My session from MAX, Flex Roadmap, is now available for viewing on Adobe TV. Its definitely worth checking out – I cover a brief update of the next version of Flex, and then move onto topics like open source, themes and features for the next releases of Flex, the next-generation Flex compiler as well as improvements being pondered for the runtimes and virtual machine.
Check it out!
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2010-develop/flex-roadmap-/
Woah, suprising move from Adobe to include video ads on http://tv.adobe.com.
I suggest interested viewers of this MAX talk to watch at Adobe MAX Online web-site, which features much more better video player with no ads and fast forward working
http://2010.max.adobe.com/online/2010/MAX163_1288045382187GGKE
Thanks JabbyPanda, the original link is broken in more ways than one. Sometime in the middle it totally breaks down to show some ad and you just can’t get past that.
Very interesting talk, really nice things coming up :).
I have to agree with JabbyPanda, the video on the MAX website is a lot better and doesn’t have any problem with fast forwarding.
Fabien
Hi Deepa,
I’ve watched the flex roadmap video and there’s some exciting stuff in there. Since you asked for feedback in the presentation, here’s mine on one topic: concurrency.
I think that the best way forward for a concurrency framework/api in flex (besides the asynchrous request handling that’s already there today) is to go for a message passing (aka C.S.P, aka Actors) approach (and immutable datastructures and functional programming in general) and not a shared memory + locks/threads directly exposed to programmers (of course you’ll need a threadpool under the covers to actually make the actors code run in parallel on multiple cores).
If you look at how “new” languages that are now high on the hype cycle (like Erlang, Scala, Clojure, Go, Groovy,…) approach concurrency then you’ll see that all of those have at least message passing as a paradigm for concurreny. Some have only this, others have other paradigms also. But given a choice between a low level thread + locks approach with all the dangers/intricacies (deadlocks,livelocks,…) that entails (and the programmer expertise!) vs the more high level message passing approach I think the choice should be obvious: go for MP.
I think the MP appraoch also meshes nicely with the functional programming paradigm (and this will become more and more mainstream I think, in part due to concurrency). Now I know that AS3 is not a functional programming language. In fact the transition from AS2 to AS3 was really to make it a statically typed OO language that mimics Java a lot. But thanks to its Javascript legacy there are actually some concepts from FP in AS3: like closures, functions as first class citizens, higher order functions. So in that regard AS3 can be considered a somewhat oo-FP hybrid (& more powerful than Java which still doesn’t have closures) on the level of Ruby,Groovy, Python but not as functional as e.g. Scala which has immutable datastructures, map/reduce kind of stuff, comprehensions, higher kinded types,….
It would be nice for AS4 to get a library of functional/immutable datastructures, higher order functions like map/reduce, comprehensions,… I think this could be nicely combined with an actors library for concurrency and also making the current asynchronous request handling of server requests part of the actors lib: i.e. make remote services (be it remote object, HttpRequest or SOAPRequest) appear as a remote actor on the flex client side.
Moving to an object-functional approach for Flex would also mesh nicely with the server side if modern languages like Scala are used on the server side rather than plain old Java.
So hopefully this feedback will have an impact 😉
Cheers,
Steven