So, we'll assume that the audio is working. Yes, even with the loud music. I'm pretty sure it is, but so we're here, you know, there's this little special edition of RA Weekly video, obviously. And we're here at Adobe Engage. It's like February 25th, I think? Yes, it is. Yep, and so this is like the second Engage you guys have had. This is the second one. It's very different from the first Engage, too. Right. But you were in both of them, in fact. I sat next to you. That's where we first, I think, met. That's right, you were sitting next to Anne. Yeah, oh, that's right, exactly. Yeah, you were behind us. And she kept being like, "It's Ryan Stewart." And I was like, "Who is that guy?" They're trying to get things started up. So, why don't you tell us what you thought of the first morning? Your unbiased opinion has meant to be interesting. I thought it was good. I thought we had a lot of interesting tech, you know, a lot of interesting companies. The FedEx app is going to be great. Hopefully, the next half is more air-centric stuff. So, we'll see what happens instead of just purely playing. And NASDAQ should be good. All right, well, we'll check it out. So, I am here with Carnet, the CEO and founder of Sprout Builder. So, by the way, we're at Engage. We're at Adobe Engage 2008. And Carnet was one of the presenters of Sprout Builder, his flex application that outputs Flash content. Do you want to give us a quick run-through as to what it is? Yeah, it's basically a web-based interface for building sophisticated Flash content. So, we wanted to take the programming out of building Flash, but also to still provide a lot of powerful features. So, it's basically, imagine a Photoshop interface via a web browser that outputs basically a Flash file. But we've added a couple of twists. We add concept card components. You can add a lot of powerful features like RSS feed, Amiibo chat room, Ribbit phone without doing any programming. And then when you publish it, you can also get a lot of analytics via Google Gadget ads, Giga, ClearSpring or Spring Widget. So, sort of a lot packaged into something that doesn't actually take a single line of code. So, now did you guys choose Flex because, you know, you want to output Flash content? Is that sort of the reason? And then what was the experience actually building an application like that in Flex?
2:02It's one of the more compelling reasons I've seen to actually do Flex, you know, one of the more complex Flex applications that I've seen, I think, in a long time. Yeah, actually, Flex was very compelling. We actually started in ActionScript 2, doing a lot of HTML and JavaScript. And that's actually how we built our proof of concept, which was late 2006, early 2007. And we're the classic company. We actually had to wait for Flex to catch up to what we wanted to do. And as soon as they did, we converted it into a production environment in Flex. And obviously, you know, our long-term goal is to actually have it as an AIR application. We actually, right now, have a Flex application. We're actually putting complicated HTML layered on top. So, a lot of the trades that you see falling down are still in HTML and JQuery. But we're going to convert that onto Flex as soon as we can. So, now, obviously, you're kind of a unique position because you built a rich internet application that helps people build rich internet applications. So, you kind of bought into the Kool-Aid. Yeah. But what do you think, like, why is it so exciting for people to actually create the kind of content that you enabled them to create? Like, what makes that compelling? Well, I think, as I mentioned a lot of folks, I think we have a generational shift coming along. The era of self-expression, maybe the last four or five years, has really exploded. If you look at the long tail, you know, we went from 45 million unique domains to over 700 million unique pages. And that was about self-expression. I'm sharing a video. I'm sharing a slideshow. Well, I think we're seeing the pendulum swing back where these people now are saying, I need more. I don't want to just do self-expression. I want to actually do self-promotion. I'm a blogger. I'm a musician. I'm an artist. I want to put together much richer content that actually is for a purpose. It's bringing you to my site. It's having you buy my album, whatever it might be. And so we're seeing the pendulum swing back. And that's actually why we built Sprout. Is to really address this new self-promotion group that's coming online that needs tools more than what's available. So it's that group between, you know, using a simple bling widget creator and those who can design and flash.
4:04There's a huge middle section that we're hoping to address. Yes. So how hard was it to build it? I mean, how do you feel about Flex and Flash after having gone through the entire project? We love Flex. I think the biggest accolade you could have is that a bunch of our engineers are ex-Java developers. And they said, this is how Java should have been built. In a way, they told me. And these are hardcore Java guys, so I didn't put these words in their mouths. They're like, they finally got it right. This is like Java version 2. It's Flex. And so I have to tell you, my guys, we train them all in-house. I think a lot of people said, oh, there's not a lot of good Flex developers out there. But I think with sort of the way it was designed, we've got two really good types of sort of channels. If you're a really good web developer, you understand web development. So jQuery, JavaScript, PHP, you can actually learn Flex very well. You'd be very good at the front-end Flex development. If you're a Java developer, a lot of the way Flex is built is also very familiar to you. So we've been able to retrain our Java developers to build in Flex. And retrain our web developers who are all sort of JavaScript, you know, jockeys to build in-place. So it's been a great sort of synergy where our engineering teams actually met in the middle. Because before the Java guys would never talk to the front-end guys. Now they're actually building the same environment. It's been really exciting to watch. That's cool. Well, thanks a lot, man. Yeah, that's great. Would you like to introduce yourself? I'm Peter Humphrey. I work for BA Systems. I do developer marketing. We recently introduced a bundle of our developer tool BA Workshop Studio with Flex Builder 2. They're SDK 2 and the sharding component. Oh, that's right. Which is why we're here for the show to kind of promote the job of Flex Connection. You know, I'm sort of an old enterprise hand, if you will, right? Yeah. So we're finally in my wheelhouse. We've got a lot of videos and DJs and stuff going on here. Yep. So it seems like a lot of, like, early flex usage and RA usage in the enterprise. It's basically a really nice front end for business and tech for BI stuff. And is that-- BI is a primary use case. Yeah. Reporting with their--the charting components are actually really great. Right.
6:04And I think you find a lot of Ajax programmers within the Java community who are--do not quite have the expertise to do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they want to leverage the component libraries from Flex. Right. That's what I'm seeing drive a lot of the Flex adoption within the Java community. And are you seeing it just bleed to general UI stuff? Or is it mostly, like, are people isolating it to parts of their--their BEA stack? Uh, yeah. There's--there's--there's people--I think 'cause there's a lot of--sometimes there's hesitance to go full guns with their proprietary stack. Right, right, right. So they usually want to do a POC where they dabble with it, you know, one port--let in a portal, or try one reporting application that's internal before they try rolling it out to some sort of larger audience. And--and so, I mean, obviously, like you're saying, you guys have Flex Builder and Flex, so you're--you're all mixed up into that. But do you see, like, some opportunity for air, say, air use scenarios as far as offline and desktop and drag and drop access? Absolutely. Um, you know, I think that the offline case is pretty good because you can't really--you can't buy that from too many other vendors. Yeah. You're really in a do-it-yourself scenario. Right. And, you know, we're all a pretty mobile workforce these days. Yeah, yeah. So that's one of the things that got me excited about it, as well as the sort of back-end integration. Adobe has one of their products called Live Cycle Data Services, which you can use to plug into the back-end service. And you guys sort of OEM or partner or ship that or something, right? Actually, no. We only partner along the Flex Builder lines. But, you know, if I could wave a magic wand, maybe we'd do something there. That's right. I think there's some good synergy, but not yet. Well, you know, like, I forget if I was talking to you about it, but I'm always thinking people that I'm telling Adobe they need more back-end stuff. Yeah. I mean, they've got the filing cabinet of PDF stuff going on. Absolutely. It's kind of like all these jobs. Well, thanks. I appreciate you taking the time. Fote, nice to talk to you again. We'll see everyone later. Take care.