Rob Brooks-Bilson

Matt Riley, one of our Sr. Engineers at Amkor has just released his first open source project, dubbed the Deployment Server. It's a ColdFusion application (Mach-II 1.5, ColdSpring, EXT 2.0, Java SE 6, Ant 1.7.0, SVN, SQL Server) that's designed to make deploying applications to various server environments simple, auditable, and secure.

We have a very rigorous SDLC at Amkor, and an even more rigorous internal and external audit. As part of that, it's important that we have a clear segregation of duties between developers, QA, approvers, and those that can promote code. In order to make our lives easier, Matt's created an application that provides a security layer around SVN and ANT that allows our operations group (or anyone else defined in the security policies) to specify which builds/tags are to be deployed, and to which server(s).

The application is highly configurable, but because of that, it's not just something you can download and run out of the box - it has to be customized/configured to meet the needs of your particular environment and process. For more information, or to download, check it out on the RIAForge website.

Any and all feedback is welcome.

Live blogging from SAPPHIRE 2008 in Orlando. Andre Salazar from Adobe is giving a session on creating engaging experiences for SAP using Adobe technology.

Main themes are Adobe has an entire group for managing the SAP partnership. Technologies highlighted include Flash, Flex, Air, PDF, and LiveCycle.

Partnership started in 2002 to replace SAP SmartForms with PDF Forms. Today, the partnership includes other technologies including Enterprise Learning (Acrobat Connect) and user experiences (Flash/Flex dashboards for SAP Analytics, RIA's within SAP).

SAP has licensed Flex for Visual Composer as well as several new areas, launching later this year.

Right now Andre is concentrating on Air. SAP is interested in Air for desktop/off-line capabilities. I'm not completely sure the way he's explaining it is connecting with the SAP audience. He's bouncing back and forth between Flex and Air, and I think that's further confusing people. They do seem to be respoding positively to the UI's that are being shown.

He's showing an example now of a company that put a Flex front end on top of SAP CRM. It's a (very) simple dashboard with charts and graphs. SAP is shipping an app later this year called Spend Analytics that's built in Flex and exposes cost and spend analysis. It's available in both Flex and Air.

Flex Islands inside of WebDynPro, also available later this year lets you embed Flex components inside the WebDynPro environment.

Excelsius (Business Objects) makes heavy use of Flex to generate rich dashboards from Excel data.

At Adobe, they use Flex and SAP for MDM Management internally.

He's now showing some more demos. The first one is the Adobe Customer Response Tool, built in Air. It's lined with SAP CRM for customer trouble ticket resolution. I see Christine Lawson's name on the demo screen ;-)

Next demo is the Adobe Directory, also built in Air. It's a little search widget that ties in with their LDAP as well as SAP's HCM system and MS Exchange. If someone in the search is available, you can pull up a map of the office and see where they sit. The latest version has voice chat too. Pretty slick.

Adobe has interactive forms internally for Travel Authorization. When you download the form, it's already pre-filled for lots of the information. It links to the travel policy via javascript (from intranet). Form has cost calculations and can be routed to managers for approval. The form is also available both online and offline.

He's now showing Acrobat Connect. It's amazing how much better Acrobat Connect is than WebEx and LiveMeeting.

Well, that's about it. Time to move on to my next session.

This one has been making the rounds around the ColdFusion blogosphere, so I thought I'd add to the mix and help get the word out. Todd Sharp is running a nice contest over at the new CFSnippets website designed to get developers working with the new Snipex features in CFEclipse. If you haven't been to CFSnippets, it's a public Snipex server with several libraries of open source snippets you can use within CFEclipse to speed up development of common tasks.

The contest runs through November 30th and includes some pretty cool prizes. For more information, click the banner below.

Loading up Google Reader tonight, I noticed a new link that read "Read Offline". What was this I wondered, so of course I clicked the link. It turns out that Google's been working on a new open source project called Google Gears that allows web applications to run offline. Very cool. I can see myself using this when I travel to read my RSS feeds on the plane, or in airports that don't have free wi-fi (why pay $10 just to read my feeds for an hour).

Gears is a browser extension that Google describes as adding "... just enough to AJAX to make current web applications work offline."

It's certainly an interesting approach. I doubt, though, that the approach will be as flexible as Adobe's Apollo platform, but it does offer another approach for allowing offline access. For Google Reader, it's a natural fit.

Google is also working with Adobe, Mozilla, and Opera (and other companies) on the project to ensure that the project has broad industry support.

You can read more about Google Gears on the Google Gears site.

Check out Many Eyes, a new social data visualization application over at IBM alphaWorks

This isn't a Flex app (it's Java), but it easily could be.

Essentially, Many Eyes allows you to upload data sets via your web browser and share visualizations of the data with others - in the hopes of starting conversations around the data. It's a pretty cool concept all-around.

The system supports several visualization types including geographic maps, line and stack graphs, bar and bubble charts, histograms, scatter plots, network diagrams, tree maps, pie charts, and more.

I bet doing this in Java was a real pain. Given that IBM used to be a Flex partner (but now seems to be more interested in AJAX), I wonder why they chose an applet over Flex.

Steve Brownlee over at Magic Happens Here has an interesting post on a new ColdFusion/Ajax application he's developed for monitoring JVM memory in realtime called Orbwave Memory Explorer.

It looks like more folks are releasing monitoring tools for ColdFusion these days. In addition to the Orbwave Memory Explorer, you also have Ray Camden's Starfish Profiler, SeeFusion, and FusionReactor to name a few.