The Smashed Apples Development Platform is an open source development platform that aims to help flex developers easily and quickly develop flex applications on cloud services, like Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, the Google Web Api’s.
Many Clouds, 1 App.
Flex is perfect for leveraging cloud services. It was designed to have multiple sources of data. Your data can be in an xml file, a web service, or come from remoting directly into backend code. You can use Google App Engine to host your database, store your images in Amazon S3 and deploy the messaging through BlazeDS running on an Ec2 instance.
Why not all, and more.
V 099 Beta
We’re still currently in version 099 beta. But we decided to go ahead and solicit help and feedback from the flex community. We have ideas about what other flex developers might want, but it’ll be better if you just tell us.
More than a swc
Smashed Apples is more than a swc. It’s a development platform. The SmashedApplesSDK is just one piece of a much bigger puzzle. For example on Amazon we created a public Amazon Ec2 ami ( ami-5640a53f -) that starts up an apache web server that deploys blazeDS and a java project that allows you to access the Amazon SimpleDB from within flex. The swc just ties it all together from within flex. Also, with that image you can open up messaging ports and do push pulls off of Amazon Web Services.
Besides being a swc to leverage cloud services, I’ve also been incorporating enterprise-level dynamic flex computing components that will help you create flex apps faster. Forms that know how to submit themselves. DataQuery objects that allow you to consistently create dynamic queries on backend resources.
Harnessing Cloud Services as Needed
Last August at Flex 360 Seattle I had the simple idea of using flex with Amazon Web Services to build a photo viewer using Amazon S3. The problem was I knew nothing about using Amazon Web Services. I wasn’t a linux administrator and every time I tried to use Amazon Web Services from within flex I just got frustrated. (What’s up with that freaking SSH KeyPair!!) I mentioned it to long time friend Jeremy Mooer and it turns out he knew everything about using linux on amazon web services that I didn’t. That simple idea turned into a full blown open source project. As I started looking into Cloud Services, I found there were alot more out there than I suspected. Jeremy Got busy creating Ec2 ami’s and I went about creating the flex sdk, and the smashed apples java ec2 java api. BlazeDS went Open Source, Google came out with AppEngine and it became very apparent to me that the applications of tomorrow are going to be built off of cloud services. ( Get ready to dump your RDBMS btw ). Businesses are going to create thier own mini cloud services. Relational Database Management Systems are going to give way to Object Persistent Systems. Words like Hadoop, MapReduce, Erlang and Mnesia are going to be found on more and more resumes. Smashed Apples has turned into my goto for being able to harness cloud services from within flex applications. Pay for what you use, right?
Future Development
We’ve already been looking into ways to incorporate Google App Engine, and more code will be coming soon.
But in the future, we’d also like to support:
- Provide flex Api’s for the Google Web Api’s
- Provide flex Api’s for Facebook, MySpace
- Cloud Providers : IBM Blue Cloud, Joyent, GoGrid, SunGrid,
- Integration as a Service: Boomi, Mule OnDemand, OpSource Connect (OSB), Amazon SQS, Microsoft BizTalk Services
- Content as a Service: SpringCM, Xythos OnDemand, GoogleBase
- BPM and Workflow: ProcessMaker, Appian Anywhere, Skemma, Intensil
- Platform as a Service: Bungee Labs Connect, Etelos, Intiuit Quickbase, LongJump, Apprenda SaasGrid, Oracle Saas Platform
- Cloud Deployment: rPath, CohesiveFT, VMWare, Xen, Parallels, Bea Weblogic Server VE, 3Tera AppLogic, Elastra Cloud Server
- Billing, Contract Management: OpSource/LeCayla, Aria, eVapt, Amazon DevPay, Zuora
- Security: OpenID, OAuth, Ping Identity
- Data: Amazon S3, Box.net, Google Base, Amazon SimpleDB, Trackvia, Microsoft SSDS.
Learn More
Site: http://www.smashedapples.com/
Code: http://smashedapples.googlecode.com/
User Group: http://groups.google.com/group/smashedapples
Simple Explorer: http://www.smashedapples.com/samples/explorer/SmashedExplorerApp.html
It currently runs off of the public smashed apples ami, it use blazeds for remoting, to the smashed apples java api that stores data in SimpleDB.
Help is Welcome
We are an open source project! If you’re a flex developer with some free time and would like to get involved please email me. There’s plenty to do. We’re easy to get along with, like to joke around and doing an open source project is a great way to get your name out there. We give credit where credit is due.
Corporate Sponsors
Finding corporate sponsors has not been our goal when we created this project. That being said, I have received several inquiries about whether or not we have corporate sponsors for the project and we are open to the idea of having a corporate sponsor(s). If you would like to become a corporate sponsor please contact me.
My new colleague and old college buddy jeremy mooer and I found some interesting things with metadata going on in the flex framework today. We had extended UIComponent and had a custom function that we had marked with a
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