For a while now, I've been working on a rather quiet project here at Adobe. Coined "Project San Dimas", it was originally quite small, with the notion to build a simple Flash interface to eBay using Flex and the eBay APIs. I would work alone as a one-man-team, and after a bit of dev time, hopefully have a proof-of-concept that would allow people to browse eBay using a Flex interface. However, as I was developing the app, I started building tools, expanding the functionality, building up the interface, and before I knew it, people were on board to join the project. It has now grown from a simple Flex demo app to a large-scale project incorporating many teams to be shown at the Adobe MAX Conference in October 2006!

In a nutshell, Project San Dimas will act as a proof of concept for providing a rich user interface for a web service, in our case, eBay's web services, through their set of APIs and Adobe's rich-internet-application development technologies, Flex and Apollo. Currently, we have myself from Adobe working on the ActionScript 3 eBay API (which I will blog about soon), Alan Lewis from eBay helping out on the eBay API end, and a great team called EffectiveUI working on, you guessed it, the UI. The project has gained a lot of steam and is still constantly growing. This is a great example of where I am expecting the next generation of Internet applications are going.

In the meantime, I'm working on releasing my contribution to the project to the open-source community. Until then...

Charles