Adobe AIR 1.5

• Adobe DevNet article
• New: Encrypted local database, Flash Player 10 and WebKit update
  

CoCoMo beta

“Codename “Cocomo” is a Platform as a Service that allows Flex developers to easily add real-time social capabilities into their RIA (rich Internet applications). Comprised of both Flex-based client components and a hosted services infrastructure, Cocomo allows you to build real-time, multi-user applications with Flex in less time than ever before. And because Acrobat.com hosts the service, issues like deployment, maintenance, and scalability are taken care of for you.”

Flash Player 10 Solars & Linux 64-bit

• blog post by Tinic Uro
• Penguin.swf blog post

“Furthering Adobe’s commitment to the Linux community and as part of ongoing efforts to ensure the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player, an alpha version of 64-bit Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux operating systems was released on 11/17/2008 and is available for download.”

Pixel Bender prerelease 5

• blog post by Kevin Goldsmith
• John Nack blog post

“The most important release tonight is the Pixel Bender Plug-in for Photoshop Cs4. It supports both Pixel Bender kernels and Graphs and is accelerated for both GPUs and multi-core CPUs. You can now use the same Pixel Bender filter in Photoshop, After Effects and Flash!“

Tour de Flex

• Serge Jespers blog post

“Tour de Flex is a desktop application for exploring Flex capabilities and resources, including the core Flex components, Adobe AIR and data integration, as well as a variety of third-party components, effects, skins, and more.”

Thermo is now Adobe® Flash Catalyst™

• Catalyst team blog
• Ryan Stewart blog post

“Adobe® Flash® Catalyst is a new professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating application interfaces and interactive content without coding.”

YouTube Video by Sven Claar Part 1, Part 2

Adobe Flash Platform

• Keith Peters blog post
• Yahoo News

Flash Media Server 3.5 announced

• Flashcomguru blog post
• Flash HD Video using Dynamic Streaming

“The new servers include new media delivery options, such as: dynamic streaming; enhanced H.264 video and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support; and the ability to pause and seek within a live stream.“

Alchemy

“Alchemy is a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2).”

Flex SDK 3.2 and Flex Builder 3.0.2

• flex docs loading sup-apps

Genesis

“Genesis is the code-name for a new product initiative at Adobe with the objective of joining business applications, documents and the web on every knowledge workers desktop with integrated collaboration capabilities. Using the very intuitive interface of the Genesis desktop client (built on Adobe AIR) knowledge workers are able to create custom workspaces combining views into business applications, analytics, web sites and documents. Workspaces can be easily and securely shared with other colleagues or business partners outside the company and provide out-of-the-box real time collaboration capabilities like instant messaging, voice and video as well as screen sharing and white boarding.”

Adobe Wave

“Adobe® Wave™ is an Adobe AIR application and Adobe hosted service that work together to enable desktop notifications. It helps publishers stay connected to your customers and lets users avoid the email clutter of dozens of newsletters and social network update messages. Adobe Wave is a single web service call that lets publishers reach users directly on their desktop: there’s no need to make them download a custom application or build it yourself.”

Stratus

“Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5 introduce a new communications protocol called the Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP).”

Stratus is “A new beta service from Adobe coming this December”.

With Adobe Stratus you can build:

• A video chat application
• Multi-player games
• Voice Over IP

Durango

“Durango is a framework that allows developers to build Adobe® AIR™ applications that can be customized by end-users. Durango allows developers, designers and end-users to easily mashup independent components to create new applications or extend existing Durango-enabled applications. These “mashable” components can be visual or non-visual (e.g., web services). Designers and developers can rapidly create prototype applications and then generate Adobe Flex® MXML source projects for further development. End-users can take parts of their favorite applications and bring them together in new ways.”

PatchPanel

“Adobe is pleased to offer our third-party developers and the larger Adobe Flex® development community this preview of PatchPanel, a first glimpse at combining the dynamic control of ActionScript™ with the power of Adobe’s Creative Suite®.”

Adobe Configurator

• John Nack blog post

“Configurator is an open source utility that enables the easy creation of panels (palettes) for use in Adobe Photoshop® CS4. Specifically, Configurator makes it easy to drag and drop tools, menu items, scripts, actions, and other objects into a panel design, then export the results for use inside Photoshop. These panels leverage the support for Adobe Flash® built into Photoshop, making it possible to drag and drop audio, video, images, and even other SWF files into a panel design.”

Centaur and Bolt
Eclipse based ColdFusion IDE codenamed “Bolt” to be released in conjunction with the next version of ColdFusion codenamed “Centaur”

News

• OSP Open Screen Project
• MLB.com doprs Silverlight for Flash
• New Flex Builder features like contional breakpoints and network monitor
• Adobe Flash Platform ActionScript reference guide for RIA development
• LC DS and Blaze Update for Flex SDK 3.2
• Google Maps now supports AIR
• Flex Builder Extensibility API Reference (blog post Mike Morearty)
  
• groups.adobe.com launched
• Cairngorm Plugin

Wow, wow, wow! What a week!

I think the event was a great success and all speakers did a great job. The Flex Usergroup Hamburg did a great job organizing this event and I hope the location at Adobe was comfortable enough.

Below you see Adobe Platform evangelist Piotr Walczyszyn who did a talk about AIR.

This is also another prove for the bad iPhone camera, sorry!

Check out more pics at the Flex Usergroup Hamburg blog.

Top 10 for political personas:

Obama
Palin
McCain
Tina Fey
Joe Biden
Chuck Norris
Cindy McCain
Bristol Palin
SNL Palin
Colin Powell

Chuck Norris? Come one ;)! After a small research I read that he did some spots for the republican party where he made a campaign called HuckChuckFacts. If you don’t now the Chuck Norris Facts check them out. Internet legend!

Of course the next step was YouTube where I found some spots. At least funny but not the party I would prefer … However, congratulations USA for this new president and be carefull if Chuck runs for president in 2012. Nobody can beat Chuck Norris!

I am still playing around with the Swiz framework and I wanted to have an easy way to switch between mocked and real data. For that reason I added the two compile constants mock and release in the CONFIG namespace:

To support mock and real data I have two different BeanLoaders, one with the real service and one with the mock service. In my main mxml I have the following preinitialize event listener:

private function onPreInit():void
{
	var serviceBeanLoader:Class;
	if(CONFIG::mock)
	{
		trace("MOCK");
		serviceBeanLoader = ServiceMockBeanLoader;
	}
 
	if(CONFIG::release)
	{
		trace("RELEASE");
		serviceBeanLoader = ServiceBeanLoader;
	}
 
	Swiz.loadBeans([GeneralBeanLoader, serviceBeanLoader]);
}

The GeneralBeanLoader contains models and controllers which are independent from a server implementation and the ServiceBeanLoader contains server specific stuff like for instance DynamicChannelSet, HTTPService, RemoteObject, DataService etc.. The ServiceMockBeanLoader contains the same ids but mocked implementations. If you are using Delegates it can be even simpler because you can easily mock an AsyncToken like this:

private var mockAsyncToken:AsyncToken;
 
public function loadSomeData():AsyncToken
{
	mockAsyncToken = new AsyncToken(null);
	// wait 500ms before invoking the result
	var t:Timer = new Timer(500, 1);
	t.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE, onTimer);
	t.start();
	return mockAsyncToken;
}
 
private function onTimer(event:TimerEvent):void
{
	Timer(event.currentTarget).removeEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE, onTimer);
	for each(var responder:IResponder in mockAsyncToken.responders)
	{
		responder.result(new ResultEvent(ResultEvent.RESULT, false, true, RESULT));
	}
}
 
private static const RESULT:XML = <result>could be the mocked result</result>;

What are your best practices to use mock objects?

A few month ago the Flex-mojos blog got my attention and I added it to my RSS Reader and now I finally got the time to play around with it.

“Flex-mojos is a collection of maven plugins to allow maven to compile, optimize, test and … Flex SWF, Flex SWC, Air SWF and Air SWC. The main goal is to provide a full support to all mxmlc/compc options.”

“Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project’s build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information.”

This all sounds pretty promising so I gave it a try. I am under OS X so the commands are slightly different under Windows.

Install Maven

• Download Maven
• Set environment variables in the console:

export M2_HOME=/path/to/maven
export M2=$M2_HOME/bin
export PATH=$M2:$PATH
mvn --version

If you see the Maven and Java version info you know your installation was successful.

Flex Mojos with Flex SDK 3.1.0

The first thing I tried was to follow the Flex-mojos HelloWorld tutorial. I got the same 4 missing artifacts error like you see below in the comments. After some research on Velos blog and the goal to compile with 3.1.0 the research began ;).

The first thing is to copy the Maven settings.xml from /path/to/maven/conf/settings.xml to ~/.m2 which is your Maven user directory.

HINT: You can open this hidden directory in Finder from the Terminal with open ~/.m2.

Integrate the settings by Velo like described here and provided here.

Update to 2.0M5 (and change the path to your sdk):

mvn info.flex-mojos:install-mojo:2.0M5:install-sdk -Dflex.sdk.folder=/Users/soenkerohde/sdks/3.1.0/ -Dversion=3.1.0.2710

Due to a typo bug in the 2.0M5 super-pom we will work without super pom so you have to comment the parent node add add the contents from the super-pom which should look like this pom.xml.

Now things should be ready to go:

mvn install
...
...
INFO] Installing /Users/soenkerohde/maven/myproject/target/simple-flex-application-1.0-SNAPSHOT.swf to /Users/soenkerohde/.m2/repository/com/example/flex/simple-flex-application/1.0-SNAPSHOT/simple-flex-application-1.0-SNAPSHOT.swf
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 12 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Mon Sep 29 16:01:16 CEST 2008
[INFO] Final Memory: 9M/55M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
soenkerohde:myproject soenkerohde$

Yeah! So this was “HelloWorld” and my first impression of Maven after walking into every trap is pretty good. I will try to blog more when I get more experience.

I also read a few things about Maven archetypes which is the Maven project templating toolkit. If I find time I would give this also a try. Just check the links to get some inspiration.

Links

• Flex Mojos / Blog
• BlazeDS Spring Archetype project
• Maven and Flex Builder Tutorial Part I
• Maven and Flex Builder Tutorial Part II
• Maven Eclipse Plugin
• Guide to create Archetype
• Create Archetype from project

I am always interested in new Flex frameworks and Swiz got my attention. I watched the video and started to play around with it. What I like most about the framework is the use of metadata aka annotations which really reduces the amount of code.

When I first checked out the source I recognized that the DynamicMediator which was shown in the presentation was not committed yet. However, I started to build an example project where the views got the controller injected via Autowire. After a few days I was a bit frustrated because I also wanted to use the Mediate metadata and surprise, the code was committed. I updated the library and could remove all the controller references from the views which decoupled things like I wanted it to have. And recently Chris Scott, the developer behind Swiz, also blogged about the update for DynamicMediator.

When you have no clue what I am talking about be sure to check the presentation of Chris at 360Flex. There was no more need to study the docs after watching the video since the framework is really a “Brutally simple micro-architecture for Rich Internet Application development with Adobe Flex“.

So what’s it all about? Swiz is an IoC or Dependency Injection framework. I have used IoC frameworks in the past and got the point why it is cool but I always disliked the XML configuration files. Swiz uses similar concepts like Spring in the Java world were annotations were introduced in 2.5.

Swiz currently support two kinds of annotations: Autowire and Mediate
Autowire automatically injects references to objects which very defined in the BeanLoader and mediated methods get invoked when the belonging event was fire with event member variables as parameters.

The other hot discussed IoC framework is currently Mate. The presentation of Laura Arguello at 360Flex is really great and really nails down what the common problems are and how to solve them. I pretty much share the dislike of coding in XML blogged by Olesen and discussed on InfoQ. Another review of Mate is done by Flash Magazine and the structure is visualized in a diagram by Fatara Systems. But don’t get me wrong. Mate looks really awesome but to my personal preference I prefer something more lightweight like Swiz.

The weakness of Swiz is currently that the Autowire and Mediate uses strings instead of constants which means there is no compile time check if things work or not. On the one hand you should use conventions how you name the “beans” to autowire and the event types to mediate and on the other hand it would not be to hard to build a kind of pre-compiler which validates that the annotations match. My convention for beans is to use the class name starting lowercase like

<Beanloader ... xmlns:ctrl="com.soenkerohde.myproject.ctrl.*">
    <ctrl:MyController id="myController" />
</Beanloader>

.
So it can be used/injected with:

[Autowire(bean="myController")]
public var myController:MyController;

For the dynamic mediators my current approach is to type the event with the full qualified classname like

[Mediate(event="com.soenkerohde.myproject.events.LoginEvent", properties="username,password")]
public function login(username:String, password:String):void

The event would look like this:

package com.soenkerohde.myproject.event
import flash.events.Event;
public class LoginEvent extends Event
{
  public static const LOGIN_EVENT:String = "com.soenkerohde.myproject.events.LoginEvent";
  public var username:String;
  public var password:String;
  public function LoginEvent(username:String, password:String)
  {
    super(LOGIN_EVENT);
    this.username = username;
    this.password = password;
  }
}

However, it would be nice to have something during compile time. Let’s see how Swiz evolves and what other frameworks enter the arena.

So there is an easier method like mine which waited for the complete event of the HTML control and added custom event listeners for each anchor tag.

Like it is described in the docs you can extend the default HTMLHost class with for instance CustomHost. To handle links which should open a new window you simply override the createWindow method and implement it fitting to your needs

The simpliest approach might be using HTMLLoader.createRootWindow:

public override function createWindow(windowCreateOptions:HTMLWindowCreateOptions):HTMLLoader
{
	return HTMLLoader.createRootWindow();
}

To set the new CustomHost the HTML control can be defined like this:

<mx:HTML htmlHost="{new CustomHost()}" />

Besides that you can override a bunch of other methods which would trigger because of called JavaScript functions like window.open, window.close, window.blur, etc.. If you use the HTML control of AIR be sure to read about “Scripting the HTML Container” with all its sub-chapters - great read!

News on Google Blog

Update: The browser is now available for download