This is what I look like. If you see me around, ping me on anything Flex and AIR .

And of course if you are interested in working for Comcast Interactive Media on the next generation of entertainment based applications, my team is definitely looking for talented developers.

I was shocked to hear today of the passing of Mark Belsterling, one of the main voices of the Flex community in Philadelphia and indeed the world. Mark was the manager of the Philadelphia Flex User Group.

Mark passed on this Saturday, Sept the 8th.

I met mark a few months back when he came over to interview with us at CIM. I was struck by how much Mark knew of all things technology related. Mark had a very unassuming nature but had the experience to humble many veterans in the online domain. And it was really obvious how passionate he was about Flex. He started the Philadelphia Flex User group in June filling a need a lot of us were feeling. He had been having heath issues over summer but still found the energy to organize the meetings for the groups. I met him last at the Air bus tour event at Philadelphia.

I offer my condolences to his family and friends. His presence will be sorely missed.

ScrollImage is kind of like Flash ScrollPane component. The component takes any image url and loads the image putting scrollbars around it to allow the image to be scrolled. While the same effect can be created by using the Image inside a Canvas container, this implementation is much more efficient since its not creating a heavier container object.

I wrote the ScrollImage container as I was trying to understand the basic ScrollControlBase class that all controls that have scrollable content use. If you are a Flex developer, the source of the code should be very instructional. I have commented it out a bit and most of the code is self explanatory. Check the component out here and view the source here.

DiggGraphr is finally mature enough for me to give it 1.0 status. I finally got around to implementing the features I have been meaning to for a while, including auto update and inline browsing using the HTML control in AIR. The code for it wasnt difficult but the change in user experience is pretty phenomenal. You can read more about it and grab the latest version from http://www.arpitonline.com/blog/?page_id=63.

I captured a quick video of the application in action so take a look. Its grainy but you get the idea. You’ll have to download the app to check it out.

In response to another annoying Flex bashing article on Digg, I though I’d post my response and get some facts straight (I basically take all his ‘facts’ and respond to em so read the other article in paralllel). Funniest thing is, they are trying to sell a proprietary AJAX framework and scare their prospective customers with “Flex = vendor lock-in”.

Also I would like to emphasize that I love AJAX and javascript and I feel that they have a need to fill just as much as Flex does. This is just to make sure people have their facts straight when choosing a technology.

1) Adobe Flex effectively don’t care about any of the web standards we have spent the last 4 decades building!
Actually it does. AS3, which Flex is written in, is trying to be the ECMA reference implementation. ECMA is the standard that Javascript is based on. If anything, normal browsers fall short of actually implementing the spec correctly. This will get crazy again when Javascript 2 comes out when you will have to check your applications in multiple versions of Javascript running on multiple browsers. Your QA time will most likely double.

2) Adobe Flex is a BINARY RIA Framework!
Umm….so? You still code it in text and compile it like Java or C#. Binary code keeps file size smaller. Its better if you also come up with a funky UI and dont want others to copy the interaction by just copy pasting the code into their app. And if you DO have a serious application that you want to deploy, dont you compress your javascript files ?

3) Adobe Flex will effectively render your website invisible to Search Engines:
Are you creating a website or an application? If you are creating something like cnn.com in Flex, then its obviously the wrong technology. However, most of the AJAX examples I have seen that AJAX library vendors try to sell are mortgage calculators and the like. How on earth does google index a mortgage calculator? And if you are using AJAX, googlebots still cannot make asynchronous calls to your server. So for indexing AJAX applications, you still will have to resort to the same techniques as Flex/Flash applications.

4) You don’t know the technology needed to use Adobe Flex!
This was the funniest point I saw on the list. Basically it says: “I dont know it so you dont know it”. Flash and actionscript have been around for a while and AS3 is not that big a leap. Flex, as a framework will have to be learnt but no more than any ajax library by a javascript developer.

5) You don’t know who’ll win (Flash vs. Silverlight):
The flash player aint going away anytime soon. Ask yourself this: Will my application outlast youtube, google finance, etc? Are you willing to bet that Google, Yahoo and other huge companies who have invested in Flash dont know what they are doing or chose Flash callously?

6) Adobe Flex is immature technology!
Flash based RIA (rich internet applications) came on the web before dhtml/ajax ones. Flex has been around for 2+ years and we are now approaching version 3 of the framework. And Flex unlike javascript and AJAX is being groomed as a technology for applications. For example, you have stuff like Flash Remoting that let you manage client server interctions between flash and serverside code without actually serializing your messages into XML. You also have paged data support in Flex when rendering huge sets of data, and the true power of the Flex framework shines when dealing with huge amounts of data (The javascript vs. Flex results are just obscene).

7) Adobe Flex is lock-in technology!
Um, no! Flex is an open source framework that runs on the Flash player which is owned by Adobe. Sun owned Java but Java is still the language to beat for enterprise level applications. When you are trying to avoid vendor lock in, a lot of people choose Java.

Maybe the next blog will be where Flex outshines AJAX, unless someone from the community beats me to it.