Peter Elst

Over the last few years I’ve had several projects where I had to interview people to get involved on Flash/Flex/ActionScript projects — typically what happens is the client wants some sort of assurance that “nothing bad will happen” and somehow there is this perception that only getting people on board that have passed a certification exam helps with this.

From my experience that is not the case and I have serious doubts about the whole concept of a couple dozen multiple choice questions to determine someone’s expertise in a particular product. At best it documents that they know the theory.

Is software certification worth something in the real-world and is it worth you spending your money on? I’ve seen a lot of qualified people rejected for projects because they didn’t have product certification and on the other hand you have people that did get certified and couldn’t script a simple animation without resorting to the documentation.

I would like to see this changed.
 
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General

Ryan Stewart has an interesting video up on Adobe TV showing the ColdFusion proxy tags for use in Flex based apps. Shows the ability to call ColdFusion functionality directly from Flex without having to write the server side code yourself.

This feature will likely be available with the release of ColdFusion 9 aka Centaur.
 

 

ColdFusion, Video

I was very impressed to see Mobile Vikings (see earlier post) released an API that allows us to get hold of our account data.

I’ve spent an hour or two working on an ActionScript 3.0 implementation that you can use in your AIR applications. Right now they’ve provided three API calls: retrieve your SIM balance, see your call history and see your topup history.

Here’s how you set it up:

var api:MobileVikings = new MobileVikings("username","password");

 
Get your SIM balance

public function init():void
{
  var api:MobileVikings = new MobileVikings("username","password");
  api.getSimBalance();
  api.addEventListener(MobileVikings.SIM_BALANCE_LOADED, balanceLoaded);
  api.addEventListener(MobileVikings.SIM_BALANCE_FAILED, balanceFailed);
}
private function balanceLoaded(evt:SimBalanceEvent):void
{
  trace(evt.credits);
}

private function balanceFailed(evt:Event):void
{
  trace("fail");
}

When the SIM balance is loaded successfully you get access to credits, validity, SMS and data remaining etc.

 
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ActionScript

Despite the excellent ASDoc integration added in Flash Builder 4 beta, it seems its still not easy to export to HTML and you need to set it up yourself using an external tool configuration.

I spent some time trying to figure it out and stumbled across a post by Seb Lee-Delisle that gives a good runthrough of how to set it up. Thought it would be useful to show how to set it up in Flash Builder 4 beta.

• Go to Run > External Tools > External Tools Configurations
• Select Program (left sidebar) and click the New button to create a new configuration
• Give your configuration the name “ASDoc”
• Set the location to “/Applications/Adobe Flash Builder Beta/sdks/4.0.0/bin/asdoc” (the default on Mac) on Windows the default is “C:\Program Files\Adobe Flash Builder Beta\sdks\4.0.0\bin\asdoc.exe”
   
• For Working Directory you can set it to ${project_loc}, this is a variable that always point to the location of your current project
• Finally you set up some arguments, assuming you put your code in the default “src” folder:
  -source-path src
  -doc-sources src
   
  Those arguments set your source directory and tell the ASDoc tool to recursively go through all classes in that folder and its subfolders and generate the documentation.

 

 

To run the ASDoc tool and export your documentation to HTML, select your project and click Run > External Tools > ASDoc. When its finished scanning your code and generating the documentation you’ll find it in a folder in your project called “asdoc-output”. Enjoy!

 

ActionScript, Flash Builder

In case you didn’t know yet, Flash Builder 4 beta (the product previously known as Flex Builder) is now available for download on labs.adobe.com, as is the beta for Flash Catalyst.

I’ve been playing around with the public beta for a little bit and thought it was worth blogging some of my favorite features in this release when it comes to features in the IDE. Up until now I’ve only tested it with pure ActionScript projects, so might discover some more gems later on.

Generating getter/setter methods

This is a huge time saver, you can now just define your class properties, right-click and select Source > Generate Getter/Setter and you get a useful dialog allowing you to specify how you want that getter and setter method set up. You can make your class property private, rename it, specify if you want the getter and/or setter, set up its access modifier and even define where you want those generated methods to get added in your code.

SWC introspection

If you work with library projects or third party SWC files you can now introspect those and figure out its packages, classes and methods. SWC files generated with Flash Builder 4 can also have their ASDoc comments embedded.

ASDoc integration

ASDoc is a tool that comes with Flash Builder for generating documentation from Javadoc style comments in your Flash Builder projects. There’s now a panel that shows the documentation for a selected property or instance, you also get a tooltip showing the documentation when you hover over them.

As mentioned earlier this also works with SWC files generated from Flash Builder 4, since those can now contain the ASDoc information (increases SWC filesize, but not filesize when exporting a release build).

 

Be sure to give Flash Builder beta a try yourself, I’m very pleased with what I’ve seen so far and am sure it will improve productivity significantly.
 

ActionScript, Flash Builder

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.
 

ColdFusion, Flex

Photo by Pieter Baert

I just returned from a nice evening in Brussels where Microsoft held a user experience event, showing some of what their technologies have to offer. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised about the whole setup. Nice venue, great food and drink and a nice atmosphere for networking.

While personally I thought the evening was more about vision than actual user experience it was definitely the best Microsoft event I’ve attended so far.

 
Presentations

First session we attended was one on SharePoint — not something I’d normally be looking at but we got to see how you could use it for public facing websites and integrate things like the open source Podcasting Kit for SharePoint.

Next up was the Microsoft partner program and the “Web Solutions Toolkit”. It seemed like quite an interesting offer, though the user experience of their online registration form could be improved quite a bit.

Caught some glimpses of other sessions including Internet Explorer 8, Silverlight, SketchFlow, Windows 7 etc. but the one that really struck me was Microsoft Surface. Its not exactly a brand new product and you’ve all no doubt seen it, but getting hands on with the technology did bring it home how multi-touch interfaces bring a whole new level of interactivity to the table (pun intended).

When using an iPhone or other touch enabled devices you get some idea of what that might be but real a real multi-touch, pressure sensitive and collaborative environment (up to 52 touches in the case of Microsoft Surface) is unlike anything else. Microsoft Surface will soon be available to the general public, but with a price tag of around 12.000 Euro I don’t see it sitting in everyone’s living room quite yet.

With Windows 7 fully multi-touch enabled and multi-touch screens like those by HP soon being a commodity, I see that as a logical first step. While not allowing the full collaborative experience it would allow you to go beyond the realms of the Microsoft Surface SDK and develop using any technology, which I would personally be a lot more interested in.

 
Conclusion

I had the opportunity to talk with Luc van de Velde, Microsoft’s Director of the Developer and Platform Group, mostly on Silverlight and WPF. I’m hearing a “write once, deploy everywhere” story similar to what Adobe is working on, though the definition of everywhere might be slightly different. Designer/developer workflow is another important aspect I see getting addressed, again parallels can be drawn with the Flash Catalyst / Flash Builder 4 approach though in certain areas there I do see Microsoft with somewhat of an advantage.

I sense a change in Microsoft’s marketing of their rich client technologies. Maybe less dominant and more pragmatic, but slowly but surely they’re getting there. My guess is that enterprise is going to be the first battle ground where in my honest opinion Adobe might have a less compelling offering. On the other hand, user experience is still Adobe’s strong suit and I don’t see Microsoft overtaking them there any time soon.

I for one can’t wait to see what innovation the next few years will bring!
 

Events, Silverlight

While at Scotch on the Road in London earlier this week I recorded a couple of videos and quickly edited those together for those interested to get a glimpse of what the event was like.

Includes some clips of the pre event drinks at O’Neills, Adobe’s opening keynote sneaks, Terry Ryan’s “Extending Bolt” session and Kev McCabe and Andy Allan wrapping up the day. Enjoy!

 

ColdFusion, Events, Video

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.
 

ColdFusion, Events, Flex, Video

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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Flex