- Image via Wikipedia
While at Adobe MAX, I had the pleasure of talking with one of the customer keynotes, Adam Mollenkopf of FedEx Custom Critical. His team had worked on a Flash Platform and LiveCycle driven console for tracking high-dollar shipments and monitoring just about every aspect of the shipment itself. I’m always searching for stories of why an RIA (here, Flash) was used over Ajax or traditional GUIs, and I think in Adam does a good explanation of why they came to pick the Flash Platform over Ajax in the first part, the interview. We then sit down and he walks us through the demo of the console in action.
Interview
Adam first tells us what FedEx Custom Critical does, and then we jump into a discussion of how they came to select the Adobe stack for implementation of their shipment tracking console. They not only chose Flex and LiveCycle for the rich interface, but also for the high-speed data transfer between front-end and back-end. Adam really likes the data management that comes with the stack, esp. being able to use “true push” to the client.
Demo
In addition to the general RIA-ness, the special thing to note is the rules engine backing all of the predictions and analyzing sensor and geo data. Those create an interesting (and for FedEx useful) stream of real-time data to console of realtime data to churn over, expose in the RIA, and start making business decisions around.
Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored these videos.
