One of our stops in Europe last week was in Liège where Serge Jespers and I presented at a local RIA event. While there, community members Cyril Hanquez and Steven Peeters interviewed me briefly for their local usergroup. They have now posted that video interview online:

Interview with Ben Forta on March 9, 2010 in Liege, Belgium from CFUGBE on Vimeo.

Intelligent Software Solutions has developed and deployed an application to enable critical infrastructure monitoring to the White House Situation Room. The application uses touch technologies to provide insight into the current status of various elements of critical infrastructure across the United States. The application provides users such as the President and his staff with the ability to view the status of any of thousands of pieces of critical infrastructure with a single tap on a touch surface. And the application was built using Adobe Flex.

A bit more detail in the press release.

FlashCamp is coming to Boston next week on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 5:00pm. This is a free event with limited space, and the speaker lineup is pretty phenomenal, and includes Deepa Subramaniam, Heidi Williams, Doug Winnie, Chet Haase, ColdFusion's own Alison Huselid, as well as presenters from Zend and more. Registration required, so sign up now.

The Creative Suite Developer Summit will take place at the Adobe offices in Seattle, WA from May 3rd to the 6th, 2010. I am scheduled to present a session entitled Flex and Flash Builder 101. Registration is now open.

The entire Adobe Platform Evangelism team is in London this week. And team member James Ward has announced that he is presenting "RIAs with Java, Spring, Hibernate, BlazeDS, and Flex" to the London Java Community.

I visited China several times last year, and am planning multiple trips this year, too. China is home to the second largest population of Flash and Flex developers, and it's high time those developers had the opportunity to take part in a full-blown Flash Platform conference of their own. So I am excited that we're hosting a 2-day Adobe Flash Platform Summit, a mini-MAX of sorts, in Beijing on April 21st - 22nd, 2010. The exact agenda and speaker list is still being worked out, but I do plan on attending, and am really looking forward to the event!

I'm spending a lot of time in Europe right now. I was in London a week ago, am heading back there this week, and will be back in the area in March to discuss Flash Builder 4, ColdFusion 9, and ColdFusion Builder with customers, partners, and at the following public events:

• London, UK - March 4th, 2010
• Paris, France - March 8th, 2010
• Cologne, Germany - March 9th, 2010
• Liege, Belgium - March 9th, 2010
• Amsterdam, Netherlands - March 10th, 2010

Registration for these events is now open. (And it appears as though London sold out completely, within 20 minutes of registration opening)!

There is a broad and growing ecosystem that surrounds Flex and the Flash platform. And we've just posted a comprehensive list of products and projects which provide support for the Flex framework.

InfoQ has posted a great Flex platform roundup article entitled The State of Flex RIA Development Ecosystem.

JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA has long been a top notch Java IDE (and has long been the tool of choice for many on the ColdFusion engineering team). But IntelliJ IDEA does more than just Java, and the new version 9 improves its Flex and AIR support, too.

Over the past few days I referred several people to the Adobe Developer Connection Learn Flex and ColdFusion page, none of whom knew it existed! And so, linking it here too, just in case.

Fellow Adobe Platform Evangelist Kevin Hoyt has recorded two useful videos for Adobe Developer Connection. In RIA Problems You Never Expected: Too Many Screens he explains how multiple screens in a rich internet application can exceed the abilities of the client machine, and shows how to achieve swift and seamless response time with creation queuing techniques. In RIA Problems You Never Expected: Wasted Resources he explains how virtual lists improve application performance by reducing rendering time. You can watch both videos in under 10 minutes, and in doing so I think you'll find the time well spent.

SapphireSteel has released beta 7 of their Visual Studio plug-in for Flex development. New features include improvements to the design view, property editors, as well as a new debugger.

The current alpha of Flex Builder for Linux has a hard-coded expiration date of December 1st, 2009. To enable Linux users to continue using Flex Builder past that date, the Flex team has announced an update (no features changes, just the expiration extension).

A few weeks ago I mentioned ChessJam, a Flex/AIR/ColdFusion/LCDS app built by Greg Wilson and some of his pals. Greg has since posted technical details on how the app works. (He actually posted this last week, but I missed it while on the road).

Later this month we'll be running a series of free full day seminars for ColdFusion developers, focused on getting started with Flex, using Flash Builder 4, and ColdFusion Flex integration. We'll be hosting events in Plano TX, Durham NC, Denver CO, Newport Beach CA, Atlanta GA, Chicago IL, Washington D.C., and San Francisco CA (in that order) from November 13th, 2009 through November 20th, 2009. Details and registration info online.

One of the most talked about MAX keynote demos was the FedEx Custom Critical shipment tracking dashboard as presented by FedEx's Adam Mollenkopf. And now RedMonk's Michael Coté has posted an interview with Adam where they look at the app, discuss the business case, and explain why the solution was built on the Flash Platform and powered by LiveCycle Data Services.

[Via Duane Nickull]

Fellow platform evangelist Miti Pricope has spent a considerable amount of time working on how to integrate PayPal Express Checkout with Flex applications running in Flash Player or in Adobe AIR. He has posted his thoughts and recommendations in a new ADC article entitled Integrating PayPal Express Checkout with Flex and Adobe AIR.

Are you a Creative Suite 4 Web Premium or Master Collection user who purchased you software on or after September 1th, 2009? If so, you are eligible to use Adobe Flex Builder 3 at no additional cost. Details posted online.

BFusion & BFlex '09 are two day long events coming up in Bloomington, IN. This will be the second year for BFusion and the third for BFlex. For $10 per event, you'll get a full day of sessions, learning, networking and more, and you'll get to learn from speakers including Doug Hughes, Mike Brunt, Matt Woodward, Matt Boles, Rich Tretola, and Kevin Schmidt.

Fellow Adobe platform evangelist Greg Wilson has posted some details about ChessJam, a new multi-user chess game he helped create. The client is a Flex based AIR application, and the back-end is a mixture of ColdFusion and LiveCycle Data Services. He has promised to post a follow-up entry with details of the technical underpinnings.

On3 has announced the opening of an Adobe authorized training center in Denver, CO. Among the offerings are training on ColdFusion and Flex.

The new and greatly improved Adobe Cookbooks is now online. New features include:

• Many more products/technologies
• Improved navigation and search
• Recipe requests - for developers who can't find the code sample they are looking for
• Related recipes - that appear in a side bar of all recipe pages
• Cookbook Explorer - a visual display of top cookbook recipes and contributors
• New contributor recognition features - profile pics, links to blogs, links to community profiles

Squiggly is a spell checker library for use with any text control in Flash and AIR applications. This is something lots of users have wanted for a long time, and Squiggly is now available to play with on Adobe Labs. This initial release is intended for use with English language dictionaries, but the plan is to support additional languages in the future.

Google Webmaster Tools has created a page on how they work with Flash and other rich media files.

Regarding Flash, they say: "Google can now discover and index text content in SWF files of all kinds, including self-contained Flash websites and Flash gadgets such as buttons or menus. This includes all textual content visible to the user. Google supports common JavaScript techniques. In addition, we can now find and follow URLs embedded in Flash files. We'll crawl and index this content in the same way that we crawl and index other content on your site--you don't need to take any special action."

And what about Silverlight? Well: "Google can crawl and index the text content of Flash files, but we still have problems accessing the content of other rich media formats such as Silverlight ... In other words, even if we can crawl your content and it is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links."

Enough said!