Mrinal Wadhwa is a software developer form Bangalore, India. His interests include Rich Internet Applications and Enterprise Software. These days he's working with a small team trying to bootstrap a software as a service product startup
This is all over the news today, adobe has announced the Open Screen Project…. read more
I am at the Adobe RIA Architects Summit and I’ve been streaming live using qik. I have run out of battery right now 
but I will start streaming again with James Ward’s session on RIA development best practices.
You should check out the Keynote by Naresh Gupta, CEO, Adobe India and the RIA Strategy talk that David Wadhwani gave that I recorded earlier.
I will be presenting as well at around 4:30 about the RIA User Community and how it can help you
Adobe today released an alpha version of the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for Linux available for download on adobe labs. This is very cool because we can now build desktop applications in our favorite web technologies and deploy them on AIR on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Vivek started a very interesting discussion on his blog where he’s questioning Adobe’s decision to not have a MAX in India this year. His post is full of sentiment and disappointment and I totally share the disappointment with him, I was very excited when Ted Patrick hinted that Bangalore was being considered but when the final locations were announced it was a bummer 
The discussion in the comments of Vivek’s post has been quite interesting … Abdul expressed that it might not be very practical from an organizers perspective, given that the Adobe community in India is still quite nascent and I kinda agree with him having had the experience of organizing initRIA and several local FUG meets. That said I also feel that its quite a tough judgement call and I hope that Adobe would have given Bangalore due diligence before rejecting it.
Peter Elst also joined the discussion and expressed a very important point that I totally agree with …
Adobe has an opportunity and needs to step up to the plate, failing that it takes little for Microsoft to start actively pushing out their technology to developers and tip the balance of the current ‘outsourcing ecosystem’.
Its just a matter of time for Microsoft to push more money into it and start promoting Silverlight. I firmly believe Adobe needs to be ahead of the curve here.
Yes, Adobe needs to step up and stay ahead of the curve here in India, before it becomes economically more practical for organizations to build RIAs using Microsoft’s technologies, even though the Flash Platform is a better option technologically.
Now is organizing MAX in India the way to stay ahead of this curve? I don’t think so …. events in general is definitely one area but there are several other things that Adobe needs to spend time and money on, as far events are concerned, we have gone from no events in 2007 to some events in 2008 .. thats not too bad.
So here are the things that Adobe needs to do to stay ahead of the curve and MAX is not what we really need at this point ..
Thus in my opinion Adobe’s time and resources are better spent in the above areas rather than in a big event like MAX . I’m not saying that events are not important, I would totally love it if we had a MAX in India .. but right now that is not my biggest demand from Adobe. read more
Last year, many of us RIA enthusiasts in India were kinda disappointed with the lack of RIA related events in India, so very close to the end of last year I with some other members from BangaloreFX helped organize the very first RIA focused event in the country initRIA and it was a big success.
Things are very different this year, from the very beginning of the year I started to feel that RIAs were getting a lot of traction in the local circles and we have a lot of fun in store for India this year. In February all the Flex user groups in the county celebrated the launch of Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 and we now have some excellent events lined up already … here’s a list of events that have already been announced …
Notable Attendees:
Colin Moock is the author of the best ActionScript 3 book there is, Essential ActionScript 3 and a very well renowned expert in the AS3 world.
Although this is a broader event and is not free like the above two events, there are two speakers on its speaker list that i would love to listen to:
These are the events that have already been announced, I know there are many others that are being planned … there’s word that we might even have an Adobe MAX in Bangalore this year..
So lets get ready to party !! read more
