O’Reilly: Inside RIA

I've been holed up in meetings or in my hotel room working more than I've been over at the show, so my ability to speak as johnny-reporter-on-the-spot is rather limited. That said, here are a few impressions: --General Web 2.0...

Inforworld covered the announcement of Curl's entry into the rich desktop game with the release of Nitro. It appears to be positioned as a competitor to Adobe's AIR, the key differentiator they're claiming is security and performance, but this seems hard to prove at this stage.

Today, Adobe released the public beta version of LCDS 2.6 on labs. I see this as a pretty big release because we now have highly scalable streaming data available over port 80 using the HTTP protocol.

It was recently announced the the next 360|Flex will be held back in sunny San Jose, CA (8.18-8.20), where it all started. If you haven't checked out one of these conferences yet, you're missing out. Here's the low-down... Tom Ortega and John Wilker are the hosts of the 360 conferences. 360|Flex conferences are the only 3-day, community-focused, all Flex conferences I know about, and I'm pretty sure they're the only show in town when it comes to an all Flex conference. John and Tom are not in this for the money (because I don't think they make any), they're in it for what it does for the community... and it shows.

Adobe® Media Player software provides control and flexibility to view what you want, when you want — whether online or offline. You can queue up and download your favorite Internet TV content, track and download new episodes automatically, and manage your personal video library for viewing at your convenience.

The event in Paris was great. It was in the Palais Brongniart which is a really cool venue. I think we had up to 300 attendees at the event. So the Paris event had some kick ass demos that attendees were showing! There was MooFlair which was a beautiful looking video player, I'm definitely going to use this for viewing Blip from now on. The next app was the Elixir dashboard from iLog was really slick too, some very nice tree maps and dynamic maps. Christophe from iLog showed data from Adob'e Jira Bug Tracker and the CIA world fact book. Very cool to see a technology leader like iLog jumping on AIR and Flex. The most amazing thing I saw though was mutli-touch screen running with AIR.

If you're interested in design patterns for rich interactions or web 2.0 design patterns in general, and you can get yourself to Switzerland this summer, then you might want to submit a proposal for the pattern-mining workshop at TOOLS 2008 Europe.

Microsoft announced support for SWF in its next version of Silverlight. Does this spell trouble for Adobe?

So the OnAIR Tour Europe has officially begun! I joined the crew yesterday evening in Madrid for tapas in the late afternoon. Today's event was a great kick off, we had just over 200 show up and most stayed right until the bitter end. I think everyone understood most of what we were saying, although I can't be sure I think the number of questions we received was a good indicator that people were interested in AIR, Flex, Flash and Ajax.

Adobe has launched their 1st public alpha for building AIR applications on Linux. Included in this alpha are the AIR runtime, sample applications, and the AIR SDK.

The beta version of Flex Builder 3 has been updated to beta 3 and now includes support for building AIR applications on Linux.