Sun's mule train has finally pulled into Indiana after three years on the road. Indiana is the Linux-friendly Fedora-like OpenSolaris project meant to move the Solaris-shy Linux community off Linux and on to Solaris tempted by Solaris widgetry like the highly scalable, rollback-easy, 128-bit ZFS default filesystem, Linux-like network-based Image Packaging System (IPS) application install accelerator, DTrace predictive self-healing and scalable Containers virtualization, not to mention its Gnome 2.22 front-end and built-in Firefox browser.

Flex 2 was released in the Summer of 2006 and it was a mini-revolution in the RIA space. Almost nobody knew about Flex 1.5, but now almost everyone has at least heard about this software. Flex 3 was released in early 2008. It has a number of useful new features, but it was not a major release. In my opinion, a more modest 2.5 would suffice. We are expecting more now. Flex 4 will come out to the world next year and while the Flex team has announced a number of very interesting syntax improvements, I'd love to see more fundamental improvements in this great RIA tool.

This pattern is a hybrid of plug-in and event driven architecture to integrate individual plug-ins together with one another to come up with Plug-in Integrator pattern. This pattern leverages the benefits of both these well-known architectures to provide a optimal solution to build enterprise ready rapid application development infrastructure preferably in Flex but might also be implemented in other programming languages like Java, C#, etc.

A bunch of the boys have joined Adobe in forming the Open Screen Project to drive a consistent rich Internet experience across TVs, PCs, mobile devices and consumer electronics regardless of operating system. They've been persuaded that the way to squeeze the World Wide Web into those little bitty phones and newfangled MID things - and make it look like a PC - is to enable, maintain and optimize a consistent runtime environment using Adobe's Flash Player and later on Adobe AIR.

Today, Adobe announced the Open Screen Project, supported by a group of industry leaders. The project is dedicated to driving rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics.

In today's cooking class you'll add to your cookbook a delicious recipe. It's quick and won't cost you a dime. I'm sure you've been in one of these situations when you have unexpected guests arriving in 20 minutes and need to make a good impression. Let's create an application that will auto-generate a Flex-Tomcat-BlazeDS-DB2 application.

Vectors supporting types are the part of next release - and are billed more of performance/coding help then language enhancement. Most of the Java 5 constructs are not really applicable to ActionScript 3 - for fair comparison you need to use Java 7/8 with dynamic scripting language support - and then the way you speak that language changes. Compare how enum support evolved in Java over the years - starting with patterns - and you would think of language as of evolving environment. I was coming to Java in '97 from C++ and I thought of it as a very poor language. 10 years made it almost tolerable - but I still miss ability to redefine operators - does it really matter to anyone who never did it in first place?

Told ya Adobe was gonna reorganize and put its mobile/devices operation in with its platform operation in the name of moving to a single technology platform and runtime for PCs, handsets and consumer devices. Adobe's new CTO Kevin Lynch, the creator of AIR, is basically in charge of the whole magilla now. Gary Kovacs, VP of product management and marketing for the mobile and devices business, will be general manager of the unit, reporting to Lynch, replacing Al Ramadan, who is leaving.

Robert X. Cringely thinks Apple should buy Adobe. In an article published on the National Public Radio website discussing Apple's future, he lays out some goals for Apple on its quest to desktop dominance: an important link in this chain, according to Cringeley, is the aquisition by Apple of Adobe Systems.

Adobe, which is not exactly unfamiliar with the concept of the free giveaway, has put out a public beta of a simple version of its popular Photoshop photo-editing software for free over the web. Think of it as an answer to Google's Picasa. It's called PhotoShop Express and Adobe says it'll add features over time, evidently in response to the feedback it gets from the beta.