We knew it was coming but we didn’t know when or in what form. Adam Flater just posted that the Artemis project has officially been reborn as the Merapi project. The list of contributors looks impressive, including both developers and designers.
For those of you not familiar with Artemis Merapi, it’s a framework for connecting Adobe AIR applications to the desktop using Java technology. Merapi picks-up where the AIR 1.0 runtime drops off, in that while AIR can read and write from the native file system it cannot launch native applications or interact with the shell.
Merapi has huge potential and I’m looking forward discovering what’s possible when we can combine the power of Java with the richness and ubiquity of Adobe AIR. These are exciting times indeed!
By the way…looks like the namesake might be a mountain in Java Indonesia
Edit:
Andrew Powell has also posted a few words about Merapi and a few more about why they chose the name. (02/05/08 09:37am PST)
For my last AIR project and my current Flex project I’ve been using the PureMVC ActionScript framework. It’s a solid framework and on the whole I’m enjoying working with it. When using PureMVC for Flex and AIR development one of the questions I see consistently is how to create mediators for deferred components. In other words, if the view of your app uses a view stack how do you handle creating mediators on the children of the viewstack that are not created yet? Read more…
I work with Model-Glue and Coldspring regularly but I have yet to take time to evaluate the Mach-II framework. After listening to Matt Woodward and Peter J. Farrell talk-up the MachBlog beta on CF Weekly I thought to myself MachBlog would be a golden opportunity to evaluate Mach-II. Not only that but since I've decide to start blogging in 2007 MachBlog will meet that need as well. So if you're not reading this post from your favorite feed aggregator then your looking at MachBlog (Beta 1 at the time of writing).
First impressions…So far I'm really impressed with MachBlog. Matt was kind enough to let me have read access to the Alpha code so I've got a bit of a jump start preping for the beta. Skinning is an especially nice feature. MachBlog comes with three skin choices but with very little effort you can create your own skin. I created my own skin based on an open-source design from openwebdesign.org. For a beta product MachBlog is suprisingly feature rich. Administration contains the usual suspects: Entry, Category, Comment, Trackback, Aggregator, User and Subscription admin. I have yet to find myself in the Db tweaking data.
What's missing IMO…No XMLRPC support (yet). Matt mentioned in an email that XMLRPC support is in the future plans.
MachBlog is billed as a reference application for the use of Mach-II and ColdSpring. Matt and Peter have accomplished that and a lot more. If learning Mach-II, ColdSpring or OO techniques is on your radar MachBlog is an excellent place to start.
I'm excited to learn a ton about Mach-II from this app!
