Photoshop where you wish to manipulate some design work, so too can you employ the services of LiveCycle ES when you wish to perform server-side business processes.
LiveCycle ES delivers a number of solution components, each of which sit upon and within a common LiveCycle ES Foundation architecture, that handles common administration functions, invocation services, orchestration and security. I'll cover each individual solution component in more detail in follow-on postings, however for the time being you can review these components on the LiveCycle ES Solution Component web pages.
Flex and Apollo Developers can easily invoke LiveCycle ES Services through Remoting Endpoints
Each and every service in the LiveCycle ES architecture can be easily invoked and consumed by a Flex or Apollo Rich Internet Application. LiveCycle ES remoting ensures that each servic is exposed to Flex as a remoting endpoint, however there are a number of different endpoint technologies, including Web Services, for the invocation of LiveCycle ES services from a client to a server.
This is the first piece of the puzzle for Flex developers; in an instant, all of these services exposed by LiveCycle ES can be immediately and easily consumed by an Enterprise RIA.
Capture Data Quickly and Effectively using Form Guides
When you deliver Enterprise RIA, you'll find yourself creating forms. Lots of forms. Flex forms that deliver on the promise of removing the end-user from the frustrations of the request/response paradigm to create single-screen form experiences that leverage user-experience patterns such as accordions and wizards, to allow the end user to seamlessly navigate through a multi-step application form, completing the form in the order they so desire.
Form Guides are a tremendous labor-saving addition to LiveCycle ES; so much so that they're going to merit a separate blog post. But for now, let me outline some of the heavy lifting that LiveCycle ES can offer. There's a lot of merit to capturing this data into a PDF - as I've outlined above, once data is captured as an electronic form, there's a tonne of things we can do to it, from digitally signing it, rights managing it, barcoding it prior to a wet-signature, completing it offline or having it participate in a long-lived process. BUT - forms are also a user-experience designed to squeeze as much information onto as few sheets of paper as possible, and not necessarily conduisive to a great user-experience. Which is what RIA are for, right ?
LiveCycle ES allows analysts and non-developers to create forms; you can start by scanning in an existing paper form, or by importing a word file for instance, and then slowly turning that form into something electronic, with form fields, and validation rules and the like. Previously, these interactive forms would then render as an editable PDF - however, using the same Form Designer, LiveCycle ES can now automatically generate a Flex-based RIA form, known as a Form Guide. As a Flex developer, you have complete control over the look, feel and behavior of these forms within an organisation - from the simplest of CSS styling through to more code-level customisation. But the key thing here, is that these forms can be designed by an analyst in a design tool, automatically code-generated, and given a consistent look and feel across an organisation. We've engaged in projects with literally thousands of forms, and the labor saving that Form Guides offers is tremendous - with the additional bonus that the RIA form is actually rendering the same data as an underlying PDF, so that we can swap between a PDF-world view or an RIA-world view of the form, and perform any of our LiveCycle ES service operations upon that form.
Summary
I've only touched on the different ways in which LiveCycle ES is bringing the RIA and LiveCycle technologies from Adobe and Macromedia together. I've only touched on the service oriented architecture of LiveCycle ES that dramatically simplifies the manner in which an enterprise software developer can leverage LiveCycle ES services into their own software applications. And I've only touched on the utility of these services to Enterprise RIA developers who are delivering solutions into verticals like financial services, government, life sciences and manufacturing. And I haven't even begun to touch on what this means for the existing LiveCycle customer-base, for whom HTML and PDF online experiences can be easily upgraded to deliver much more effective user-experiences upon the Adobe Flex platform, with as little coding as the development team feels comfortable with.
In future blog entries, I'll look at the various LiveCycle ES solution components in more detail, and help you to understand how you can leverage these solution components in your own application development.
In addition, I'll talk more about the ways in which Flex and LiveCycle ES come together, and explore how we can more easily create innovative and immersive user-experiences that extend our customer engagement beyond the screen and deep into the enterprise processes that happen under the water-level.
However, as an increasing number of options emerge for creating Rich Internet Applications, I think LiveCycle ES is a tremendously valuable addition to the technology stack for Enterprise RIA development upon the Adobe platform. Not only do we have an RIA platform in Flex, that is steaming towards it's 3rd release, but sitting underneath this proven front-end architecture we have an SOA architecture in LiveCycle ES that offers a tremendous number of services that are immediately valuable when delivering the kind of solutions I've outlined above.
As John Dowdell said, "I think this announcement is more significant than it may appear". I'll say so - we just got ourselves a brand new platform in Flex and LiveCycle ES for the delivery of bet-the-business mission-critical enterprise RIA in vertical markets like Financial Services, Government, Life Sciences and Manufacturing.
I'll say that's significant.