Coming at you from sunny San Jose, California at the eBay campus…

Yesterday at 360 Flex I presented a session on Merapi and moderated a panel discussion on open source technology. At the Merapi session we discussed the focus of the project and show a lot of sample applications. Including a few demos that showed the ease of use when developing with Merapi.

Here’s some sample code that shows how to do a simple echo of a string from a Flex UI to Java and back again:

Flex Source:

Java Source:

This simple application is an example of how easy it is to communicate from AIR to Java (and vice-versa) at the desktop.

I also walked through a bit of the source involved with creating the gyroscope demo shown in the video below:

Enter one Jordan Snyder.

Jordan is a friend of mine that has a keen interest in messing with hardware, amoung other things. So, we were hanging out one night at my place and she saw that I had a Lego Mindstorm robotics kit. I proceeded to tell her bout my plans to integrate Merapi with some of the Legos APIs… long story short, she took the Mindstorm home with her and did all the work. Here’s a video of the robot that Jordan presented in the same talk:

So, what’s up here? The AIR application is controlling the Robot in real time using Merapi via Bluetooth. Why is that cool? This a proof of concept, but it’s not smoke and mirrors by any means. This means that Merapi has a huge potential to soon be a a cross platform solution for building device enabled Flex/AIR applications.

I submitted this talk for the Adobe MAX conference when they were asking for proposals, but unfortunately it was not selected. I will be at MAX though and would be happy to talk with anyone who is interested in Merapi at the Universal Mind booth. If there’s enough interested in having a birds-of-a-feather-session on Merapi, I’d be happy to accommodate that as well.

The feedback from the folks here at 360 Flex and those of you digging into Merapi has been great. Keep the comments coming and we’ll keep on adding features and stability to the framework.

[ Update: More view of "Nathan" the 360 Flex Robot ]