There are some interesting threads going on in the Aptana Forums about using Aptana Studio with Adobe Flex and Flex Builder. The idea of using Ajax and Flex or Flash together is not new. Google Finance did a great job a few years ago blending the two to provide a very nice user experience with Flash-based interactive charts within an otherwise Ajax UI.

It seems that the Aptana community is uncovering increasing efficiencies in using Aptana Studio and Adobe's Flex Builder together. We've also known that many Adobe AIR users are building their Ajax apps for AIR using Aptana Studio, and have heard from others that using Aptana Jaxer to create JSON data services (written natively in JavaScript) consumable by Flash and Flex apps makes a lot of sense as well. Flash and Flex each have an "Ajax bridge" to expose JavaScript APIs for the embedded objects.

Anyways... It seems Adobe is now actively taking a deeper look at this trend in the hybridization of Ajax and Flash and Flex. I saw that they are offering $75 bucks for an hour phone call to discuss your experience with and thoughts on using these together.

Here's the link if you're interested: http://www.adobe.com/go/RIAintegration_study/. $75 bucks... That's almost the cost of a tank of gas in San Francisco.

In June, Aptana and ColdFusion enthusiast, Mark Drew will be at CFUnited presenting:

Fresh AIR: Getting to grips with Aptana and AIR apps
This session will give a nice and fresh introduction to developing AIR applications using Aptana. By using a ColdFusion developer's existing knowledge of HTML and JavaScript (and some quick introductions to JavaScript libraries such as EXT and JQuery), the whole process of developing rich desktop apps will be demystified.

Mark, who has been central to the CFEclipse project, is sure to deliver a great session, so be sure to check it out.

Next week Aptana will be at AjaxWorld (NYC), iPhone Developer Summit (NYC), and EclipseCon (Silicon Valley). Join us. We want to meet you, answer your questions, and get your feedback and ideas to make Aptana Studio and Aptana Jaxer even better for you. (Of course you can do that anytime via our ASAP enhancement request system too).

AjaxWorld, March 18-20, New York, NY
Kevin Hakman presents Aptana Studio: Your Unfair Advantage for AJAX, iPhone, Adobe AIR, PHP and Rails Development and Rapid Development of Enterprise Ajax Apps both on Wednesday, March 19.

iPhone Developer Summit, March 18-20, New York, NY
Also on Wednesday March 19, Kevin Hakman presents Developing AJAX Applications for iPhone and iPod Touch.

EclipseCon, March 17-19, Santa Clara, CA
Eclipse Monkey committer and Aptana engineer Ingo Muschenetz shares Building Eclipse-based Products: A View From the Trenches on March 18, and Aptana engineer Kevin Sawicki delivers Pimp My Editor with insights for extending and customizing features in Eclipse.

We'll also be at the EclipseCon Ajax focused Birds of a Feather meeting -- check the schedule for details.

The first Adobe AIR Support Pro feature has been released to the nightly update stream. This feature includes a custom application descriptor widget used for editing the application.xml files inside your Adobe AIR projects. It includes fields for various AIR application metadata as well as a interface for adding, editing, and removing file type associations. It also includes selectable controls to manipulate the initial, minimum, and maximum window width and height and the initial position of your main AIR application window.

Screenshots of the new application.xml editor:

• Application properties editor tab
• Window definition editor tab
• File types association and configuration editor tab

Yesterday Adobe announced the availability of Adobe AIR 1.0. At the same time, Aptana released the Adobe AIR plugin for Aptana Studio which simplifies development of Ajax applications that run "on AIR". (Adobe AIR Plugin for Aptana Studio)

If you are not familiar with Adobe AIR, it enables you to use the skills and Web technologies you already know, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to write applications that can be deployed to the Windows and Mac desktop, and shortly on Linux desktops too.

And what is Aptana Jaxer, you ask? Jaxer is an Ajax server that enables you to leverage those same Web skills and technologies, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to write server-side code and do a whole new range of things with JavaScript like interact with databases, file systems, and remote data sources, do server-side DOM manipulations, cross-domain data calls, make socket connections, and call server-side JavaScript functions from the client-side, plus lots more. Yes, you write both client and server code using HTML and Ajax. You can even write entire web applications in a single HTML file if you wish.

With that said, it becomes much clearer as to what ‘Jaxer on AIR’ is all about -- two systems that enable you to leverage your Ajax skills for building desktop and server apps, unified into a single, very interesting model. With Jaxer you can implement your server-side to know if an app is running in AIR and thus take advantage of offline synchronization and local access to the client system as permitted, or if you’re running on the Web with a subset of the total potential features of your Ajax apps and Web pages.

I did a 10-minute screencast showing a simple example of this. I take one of Jack Slocum’s great Ext / Adobe AIR demos (EXT Tasks Demo) and Jaxer-enabled it. I added a single JavaScript function that can query my backend database, and I use the results to fill the user interface.

This demo just scratches the surface of what is possible, but I hope it opens the doors to your thinking about how to utilize these great technologies – it’s my version of their chocolate and our peanut-butter happily together, enjoy!

View 'Jaxer on AIR' Screencast

Adobe AIR SDK beta 3 has been released and an update to the Aptana plugin for Adobe AIR development has been released to support the latest SDK and runtime.

More information can be found on the Aptana Studio Start Page (Help->Aptana Studio Start Page...).
You will see links in the Plugins section to obtain the latest Adobe AIR SDK and runtime and if you need to install via an arhived site it is available here.

We are pleased to announce that our Adobe AIR plugin for Aptana Studio now supports beta 3 of the Adobe AIR SDK.

This release requires Aptana Studio 1.1 or later which can be downloaded here.

What's new in this release:

• Inclusion of the AIRIntrospector.js allowing inspection of running applications by pressing F12
• Updated sandbox samples for both application and non-application models
• New fields added to the application.xml wizard page making it easier to create the initial configuration of your application