James Ward from Adobe came out to give a presentation on Adobe Flex. Some of the demos were really impressive, especially the one with a simulated book that you could turn over and fold pages on. He covered Apollo as well. He’s touring around as a general evangelist.
The SACJUG peppered him pretty well with questions. Any new tool/framework especially one that isn’t fully open source will always raise eyebrows with developers. He got a few questions about whether it could run on 64 bit Linux versions. Turns out it can, but there are some caveats about running it in 32 bit emulation.
Flex is a front-end framework utilizing Flash and ActionScript (aka Javascript 2). You can hook it up to back end data services as well. I don’t think we’ll probably be using it in our shop anytime soon, but it never hurts to keep up with these things. And next time my web developer brother asks me working with Flex I’ll know what he’s talking about.