Building RIA Consumer Shopping Experiences (Real-World Flex Seminar) Fumi Matsumoto, Co-founder and CTO Allurent

Background Allurent – Rich Internet Application for Commerce Flex OEM since early 2005

Product #1: Allurent BUY Based on Flex 1.5 Shopping cart / Order capture and Checkout Customizable looks and behavior Integrates to existing e-commerce applications …demo

BUY Architecture Standard Flex 1.5 architecture AMF to Flex server Our own event messaging layer Very high performance and scalable XML over HTTP for integration (among other strategies)

Challenges Client performance State synchronization after “crossed” messages Ease of skinning Product/Catalog data model Analytics Event capture architecture Omniture ActionSource

BUY Future Move to Flex2! Tools Skinning …and of course new features (but outside scope of this talk)

Product #2: Allurent SHOP Not yet announced: Still in active development Consumer shopping application (not a “web” application!)

Allurent SHOP Pieces Client-side “motor” Business user app for… Flash component assembly (“shopping experience authoring”) Data overlay (“merchandising”) Allurent Server …demo

Core Concepts and Design Decisions Need for dynamic assembly of shopping experience -> Allurent Shopping Markup Language (ASML) Need for Retailers to differentiate -> Component Kit Content Integration (product catalog) -> RDF

Extras… Allurent Development Environment Testing

Unresolved Issues Bookmarking Search engine indexing

Flex 2: The Verdict So Far… Two thumbs up! Tool Performance Source code New VM seems solid Want asset caching Not using FDS at the moment

What have WE learned? We learned that we can… Create Expressive Flex applications! Use Flex components in applications with dynamic assembly Combine Flex and Flash to leverage strengths of both

Rich Internet Applications for Commerce