Peter Elst

Great news if you’re in or around Dublin, Ireland on April 11th!

There’s a fantastic tag team consisting of Ryan Stewart, Kev McCabe and Ted Patrick coming to entertain you with talks on Flex, ColdFusion and AIR at a free half day event called Scotch on AIR.

Agenda

12:00 - Lunch
13:00 - Flex - Ted Patrick
14:00 - Break
14:10 - ColdFusion - Kev McCabe
15:10 - Break
15:20 - AIR - Ryan Stewart
16:20 - Break
16:30 - RIA Open Debate (One & All)
17:30 - Raffle, Close & Thank You

Location

The Westmoreland Bar
27 Westmoreland Street
Dublin 2

Read more here and be sure to register!

Great news for the 360|Flex Europe conference in Milan, Italy that is just round the corner — thanks to their sponsors they’ve been able to make day 1 of the conference completely free of charge and open to the general public.

The new price of the conference is 240 Euro and refunds will be given to those that already registered at the original price. Its not too late to attend, you can register online or at the event to attend days two and three which will then give you the USB stick with all session notes from the presenters and a chance to win some great giveaways.
 
http://www.360flex.com/360Flex_Europe/2008/03/360flex-day-one-free.html

I’ve been working on some experiments using video and AIR and stumbled across Abdul Qabiz’s work on constructing the FLV download link for YouTube video’s. Its actually surprisingly easy to get hold of the FLV asset once you capture the correct query string arguments.

Based on Abdul’s code I wrote an AS3 class that goes through the process of getting the URL to the FLV, dispatches a complete event once ready and has a download method using FileReference to download the actual file. Without a server side proxy, downloading only works when you run the code in AIR or as a projector on the desktop because of the security sandbox.

Using the class is really easy:

var myVideo:YouTubeVideo = new YouTubeVideo("http://youtube.com/watch?v=74HJVf0X020");
myVideo.addEventListener(YouTubeVideoEvent.COMPLETE, onVideoComplete);

private function onVideoComplete(evt:YouTubeVideoEvent):void
{
  trace(evt.video); // URL to the FLV
  myVideo.download([optional proxy URL]); // download FLV
}

I made a quick example in Flex — you just paste in the YouTube URL, it loads in the video and copies the URL to the FLV to the clipboard (rename the downloaded file to .flv). Click here to view source or download the code.

Look forward to your feedback, enjoy!

I’m really looking forward to my In-the-Brain session at SkillsMatter in London next Wednesday evening, February 13th.

I’ll be covering the basics of ActionScript 3.0, new features of the language and several examples of inspirational projects (mostly from the vibrant open source Flash community) that show the power of the new virtual machine that was introduced with Flash Player 9.

If you’re in the area and want to attend this free event, just register on their website.

Starting in a April I’ll also be teaching the 2-day “Core ActionScript: Object Oriented ActionScript in Practice” course — the first few dates have been announced on the SkillsMatter website. Further dates for my “Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0″ course in the Benelux will be coming soon.

I’m looking forward to seeing you there!

FITC is coming to Amsterdam next month and am very happy to be speaking there along with lots of fantastic international speakers, friends and colleagues from the Benelux and several Adobe evangelists.

If you’ve never been to an FITC, Shawn Pucknell and the team do a fantastic job making it an event to remember with lots of opportunities to network and party with fellow attendees and speakers.

Read the rest of this entry »

I had a great time last night presenting a hands-on session on Adobe AIR API’s at Multimediacollege — thanks to Frederik and the rest of the team for having me over!

The presentation was likely still a bit rough round the edges but people seemed genuinely interested, got some good feedback and will present a more polished version at FITC in Amsterdam next month.

While playing around with the sample code I prepared, we came across some inconsistencies between Mac and PC and things that wouldn’t quite work (its still in beta so you can expect to run across those once in a while).

One of the things that we found is that flash.net.FileFilter on Mac works fine without using a wildcard character but you need it in there to work properly on PC.

var htmlFilter:FileFilter = new FileFilter(”HTML”, “html”);
var htmlFilter:FileFilter = new FileFilter("HTML", "*.html");

The other thing we found was that you can’t addChild Flex components to the stage property a NativeWindow instance (pure AS3, such as a new TextField() still works though). I remember I came across this issue in the previous beta but the solution completely slipped my mind. What you do is use the mx.core.Window class, make a Flex component that extends <mx:Window /> or simply instantiate it directly.

var myWin:Window = new Window();
myWin.type = NativeWindowType.UTILITY;
myWin.width = 400;
myWin.height = 400;
myWin.title = "Adobe AIR is amazing";
myWin.open();

Kristof Neirynck has a a little review of the event on his blog that prompted me to write this entry. I’ve been having a lot of fun playing around with the runtime so should have some more AIR related posts coming up in the next few weeks.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve finally got my training curriculum worked out and will start delivering courses on ActionScript 3.0, Flex and Adobe AIR in early 2008.

As many of you know I’ve spent most of last year traveling and speaking at various conferences. I saw this as a great opportunity to try out different ideas, get feedback and fine tune my training material. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and constructive and would hereby like to thank everyone that sent in their thoughts.

I’ve joined forces with training partners SkillsMatter (UK, Ireland and Scandinavia) and Multimediacollege (Belgium, Luxembourg) to deliver these courses and am available for custom training and consultancy worldwide.

More information as the courses roll out, in the meanwhile I’ve got a first event happening at Multimediacollege:

» AfterHours, January 17th - An indepth look at AIR API’s

I look forward to the first training events kicking off in the next few months. If you’d like more information on the various courses and training solutions feel free to get in touch!

We all heard the rumors that something big was coming. Last night Shantanu dressed up as Santa and left the following goodies on labs for us to play with:

Flex Builder 3 beta 3
The long awaited beta 3 has been made available, one step closer to a release — be sure to check it out!

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder3/

Adobe AIR beta 3
Along with Flex Builder 3 a new beta for Adobe AIR is now out with some interesting changes and additions.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

AMF3 specs
AMF, the Action Message Format, is a binary format used in Flash Remoting to communicate native ActionScript objects between a back-end and your applications.

They’ve now released the specification for AMF3, the latest version which is used in Flex, and have committed to work with the community to get implementations for every major server platform.

http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/amf/amf3_spec_121207.pdf

BlazeDS
This is huge news, Adobe is open sourcing (under LGPL v3) the messaging services that are part of Livecycle Data Services, along with the AMF3 spec and they’ve wrapped it in a Java server.

What this now means is that we can build multi-user real-time data-driven applications (wow, say that ten times), with data push and conflict handling. You’ve probably all seen the LCDS demo’s and I for one am really excited there is no longer a barrier of entry to start using it in projects.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/blazeds/

 
Thanks guys, great job in getting it all out!

My first session of day 2 at JavaPolis was “Thinking in Flex” with none other than Bruce Eckel and James Ward. Despite some issues with the internet connection they managed to pull off a very informative and enjoyable presentation and I think the content was pretty spot on for a Java crowd.

Overall the session wasn’t as technical as I thought they’d make it but they did walk through a cool little demo of the DisplayShelf component hooked up to the Flickr web service. From what I heard during the break a lot of people were excited about what they saw and will no doubt soon be playing around with Flex.

One thing that I found lacking in the presentation was a simple example of how you’re able to use RemoteObject to connect up to server-side objects (Java Beans, EJBs, POJOs). Sure, it wasn’t an LCDS session but its not too hard to put together a quick demo or at least talk them through the process.

The next session was “JavaFX in Action” by Jim Weaver, which I was really looking forward to. Lots of good information but I have to say I really overestimated the current state of the technology. Basically JavaFX comes in two flavours: JavaFX Script (which Jim talked about) and JavaFX Mobile. There were several examples that covered JavaFX Script and how to set up panels, motion etc. In my understanding it boils down to an easy to use implementation of Java Swing on steroids.

For Java developers this might be revolutionary, but with every example I couldn’t help but sigh and count my blessings at how easy it is to implement in Flex. In terms of competition I think JavaFX is still miles away, behind even on Silverlight. If I had to put my money on something I’d say watch out for JavaFX Mobile — that could really take off given their already extensive user base on mobile and devices. I hope the Flash Lite and Flash Home teams are hard at work to make Flash a viable option in this growing market.

One thing that became clear to me attending JavaPolis is that user experience and front-end development is becoming more and more important in the Java world.

 
 www.javapolis.com

I recently got a question about what the ActionScript 3.0 equivalent is of the LoadVars sendAndLoad method. It may look like a lot more typing (and it is) but the whole implementation is very clean by separating out the request, loader and variables which you can only benefit from in the long run.

import flash.events.Event;
import flash.net.*;

var myRequest:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://www.myserver.com/myscript.php");
var myLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
var myVariables:URLVariables = new URLVariables();

myVariables.firstProperty = "first";
myVariables.secondProperty = "second";

myRequest.method = URLRequestMethod.GET;
myRequest.data = myVariables;

function onLoaded(evt:Event):void {
  trace("here we get the data back: "+myLoader.data);
}

myLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onLoaded);
myLoader.load(myRequest);

What happens in the code above is we set up a URLRequest instance that points to the server side resource you want to target. Next an instance of the URLLoader class is instantiated and we assign an instance of the URLVariables class to its data property.

Read the rest of this entry »