Ted Patrick > { Events & Community } > Adobe Systems

I will be speaking at Mashup University at MIT Jan 15-16 and will be talking about Apollo and Flex in detail. I have started development of a new mash-up game using Flex and Apollo that merges mapping, strategy, and real-time messaging. I spoke at Mashup University earlier this year and had a blast, David Berlind recently posted this photo of me to his blog on ZDNET (Honestly, the fish was this big!)



If you have never attended a Mashup Camp or Mashup University, I strongly encourage you to join in and register. The unconference revolution is an amazing change allowing for rapid learning and sharing of new ideas on software development. The format and size of these venues is ideal for real learning.

Mash-up University Registration

Mashups are becoming increasingly important as they deliver distributed computing applications to the mainstream. As the web transitions from a pages to applications, we are seeing mashups integrate various services and components into applications that were not possible before. There are many developers exploring the mashup space and gluing together distributed components and services to make something new.

I believe that Flash Player 9 will quickly evolve to be the dominant mashup client as more developers realize productivity of Flex development tools and the feature capabilities of Flash Player 9. Here are a few of my favorite features and trends that Flash Player 9 and Apollo deliver for mashup developers:

1. Distributed components - Load visual or data components directly into your application with a local API. We are starting to see many services deliver SWF components, YouTube, MotionBox and BrightCove are delivering video players to expose their streaming media APIs to end users and application providers.

2. Distributed Real-Time Data Services - Exposing Messaging and Data Synchonization as an API. Flash Player supports push based messaging allowing clients to be developed without poll based logic. This allows a group of users to synchronize data independently, and enables solutions for scheduling, workflow, inventory, and collaboration.

3. Direct Protocol Integration - flash.net.Socket allows protocol development for direct communication with SVN, FTP, NNTP, XMPP from the mashup application client.

4. Offline use - Applications that provide behavior offline. I am not alwasy online and supporting this behavior is a natural fit for Flash Player and Apollo. With local persistence and network detection, you can queue data up when offline and sync when online.

5. Rich Media - Integrated audio, video, images in both read and write formats.

6. File Literacy - The ability to read and write data to the local file system enables all sorts of new mashup use cases with Apollo.

I look forward to seeing everyone at Mashup University at MIT early next year.

Ted :)