Peter Elst

As you probably know you can use your ActionScript 3.0 classes declaratively as MXML tags in Flex projects. When you do so you can declare properties inline in the tag:

or the same can be done using a child tag with the property name you want to target:

  This is the text value declared inside a child tag

 
There was one thing that puzzled me until recently and thanks to Cyril Hanquez I’ve now figured out how to do this and made the connection to something Marco Casario blogged about earlier.

What if you have an Array property inside of your class and want to declaratively add instances of only a particular class to it? Enter the ArrayElementType meta data tag.

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Skills Matter is holding an interesting three day event in London (May 11-13) that I’m very happy to be part of. “The Progressive Web Tutorials” includes four workshops on some of the latest and greatest web technologies: Amazon EC2, Dojo, Comet and of course Flex.

I’ll be doing a full day hands-on “Introduction to Adobe Flex” workshop on May 11th that will cover the following topics:

• Introduction of the Flex framework
• Overview of Flex Builder and the Flex SDK
• MXML syntax
• States and transitions
• Data binding
• Basic component development
• Integrating with back-end services (XML, SOAP, Remoting)

 
For each of those topics we’ll have some example code to work through and you’ll walk away with the basic skills required to start creating your own Flex applications. There is no real prerequisite knowledge required, though some familiarity with XML or an ECMAScript based language like Javascript or ActionScript can be helpful.

You can take the workshop as part of “The Progressive Web Tutorials” or register for it standalone. More information on the Skills Matter website: www.skillsmatter.com
 

What do you get when you put Stefan Richter, Mike Jones, Dave Williamson, James Whittaker, Bola Roibi and Andrew Shorten in the same room?

An interesting discussion on the power of the Flash community and some of the new challenges the Flash Platform faces, that’s what!

(via Serge Jespers)
 

I’m happy to announce a new set of intensive one-day courses on Flex, ActionScript and AIR that I’ll soon start delivering at Skills Matter in London. During that day you’ll get a thorough overview of the technology and some good hands-on experience building various real world examples.

Here are the next few teach dates you can register for:

30-03-09 Introduction to Adobe Flex
06-04-09 Adobe Flex for Flash Developers
14-04-09 Beginning Adobe AIR
11-05-09 Introduction to Adobe Flex

More information here: http://skillsmatter.com/go/flex-flash

 
If you’ve got any questions about these courses, feel free to get in touch!
 

There’s quite a bit of interesting info in this video recording on Adobe’s Rich Internet Applications Roadmap. Particularly note the focus areas for 2009 with Flash Player “Argo” and “Stratos”, the plans for mobile and devices and ideas for AIR extensibility.

  


  

ColdFusion is dead, long live ColdFusion!

Before I knew it a simple twitter post about free ColdFusion workshops in Brussels turned into a heated debate on whether or not ColdFusion is a dead technology. Thought it was worth doing a blog post with my perspective on the discussion.

I’m not what you would call a typical ColdFusion developer, in fact other than installing the beta releases and experimenting with the most interesting features I have very little hands on experience with the product. Things changed about a year or so ago for me, I did some sessions at conferences like “Scotch on the Rocks” in Edinburgh where they primarily target ColdFusion developers and got to know several people in the community.

To say that ColdFusion has a passionate community is an understatement to say the least. To the untrained eye they come across as guardians of the holy grail ready to smite anyone who dares criticize their beloved technology and to an extent that is even the case. If you look at the history of the product coming from Allaire through Macromedia to Adobe it is understandable that there is a certain level of anxiety about the survival of the product and what direction it is going to take.

I for one have not given up on ColdFusion, while there are obstacles along the way with the right approach it is here to stay and can see a grow in marketshare.

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Today the Adobe User Group Belgium organized a FlexCamp in Antwerp with some fantastic speakers lined up including no less than three Adobe employees (Matt Chotin, James Ward and Chet Haase) which must be a new record for us.

I presented a slightly updated version of my “Introduction to SQLite in Adobe AIR” talk, covering the new encrypted database support in Adobe AIR 1.5.

For those interested, the source files of the demo applications I showed is available for download here (including the updated YouTube class to get hold of FLV files, thanks to Pogopixels!)
 

I just got back from the annual Feweb event, this year I was scheduled in the Rich Internet Applications track to do a Flash versus Javascript battle with none other than Peter-Paul Koch, moderated by Gijs Van Essche.

Despite our sincere efforts it was difficult to find fault with the two technologies since they complement eachother so well. I had a few opening slides listing some of the top reasons to use Flash and features that are now or soon will be available in the Flash Player.

The slides above are in Dutch but I’m pretty sure they won’t be too difficult to understand ;)

Further discussion points raised by the moderator included:

• Flex and AJAX are identical
• Flex is sexier
• Flex is cross browser
• AJAX is a team rather than a single company
• Flex = Ajax < Silverlight

 
In the end it came down to use cases for each of the technologies, with Javascript and AJAX you’ve got more fine-grained control over the browser DOM while Flash/Flex gives you the advantage of cross platform deployment and a whole stack of data and multimedia features.

Where both Peter-Paul and myself seemed to converge was the last question on Silverlight where we both had our concerns particularly about the way it is being marketed. I think we were pretty fair in our assessment though was pleased to have a little chat with Luc Van de Velde, Director Developer & Platform Group for Microsoft afterwards.

I would like to call for a RIA think tank to be set up to get a technology-agnostic look at the challenges we face and how to most effectively move forward. Nobody benefits from a “browser war” between rich client technologies. Anyone interested to help kick start this project feel free to leave a comment or contact me directly!
 

When you go to conferences as much as I do and meet up with old friends and acquaintances, the number one question is: “So, Peter what have you been up to?”. I realized that, unless you follow me on twitter and actually read the dozens of messages I post there every week, fairly few people have a clue what I’ve been doing these last few months.

Well here goes, apart from the Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0 courses I teach in Belgium and the UK, I spend a good bit of time tech reviewing several books. Two great titles that are coming out soon are AdvancED Flex 3 (Friends of ED) and the Adobe AIR Cookbook (O’Reilly).

I’m also co-authoring a couple of books, one that has already been announced is AdvancED AIR Applications (Friends of ED).

Turns out I’ve so far attended 10 events and conferences this year, presented a total 12 sessions and have enjoyed every minute! That said I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep things going at that rate.

While I’d love to be in the position to speak at all conferences that would like to have me over, unless my basic travel and accommodation expenses can be covered (which thankfully and increasing number of conferences are able to do), I’m going to have to become very selective in what I take on. I’d prefer to spend my personal travel budget on community events that genuinely have limited resources or are just starting out. That’s not a dig at Adobe MAX by the way, there are different reasons why I won’t be speaking there this year.

The ActionScript Conference in Singapore is going to be my last conference speaking engagement of the year and have not confirmed anything for 2009 as of yet.

We’ll see how things go, after Singapore I’m heading to India for a couple of weeks and will get back to business again by the end of November.
 

Thanks to Zohar Babin for pointing me to some further information about the FlaCC project on the LLVM.org website. Scott Petersen gave a talk on August 1st at the Apple Campus for the “2008 LLVM Developers’ Meeting“.

The title of his session was “Flash C Compiler: Compiling C code to the Adobe Flash Virtual Machine” with the following session description:

FlaCC is a research project that compiles C code to ActionScript using llvm-gcc with a custom flash code generator. This enables almost arbitrary C and C++ code to be executed safely and efficiently within a Flash container on web pages. This talk describes the implementation of the system and shows several compelling examples that use it to run other language and CPU interpreters within Flash as well as run existing large programs within C. The demos are also extremely impressive :)

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