The new website enables their community to define what products they use and what SIGs they want to link to. The new site wants to enable sharing of information and ideas.

The goal is to organize every month one AUG event, linked to 1 or more interest groups. Next one coming up is the “Design SIG” event in Antwerp. Yes, indeed … Antwerp. The rebooted AUG wants to host their events in different cities across Belgium.
At the moment all content is in Dutch (except for the RIA sessions), but I’ve been told they might add other languages in the future …

The event list contains 6 events and topics look really promising. The “Video SIG” event in march looks impressive. Check out the website and get subscribed ! You can follow them on twitter :  @augbe

Congrats to the team driving the new AUG !!!

Maybe we’ll see each other at the “Design SIG” event on Feb 25th in Antwerp ?

For who doesn’t know it yet … LC CS is a set of Flex components you can integrate into your own application. These Flex components offer you online collaboration capabilities like a chat window, webcam integration, multi-user whiteboard, VOIP, … You can see it as Acrobat Connect building blocks.

As the word “service” implies, these Flex components will use a hosted service provided by Adobe. If you want to use these components you’ll need to have an account to use these online services.

Wanna get started ? Checking out the LC CS developer portal might be a good idea

“During these sessions “Dr Flex & Dr LiveCycle”, observe your common Flex & LC symptoms. They advise on how to implement Adobe Enterprise Software and work in a healthy IT environment by giving you a FREE ‘health check’ session.” 

They also setup a blog where they will post all questions and answers so the community can benefit from this iniative ! Check it out : http://www.drflex.eu

You can see a list of new features + download at Adobe Labs.  

We’ll also have some Flex specialist at Adobe booth : James Ward, Christophe Coenraets, Marc Meewis and me. We also have invited Bruce Eckel to talk about his view on Flex and Java.

Ofcourse we’ll also try to have some fun by organizing the “Adobe Quest” … A cool way to get your hands on some cool Adobe gadgets … More on this later on …

And … just like last year I have 2 full conference passes to give away … How to win ? Post a comment to this item and tell me why you think Java and Flex/AIR are the perfect couple … The 2 most original posts will win a conference pass.

See you at Javapolis ? I’m looking forward to it !

So Livecycle ES has got an orchestration tool that allows you to build functionality by linking ”services” together. Each services stands for a specific piece of functionality. The product comes with a library of these services. (Generate PDF, Secure PDF, Read LDAP info, Send email, SQL, …) Livecycle ES Workbench, a tool build on top of eclipse, allows you to draw the orchestration in and configure it.  

By building a custom components you can extend the Livecycle ES functionality by creating your own services. A custom component is a Jar file that excist out of a java object, a configuration file and an icon which defines the visual representation in the Workbench. I have created the LC ES Share component, by building a java object that would call the Share Java API.
After writing the component, the component developer would hand over the Jar file to the Livecycle ES administrator so it can be deployed into the Livecycle ES platform. After deployement, it will become available as a service and will be visible in the Workbench. From this moment on you can drag and drop the service into the orchestration you would be building.

The image above shows a sample orchestration. In this orchestration I will first generate a PDF file, then I’ll upload it to Adobe Share and finally I send out an email with the notification. The Generate PDF and the email component are in the LC ES product, the Adobe Share component is the one I have build.

You would configer the Adobe Share component by defining it’s properties in the UI. Check out the screenshot below. The fields I have to define here, are the same as defined in my java object and configured in the xml configuration file.

Another advantage of the Livecycle ES platform is, that from the moment i deploy my Adobe Share component, it will not only become available as a service to my orchestration designer.The service containerr also automatically makes the functionality availabe as a SOAP service, EJB service and a Remoting endpoint. The Remoting endpoint allows you to interact with this piece of functionality from with a Flex application.
You can even add watched folders or email endpoints, to make the Share functionality available when dropping a file in a folder or receiving a file by email. Find more information on the service container in the Livecycle documentation. 

I have made the source available, and also the component which you can deploy directly into your LC ES platform. Find here how to deploy components. You can download Livecycle ES trial version if you don’t have it installed yet.

One nice extra  is that I added an ANT build file to the source,  that will build the java source, create the jar file and deploys it automatically to the Livecycle ES platform as discussed in this post.

The Share guys have released Java and Actionscript API’s. So i guess it’s not going to take a long time now before we get the first  drag and drop Share application I’ll try to make a Livecycle component that connect to share, using the Java API.

Back to Max now … First session done, went pretty well … and had a full room. Let’s go we’ll keep this up . I have been taking some pictures with my new camera … I got a Canon Ixus 860 IS and am pretty happy with it … i’ll post some of the Max pictures so you can judge for yourself.

Back to Max now …

The way it’s setup for Barcelona is that a number of Adobe LS ES product specialist will spend the first 1.5  hour presenting a number of topics we’ll prepare. The audience can choose 3 sessions out of a list of 6 sessions … You’ll be able to choose from :

• Integrating Flex with Adobe Livecycle
• Using Events in LC ES Process management
• Customizing LC Workspace
• Building custom components
• End points in LC ES
• Prepopulate a form in LC ES Workspace

The last hour we’ll go into an interactive mode which means we’ll have 2 options …

• Have you guys present stuff you have build on top of LC ES.
• Answering specific “how-to” questions from the audience.

I’m sure this will not only be a great knowledge share opportunity, but also a great way to get to know some of the LC ES specialist in EMEA.

We are looking forward to meet you guys !

Here is a list of some sessions i saw in Chicago and certainly can recommend :

• Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) Security by Lucas Adamski : Great technical session that explains what’s the security model for AIR, but also will give you an insight on the why.
• Flex Roadmap by Ely Greenfield : Get some insight in the Flex teams brains … It was interesting to see what might be the next steps …
• Fifty Reasons Why ActionScript 3 Rocks by Grant Skinner : Very technical but certainly not boring
• Optimizing Search for Rich Internet Applications by Craig Hordlow : A question that pops ups quite a lot … Craig tells you what approach to take, and also will give you background on why to take that approach.

A session which is new for Barcelona is the “Flex/AIR & Java integration for Parleys.com” case study by Stephan Janssen. This one is interesting if you are a Java developer. Stephan is the founder of the Javapolis conference.

I’ll be presenting these 2 sessions :

• Hands On: Building an Application Using LiveCycle ES
• Advanced LiveCycle Data Services for Flex Developers

And also will be hosting the “Livecycle Bootcamp”.

I’m certainly looking forward to meet you all ! Don’t hesitate to ping me or say hello

ps : only 18 registrations away from sold out … so you might need to hurry up if you haven’t subscribed yet