Peter Elst

Some more good news coming from Adobe with them contributing a new virtual machine to the open source Tamarin project. This new VM - internally called QVM - known to the outside world as Tamarin-Tracing essentially brings the power of AVM2 (ActionScript 3.0/ECMAScript 4) to mobile devices.

It wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to see this as a first step into bringing AS3 Flash content and eventually Flex/MXML to mobile and devices. Exciting times ahead, given the current restrictions of a technology like Flash Lite I hope for widespread adoption of this new engine.

Read more
http://www.onflex.org/ted/2007/12/meet-qvm-new-tamarin-vm-contributed-to.php
http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/2007/12/18/qvm-mozillas-new-mobile-vm-for-ecmascript-4/
http://hg.mozilla.org/tamarin-tracing

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!

The Papervision3D sesion with Carlos Ulloa is up next, still half an hour to go but better go grab a seat as I’m sure its going to be packed.
 

13:32:02 GMT-0400 - Carlos takes the stage and starts talking about next generation web experiences — going beyond technical limitations

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Having had Ralph over to our user group last Thursday was a real inspiration to get experimenting with Papervision3D again. Last night I decided to try out John Grdn’s new PV3D components for the Flash IDE — I was stunned.

Its been ages since I last played around with the API but its ridiculously quick and easy to get a Collada model loaded in and apply your custom materials. Just a couple of lines of code and you get it animating. Thought I’d share my little experiment here, if you’ve got a couple of minutes to spare during a coffee break be sure to give it a try.

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Its incredible what the Papervision3D guys have been doing — pushing ActionScript to the limits in creating a powerful 3D engine for Flash that we could only have dreamed of. Another example of how the community drives the evolution of the Flash platform.

Although their API was easy enough for any developer to get started with, John Grden has now announced a component set for the Flash authoring environment that actually shows you the rendering at design time. You basically just browse to a Collada file, set up your scene and camera rotation, zoom, focus and you’re all set.

The component even allows you to assign new materials (bitmap or movie clip). Unfortunately that doesn’t give you a live preview because the library items are not accessible for the component, but they’ve handled that nicely by just applying a color fill so you can see what material you’ve used.

Read John Grden’s blog post for more information on the Papervision3D components and be sure to check out the video below!

Adobe announced their plan to open source Flex, I’m very excited about this news!

Just got back from Toronto today so just blogging some resources to check out, will certainly blog more about this move when I’ve had a chance to review it all.

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I’m absolutely blown away by this new project Luke Bayes and Ali Mills (of AsUnit fame) have just released!

AsProject is a cross platform open source ActionScript development tool set that supports both ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0 and leverages tools like MTASC, Swfmill and AsUnit using rake tasks to automate the build process.

Its distributed over Ruby Gems, so the only thing you need to get started is Ruby and Ruby Gems installed — everything else gets handled for you and you’re literally doing open source actionscript development in minutes. This is really huge, open source Flash development wasn’t rocket science before but this sure lowers the threshold for anyone still doubting to give it a try.

Best practices development at your finger tips, I love where the community is going with these open source initiatives!

watch the video demo

I’ve just spent a little time creating another Flex component that might come in handy for some of you. This time I’ve extended the ComboBox component and added a dataProvider for all countries and corresponding ISO 3166 codes around the world.

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Last year I released a first version of the Belgium zipcode components — I’ve made some improvements and have since ported it from Flash to Flex 2. As a little early Christmas present to my loyal blog groupies I thought I’d release the source code for this latest version.
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Its been several months since I first announced FlashExtensibility.com, but have finally found the time to get it up and running!

The idea behind this site is to provide an open source repository of JSFL scripts, everyone can get involved and share their work. Right now I’ve got experiments up that I did for a couple of Flash conferences. Some of the examples are still work in progress or just a proof of concept — feel free to play around with the code, debug and/or add features.

Looking forward to seeing this develop into an active community site — if you’re at all interested in extending the Flash IDE, make sure to get involved!

Special thanks to Keith Peters for hooking me up with the domain name and Aral Balkan for his help and support.

www.flashextensibility.com

[update] There now is a mailinglist kindly hosted by osflash.org if you’d like to get involved.