JavaPosse.com interview with Chet Haase and James Ward from Adobe taken at Devoxx'08. This informal interview talks about the new features of Gumbo, what Adobe announced at the Devoxx conference and what similarities Flex and Java have from a development point of view.
Chet Haase is a senior computer scientist on the Flex SDK team at Adobe, focusing on graphics issues and features. In a former life, he worked for Sun Microsystems as a client architect in the Desktop Java group, working with client technologies such as Java 2D, Swing, AWT, and deployment. He is coauthor with Romain Guy of the book Filthy Rich Clients: Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java Applications. He and Guy are presenting a session on filthy rich clients, beyond Java. James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe and Adobe's JCP representative to JSR 286, 299, and 301. Much like his love for climbing mountains he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early 90's; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid 90's; then Java and many of it's frameworks beginning in the late 90's. Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front-ends for Java based back-ends. Prior to Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems.
