Peter Elst

Earlier this week I headed to the Adobe DevSummit event in Chennai and was pleasantly surprised of how vibrant the community here is. No less than 600 people turned up and the rooms were absolutely packed.

We had some great talks and hands-on sessions by the Indian Adobe evangelists and various people from the community (including Mrinal Wadhwa, Saurabh Narula, Yash Mody,…) presented in depth sessions on various technologies. I did two sessions on Adobe AIR, one of which covers various examples of AIR APIs and you can see some video excerpts of below.

Sometimes I really wish I worked over in San Francisco — now and again Adobe does these great meet ups, like recently happened with FlashCamp. They’ve put the video of the presentations online including a keynote by CTO Kevin Lynch and the following topics:

• Introduction to Flash Catalyst

• What’s New in Flex 4
• Skinning Components and Apps in Flex 4
• New Productivity Features in Flash Builder 4
• New Data Features in Flash Builder 4
• Update on Adobe AIR
• Using Effects and Animation in Flex 4
• Advanced CSS in Flex 4

 
These are some really good in depth presentations that I can highly recommend you check out!
 

It seems Google did an update to how it indexes Flash content yesterday. Some of you might have already heard about the headless Flash Player aka “Ichabod” that Google and Yahoo got from Adobe — it seems it is now being put to better use.

Google has been indexing Flash content for years, basically extracting any static text that might be embedded in there. If you do a search with the filetype:swf flag you’ll see what that turns up.

Now with this new headless Flash Player, rather than trying to extract static data from the SWF file, it runs it over a command-line (non-visually) and gets back information about the contents of your Flash file, it will simulate button clicks etc. and capture the text results for indexing.

The important update now is that Google will also follow external resources, so for example XML files or other data that gets loaded in and not index it as a separate URL (as before) but in context to your Flash content. If you want to avoid your SWF files from getting crawled you can simply include them in a robots.txt directive like any other content.

 
More information here
 

I promised to blog about my adventures exploring what ColdFusion has to offer, and ColdFusion Components (CFC’s) was one of the first things I tried.

I’ve got to admit its still a little uncomfortable writing non-interface related markup in tags, though of course you can do the same with Flex, and technically this can also be done using CFScript over CFML.
 

 
This particular HelloWorld component has just one function “sayHello” and you can probably figure out what it does. It requires one argument “name” of type string and returns a string using the given name.

To integrate this in a Flex application, things are very straightforward. The easiest option you have is using the Flash Remoting gateway that comes with ColdFusion.
 

 

 
In the example above the only thing we actually need to connect to the HelloWorld CFC is the RemoteObject tag. We first set the destination property to “ColdFusion” and point the endpoint to the ColdFusion remoting gateway location. The source property is the name of our CFC (HelloWorld.cfc) without the .cfc extension.
 
Now that is set up we can call methods in the CFC by referencing the id of the RemoteObject instance, e.g. cfc_service.sayHello() as you see happens when the button component gets clicked. The RemoteObject tag is also set up to listen to the result event and then populates the result in the result textinput component we set up.
 
In a more real world example, I’d recommend creating an actual ActionScript 3.0 result handler function rather than writing that as inline code.

You can see this is pretty trivial to set up. In an upcoming blog post I’ll show you how to access this same CFC as a SOAP webservice from PHP or other scripting languages.
 

Scotch on the Rocks went on the road this year, and I was happy to do a presentation yesterday at their London event. In many ways this was a new type of session for me — not in the least because most of my audience will no doubt have had more hands on experience with the technology than me.

It seemed to go down pretty well and think it was worth the ColdFusion community getting a glimpse at how their technology gets perceived by those outside. I did a couple of basic examples to show what I thought were the strong points of CFML and how I see things evolving.

I think the discussion afterwards was particularly interesting and most of us were in agreement that ColdFusion is in need of a renaissance and together with Adobe, the open source CFML vendors and the developer base we can make that happen.

 

I tried to get a narrated version up of my slides but had some audio sync problems, I’ll see if I can get that fixed later.

In the next few days and weeks I’ll be blogging a couple of basic CFML experiments I’ve been doing while preparing for this session. They should show how simple it is to get things up and running and connecting to Flash/Flex applications or even get some ColdFusion services integrated with other languages such as PHP, Python etc.
 

Aral Balkan blogged about what he called an epic FAIL of removing the Fx prefix from Gumbo.

This I admit came as a bit of a surprise to me as it has been widely discussed in the community for some time and strong consensus built around using namespaces. The decision was then made by Adobe on February 13th 2009 to drop the Fx prefix and go with namespaces. For those that aren’t really getting this whole controversy, its actually quite simple.

 
Initially the idea for the next release of Flex (codenamed Gumbo) was to leave out namespaces for the new components and instead use an Fx prefix. As you probably know up until now we had the mx namespace for Flex components which was like this:

< ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>

  

 
The Fx prefix approach looked as follows:

< ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>

  

 
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I just finished my “Creative Programming in ActionScript 3.0″ session at day 1 of Multi-Mania 2009. Really enjoyed doing this new presentation though from the looks of it seemed I had more of a designer audience — so might have been a little code heavy.

As promised here are my slides, along with the example source files for download.

 

Something had to be done about confusing Flash Platform product names and if you paid close attention you could see this one coming for a while now. From the upcoming release onwards Flex Builder will be known as Flash Builder.

I initially had some reservations about this but it does go a long way in making the name more accurately describe what the tool does. Flex Builder is more than a development environment for Flex framework based applications. Myself and I’m sure many others in fact use it primarily for creating pure ActionScript 3.0 projects.

The Flex name will still be used but now exclusively to refer to the framework. If you call yourself a Flex developer and code using the Flex framework that is still a perfectly valid job title. This seemed to be a particular sore spot for some people, but I don’t get their argument — after all, you don’t call yourself a Dreamweaver or Visual Studio developer when talking about HTML or C#. Surely your job title describes the technologies rather than the specific tools you use.

If you still have your doubts, Josh Tynjala posted some very insightful comments on Lee Brimelow’s blog post that I can highly recommend reading.

One point I do feel strongly about: Flash Builder vs Flash Professional naming. The epithet “Professional” doesn’t cover what the Flash authoring environment really is. With the new name changes it comes across as though Flash Builder is a basic tool and Flash Professional an extended version of that.

I’d recommend going one step further and rebranding Flash Professional to something like Flash Designer and get it back on track to being primarily a tool for animation and interface design.
 

For a moment it looked as though I was going to miss out on this years FFK in Cologne — the largest German speaking conference covering web products and technologies organized by Marc Thiele and Sascha Wolter of Flashforum.de. This is already their 9th edition and not surprisingly it has completely sold out!

At the last minute I managed to secure a spot (thanks to Marc) in the “Discover the third dimension” workshop on Away3D that Jens Brynildsen is teaching on Monday. I’ve already experimented with Papervision3D quite a bit but was eager to look into what Away3D has to offer so this is the perfect opportunity.

I’ll be sure to blog about to workshop and perhaps share some experiments after I’ve familiarized myself with the code.
 
Ganz toll! ;)

 

Flash at the Lake is a two day conference organized by the SFUG (Switzerland Flash User Group) taking place at the Rote Fabrik in Zurich, right by the lake side.

Confirmed speakers include: Aral Balkan, Mario Klingemann, James Ward and many more.