Recently Yahoo unveiled their new Maps product. Most shocking is the new Yahoo Maps is built on an AJAX platform, replacing the previous Flex 1.5 implementation. Why would Yahoo throw away an entire product, an entire investment in Flex technology? Was it because Flex is inferior to AJAX?

The release of Flex 3 and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is imminent. To help kick things off properly, Adobe are starting a World Tour.
  Expect prizes, swag, product demos, sample applications and the latest in Flex 3 news. Is your city listed?

Thanks to Ryan Stewart, I just spent some time inside SmallWorlds. Smallworlds is an interesting take on social networks. I found the experience pretty fun. I was very impressed with the finished quality of the virtual world. The interface was very nicely done and as a flex programmer, it was quite inspiring!

One of my good friends, Rama Marupilla, showed me a recent project where he used CFGrid to make a searchable, filterable restaurant locater. Have a look at http://www.nycvisit.com/restaurantweek/.

Last night, Ben Forta came to Cary, North Carolina to showcase the soon to be released Flex 3 and AIR products from Adobe.
  Flex Builder 3 is a compelling upgrade for the product. The IDE offering has actually gone down in price even while adding nice new features like Improved Designer/Developer workflow, a memory profiler, advanced components, and support for the AIR platform.
  For more complete information on Flex 3 Features see the labs.adobe.com page.

Bruce Phillips (You should check out his interesting Flex posts) let me know that my Surfing Stats data didn't load when the swf was located off my http://www.nodans.com domain. I want others to take the code and do with it as they please so I need to make the data available across domains. This is done through the use of a crossdomain.xml file. The file I used looks like this:

This week, I spoke with John Wilker, long time Flex Consultant and co-founder of 360 Conferences. John and company are in final preparations for the third installment of the 360 Conference series. 360|Flex Atlanta follows events in San Jose (March 07) and Seattle (August 07), and will continue the 100% Flex focus.
  Flex development has never been hotter so it was a logical choice to hold this conference on the hottest RIA technology right in Hotlanta! For the low low price of $480, this 3 day event is a bargain though don't think the bargain price represents bargain rate content. Attendees will hear presentations on a variety of topics from top authorities on Flex like Christophe Coenraets, Michael Labriola, Doug McCune, Rich Tretola, and Ted Patrick. There are a number of opportunities to get free Flex training at the conference and a lucky few will even receive job offers from top Flex firms.
  John and I spoke on a variety of topics, from starting your own conference to sponsorships to music. Let's hear from John:

I am always interested in tutorials. I love to learn new things. In my travels recently, I found a good set of tutorials on over at Gary Gilbert's blog.
  Gary has quite a growing number of tutorials on a Spry, ColdFusion and the new Abobe Integrated Runtime. This is definately a resource for those wanting to learn more on those topics

Internet Advertisting is a very dynamic industry. Most heavy Internet users are trained to look right through ads. Banners, Text Links, Flashing Rotating Purple Monkeys, I ignore them like macaroni salad. How can organizations get their message out to people like me?
  Apparently the answer is to create a cheeky, humourous RIA featuring a hungry suitcase. HungrySuitcase.com is a front for Royal Caribbean Cruises, though that is non-obvious. On the surface, a talking suitcase will analyze your vacation needs and help you choose the perfect vacation.

Ajax, Flex and Silverlight are pretty much the top of the foodchain when talking about RIAs. Sure there are some other technologies, but none have quite the reach.
  Having been a part of many Ajax applications I see where the value is. Partially updating a page or providing a sweet drag and drop functionality can smooth out a difficult workflow for the users.
  Flex, on the other hand, is still in its infancy. The possibilities are not fully understood quite yet. There are some game changing abilities Flex brings to the table. One example, have a look at what A.viary is doing with Flex and image editing.

The old saying goes, if you throw a frog into boiling water, he will jump out quickly. If you put the frog in a pot of water and slowly increase the temperature, the frog will remain in place even when the water is boiling.
  Few people like to eat frogs. Fewer would like to BE the frog. When it comes to applications, HTML + CSS is a pot of water that has been heating up for years. We, the developers, are frogs in the middle of frothing foaming water.
  I've made countless web pages using HTML + CSS and have no complaints about the technological combination for Internet documents and pages. The rub comes when trying to make an application. Note the distinguishing factors. HTML + CSS is a horrid combination for making applications.

For those new to Rich Internet Applications, there is a War of the Platforms taking place right now. Users are demanding more intuitive applications, increased functionality and freedom from the restrictions of the browser, There are 3 companies poised to offer solutions, Microsoft, Sun and Adobe. Adobe, in my opinion, has the most compelling, broadest reaching solutions. The most significant launch in Adobe history took place last night at 12:30 EST. This morning, at 8:35 AM, Matt Chotin announced the release of the AIR and Flex 3 platforms at the 360|Flex Keynote. As a matter of fact, I am sitting in the Keynote right now, blogging this. (all mistakes, typos, etc are mine)

The 360|Flex Conference, Atlanta version, is drawing to a close and it is now time to take home the fancy conference schwag and tons of new information. I'll be driving for 5 hours to get home but honestly, I'd much rather spend that time coding with some of the techniques and libraries I learned about during conference sessions.
  We were excited to be a part of the launch of Flex 3, AIR 1.0 and Flex Builder 3. We were also excited to get interesting first-hand information from the prestigious line up of speakers. The sessions were a good mix of content and experience level with topics ranging from Memory Management to The Flex Framework Life Cycle, from Open Source AS3 libraries to Custom Component Creation and Skinning. There was even a presentation on making 3D, you know the kind, viewed with the red and green glasses? It Was Very Cool!

Many developers want to add AJAX enhancements to an application. When that application uses a front controller, the inevitable question comes, should the remote request also route through the front controller?
  The answer is, as always, It Depends!
  If the remote requests will primarily pull data back from the back end, then this is a good indicator the requests should pipe through a Remote Service Layer. On the other hand, when the nature of the AJAX requests simply need to make partial page updates, I push them through my front controller.
  Why? Clearly generating HTML is much easier and cleaner inside of the front controller. My favorite front controller framework, Model-Glue, has all sorts of helpful functionality like a dependancy injection, business logic, an event manager and a view manager all in one place.

DZone sits down with Aaron West, the man who set Twitter free of the browser. Aaron is a long time ColdFusion, Flash and Flex developer who created twitterAIR, the first Twitter/RIA integration based on the Adobe Integrated Runtime platform and he has a host of community contributions and accolades to his credit. In this interview, we get to know Aaron, find out how and why he built twitterAIR and hear his thoughts on the direction of Rich Internet Applications.

Today, Adobe Systems released the beta version of Photoshop Express. Photoshop Express is a web based version of the popular Flagship Image Editing product and contains a plethora of common features in an easy to use Web Based Interface.
  Users can store 2 GB of images on Adobe servers for free and also show their images in a personalized gallery, akin to Flickr.
  This offering competes directly with the Picasa product from Google, however, Adobe beats Google at their own game by providing an online version that doesn't require a specific client installation apart from the ubiquitous Flash Player.

DZone sits down with Vince Bonfanti, President and co-founder of New Atlanta Communications, LLC. New Atlanta creates server-based software products built using Java/J2EE and Microsoft .NET Framework technologies. New Atlanta recently announced a version of their BlueDragon product, a ColdFusion-compatible web application server that allows native deployment and integration of CFML applications onto J2EE servers, will be open sourced by mid 2008. This is the first open source commercial grade CFML engine to date.