Flex lives!

We haven't heard much Flex news lately but as of this month Apache took Flex out of incubation and made it a top-level project! Apache Flex now has also reached version 4.9 and contains the following changes:

• New localizations for Australian, British, Canadian, Greek, Switzerland (German) and Portuguese
• The SDK natively supports the Flash Player versions 10.2 through 11.5. Previous versions were locked to a single version.
• Better support for Vectors, including new VectorList and VectorCollection classes.
• Inclusion of the new PostalCodeFormatter and PostalCodeValidator components for more consistent internationalization.
• The TLF (Text Frame Framework) was updated to version 3.0.33, and is now baked in the SDK. No need to download it separately.
• Support for Java 7 for compiling the SDK.

Also Spark versions of the following components are coming in a future version: Alert, ColorPicker, HDividerGroup, VDividerGroup, Menu, MenuBar, and ProgressBar.

Learn to build

There are a lot of technologies out there these days to work in: Flex, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby, the list goes on and on. And each one of them has their place in the grand scheme of things, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, each with its own particularities and each one has its appeal.

At some point in time, you will have to use one technology or another to get a job done, be it either by your own choice or because it is a requirement. And the technology of choice might not be one that you have used before. So what are you to do? Grab a book of course and starting reading. I've done that many times in the past. Another way is to read online tutorials and yes I've done this many times before as well. But honestly, the best way to learn is to ... build something! Ain't nothing like writing the lines of code yourself and seeing the results unfold right before your eyes. Really its the best way to learn, I can't stress that enough. It's the best way to learn the little hidden details of a language (or just a technology or framework for that matter) and to put what you have been reading into practice and really get a good grasp on things. You don't have to build anything complicated, just a simple contact manager will do, just enough so that you can really understand how something works.

So like my blog post title says, "Learn to build", or more like "build something" to "learn" :)

Using Flex SDK with Intellij

A long time ago, I use to use JetBrain's Intellij IDE for all my Java development. But since then I have mostly used Eclipse to do so. But with all my HTML/JavaScript/CSS development lately I have been looking for a good IDE for such development so I am considering going back to Intellij in the neat future.

And actually, Intellij has supported Flex very well for long time, so that's a good thing as well. And now that Adobe has donated Flex to Apache, you might be inclined to download the open source SDK and play with it. And if you are thinking of doing so, there is a very nice demo of how to do so right here.

New Apache Flex Logo

With Apache now taking over the Flex SDK, one of the first order of business was to get a logo for the project. They did creating a contest and allowing people to submit their own creations. Well as of January 26th (yes I know I am late in posting this), a winning logo was voted upon and you see it here or in animated fashion here.

I think the logo is nice and I am eager to see how the future pans out with all the changes being made this year. Anyways, time will tell, in the meantime you can visit the official Apache Flex website here.

Two great books to study JavaScript

Since I've been concentrating mostly on Flex development since 2004 and have been getting back to JavaScript development in the last year, I thought it would be a good idea to get a couple of books to refresh my skills. Thus I've listed below two books which I've picked up recently to this effect:

• JavaScript Patterns
• High Performance JavaScript

I've just started reading the second book and I must say both books are well written and are worth the dollars I spent. Both are for intermediate to advanced level and you sure do learn some little nuances of the language that go the extra step to help a developer write the most efficient JavaScript code. So go check them out and become and better developer!

My mini-browser review

Being the first post of 2012 and seeing how I am currently brushing up on my JavaScript skills, I'd thought I'd post a mini-browser review.


Chrome
Over the last month, this has been my browser of choice at both home and work. Based on my perception, it is the fastest browser out there. It is also smooth (meaning initial start-up & opening app tabs) and when something goes wrong, you can just open up the Chrome Task Manager and kill the offending tab. I think its what most people think Firefox should be like. The only downside is that the developer tools are clunky to work with.


Firefox 4+
I have always love this browser from the start and it has been my main browser since then. But do I dare say, it seems bloated at times? The initial start-up can cause it to freeze for 30 secs (with only 2 app tabs mind you) and if a tab crashes, it takes a moment or two to recover. But for development purposes, its tools are unmatched.


Internet Explorer 9
I just can't use it. Its UI, while trying to catch up to Chrome and Firefox is still ugly. Some web sites still don't render properly and it is still behind its in implementation of HTML5/CSS3 web standards. Also how many releases have Chrome and Firefox have their been since IE9 came out? That's what I thought. Slow output from a company that needs to greatly pick up the pace. I'll wait till version 10 to see if my mind changes.


Opera 10+
I think Firefox stole its UI :) I use it from time-to-time to just see what it can offer and its pretty good. Pages load fast and it has interesting built-in development tools. How fonts look could use a little work however. It truly is the little browser that could.

Official Adobe page about recent news

Adobe has put up a more official page about the recent news, confirming that they will not continue work on Flash for mobile and reaffirming their commitment to such technologies as Flash Player on the desktop, AIR for the mobile and desktop, Flash Builder and Flash Professional. Go read for yourself!

Meeting of Montreal AUG

The Montreal Adobe User Group will be holding their next meeting on Wednesday December 7th, 2011 at the Istory II Bar Billard. The main topic as you can imagine revolves around the recent Adobe news regarding Flash on mobile. Go here to sign up. 

Unfortunately I cannot make it since I have prior commitments that day.

Flex goes to Apache

Needless to say that due to last week's Adobe blog post, their communication skills leave much to be desired. The entire Flash/Flex community is up in arms and wondering about the future. A couple of follow up blog posts were made by Adobe employees (here and here), but that asked more questions than it answered. Well as of last night, one of those follow up blog posting was updated (go here and scroll down after the red comment) in an attempt to provide more clarity. Here is a summary:

• Current Flex SDK development work will be completed (new components and super fast compiler)
• The Flex SDK, BlazeDS and more will be donated to Apache Software Foundation, Adobe will have people on the Open Source Flex SDK management team
• Future versions of Flash Builder will be released with previously communicated new features

As for the future, Adobe believes that Flex is still the best solution for the development of large enterprise applications. Eventually, HTML/JavaScript will catch up in this regard, maybe 5-10 years from now, but for the near future, Flex is still the better solution. And I agree, until I see an update to the JavaScript language, I don't see how it can surpass Flex for large application development.

Times are changing: Flash and Flex

They say that the only constant is change. And another great example was given to us this week following Adobe's announcement (article 1, article 2 and article 3) about the future of Flash on mobile browsers - that basically there isn't any. For the last couple of days I've been thinking about how to write this blog post, so here goes :)


Were all the Flash haters right?
Anyone who "hates" is never right. They are most likely ignorant and perhaps even mis-informed. For 7 years now, since 2004, I've been developing web applications using Flex for my personal projects and at my job. At my job, I am perhaps one of maybe 3 developers who have used Flex at home and work and loved the capabilities the technology offers. Others used it cause they had too, and some wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. That's fine, we are all different people. But you know what the most important thing is, I tried and I learned something new. I did something not many people can say they did and because of it, I am better developer today than was back in 2004. For 7 years, I have been ahead of the curve, doing things that were not possible or very time-consuming to do without Flex. Basically what I am saying is that I wasn't going to stand still waiting for HTML/JavaScript/CSS to catch up. And I must say that was thanks to Stacy Young for giving me a CD labeled "Royale Beta" back in the Fall of 2003.


What about my skills set, my job?
So finally in 2011, HTML/JavaScript/CSS have finally caught up. Well at least up to a certain point, there are still things you can't do in a browser that only the Flash Player can do. But with the rapid evolution of browsers these days, especially for Firefox and Chrome (IE is still slow), they will soon catch up, but it will still take some time. It might still take 10 years before browsers have totally replaced what the Flash Player can do it. So what does a Flex developer like myself do? Am I out of a job? Am I useless? Nope, au contraire, I have just spent 7 years acquiring knowledge in how to better develop web applications and I thus will continue to do so. Just means I am using different tools to do so. Actually over the past year I have already started doing more HTML/JavaScript/CSS developement than ever before and I have been applying  my Flex skillset to all the JavaScript development I have been doing. I have created my own jQuery DataGrid widget, you can set the columns to display and specify a labelFunction for each column object. Sounds familiar? :)


Let's no forget
Since 1996 we have been using the little plugin that could to stream and watch Dallas Cowboys games which were not available on national TV (ok, that was just me), share funny/sad/dramatic/historical/great/not so great moments with family and friends on YouTube, watch sport highlights and much more. Were would we be today without the Flash Player? Probably stuck in the web technology stone ages. The web is a better place cause of the Flash Player and hopefully the future will be better because of it.


What Adobe is saying
But don't just listen to me, some Adobe employees have made some posts as well in the days since the announcement. Mike Chambers has a great post here and then there is one here from a couple of product managers.


What's next?
Well, I'm going to keep doing what I've always been doing, creating great web applications. And I'm going to start by bitching as to why JavaScript hasn't grown in 15 years. Oh, but that's another blog post all in itself :)

ActionScript 101

New to ActionScript (or Flex in general) and don't know how to learn the basics? Need a quick crash course? Then I have the hyperlink for you! Adobe has put together some small articles about the basics of ActionScript 3, such as language syntax, how to declare variables, namespaces and much more. The first article which talks about ActionScript Syntax is here and once you are done with that one, at the bottom of the page are the links to the subsequent articles.

So go get started if you are new to ActionScript/Flex/AIR, or share it with a friend/colleague who is looking to get started in this domain.

New components in Flex 4.6

One of the best Flex Evangelists out there, Christopher Coenraets, has recently made a blog post where he demonstrates the newest components added to the Flex 4.6 SDK. It is a must see for those developing mobile applications, as these new components were added specifically for this use case. My favorites are the Spinner (like a regular ComboBox) and the Callout components, cause I remember looking for components such as these earlier this summer when I was building some prototype applications (for Android). So what are you still doing here, go see the demo!

Montreal User Group meeting tomorrow

For those interested, the Montréal Adobe User Group is having a meeting tomorrow night from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM to recap the information from last week's Adobe MAX. Click here for full details and to sign up.

The future of Flash Platform

Although I did not attend MAX this year, I did find this nice video about several Adobe Product Managers discussing the changes coming to the Flash Platform in 2012. Its great video that shows the performance improvements they will be making, the 10x faster Flex compiler, new encryption/decryption APIs, more components converted to the Spark framework and a feature called "Workers" (think of this as threads, but its not threads within the Flash Player).

So don't delay, get the lowdown on whats coming down the pipe for the Flash Platform!

Montreal AUG meeting August 3rd

There is another Montreal Adobe User Group meeting coming up this week, on Wednesday August 3rd to be specific. This one is being held at a pool hall like the last one and will involve open talk about the mobile development. So if you are interested in dropping by, there is a $20 entry fee (hey, there's beer involved) and you can sign up here.

Fixing multiple parsley result handlers being called [Update]

This passed week I was testing my application and noticed some odd behavior. After some debugging, I noticed that two command result handlers were being called, when in fact only one of them should be. The application was built using the Parsley framework, so to quickly explain the problem and solution, here is what was happening:

1. Application was dispatching the MyEvent1 event
2. The MyCommand1 was being executed and the MyCommand1 result handler was being called
3. Then the problem, the MyCommand2 result handler was being called.

So why was the MyCommand2 result handler being called? Because Parsley didn't know any better based on how I coded both handlers. Here is how both handlers were coded:

[CommandResult]
public function onResult( event:MyEvent1 ):void

[CommandResult]
public function onResult( event:MyEvent2 ):void

In both cases, the remote java call returns void, so I declared only one parameter for each function, the event that dispatches the command class. Since I didn't specify the event class name (the type as Parsley calls it) in the CommandResult metadata tag, Parsley will use the 2nd parameter to determine the type. Oh, but I don't have a second parameter! Hence the problem, so Parsley just ended up calling both handlers. So there are two ways to solve this problem...

1) Add another parameter to the handler function of type Object that will not be used, like so:

[CommandResult]
public function onResult( obj:Object, event:MyEvent1 ):void

[CommandResult]
public function onResult( obj:Object, event:MyEvent2 ):void

2) Declare the event type in the metadata tag, like so:

[CommandResult(type="bla.MyEvent1")]
public function onResult( event:MyEvent1 ):void

[CommandResult(type="bla.MyEvent2")]
public function onResult( event:MyEvent2 ):void

I ended up using solution #1 and then I only had the one result handler being called, which is what I wanted.

UPDATE: Actually good catch by Devin, if you just use the [CommandComplete] metadata tag, then your handler method only requires one parameter, the associated event object. Totally missed this one while reading the documentation.

Great AIR for Android tutorial

As I was building my first AIR application for Android, I was naturally doing some research into how to get started. No article helped me more than this one from Narcico Jaramillo from Adobe. It properly explained the basics about the new Flex components that you need to use for mobile development and also had some links to some great step-by-step tutorials (scroll all the way to the bottom of the page) on how to build your first application using Flash Builder.

Kudos to Narcico for the great articles!

Montreal AUG meeting July 6th

There is another Montreal Adobe User Group meeting coming up next week, on Wednesday July 6th to be specific. This one is a little different than the previous ones, it's being held at a pool hall and will involve open talk about the designer/developer workflow using Photoshop, Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder. So if you are interested in dropping by, there is a $20 entry fee (hey, there's beer involved) and you can sign up here.

My first Flex 4.5.1 android mobile application

So I finally got myself an Android tablet this passed week and needless to say I've been playing with it ever since. And of course today, I build my first application with it using both the Android SDK and Flex 4.5.1. But it wasn't just click a button and voila! I had to go thru several steps and just wanted to note them all here, just in case someone else is getting started in the mobile development environment anytime soon and will be going thru the same thing as I experienced.

Before I get started, the tablet I bought is the Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101, which you can read all about here. Its a nice 10 inch tablet at an affordable price of $399 CAD. And my PC is running Windows 7 Service Pack 1.

So here are the steps that I took to build my first "Hello World" application:

1. Enable Debug mode on your device.
   
2. Download and install the USB driver for your device. The Android web site links to whole list of OEM sites, so you can find the one for your device. In my case, Windows 7 installed it on its own.
3. Download the latest Android SDK from here. I downloaded the zip version and extracted to my folder of preference.
4. Since we are using Eclipse for our development, install the ADT plugin by following the instructions on this page. I am using Eclipse Helios (3.6).
   
5. Once the ADT plugin is installed, start Eclipse and go to Window > Android SDK and AVD Manager. You can now download and install some extra components related to the Android SDK. The most important one as I recall is the "Android SDK Platform-Tools".
6. Again within the Android SDK and AVD Manager (see above step), under Virtual Devices, add your device... I just had to specify Name, Target, SD Card size.

Once I had done all these steps, I was ready to rock'n'roll. Once way to check that your device and your PC are talking to each other is to do the following:

1. Open a console window
2. Goto <android sdk>\platform-tools folder
3. Run the following command: adb devices

You should see your device listed with some alphanumeric identifier assigned to it. If you dis-connect it from the USB port and run this command again, you should see that the device is no longer listed.

The next thing that I did was to create a Flex Mobile Project and just add a label to the UI and set its text property to "Hello World". Then I ran the application and voila, the application was compiled and auto-deployed and auto-launched on my device!

NOTE: Make sure that the Run Configuration has it's Launch Method set to On Device.

I hope these steps help out all those that are getting started in Android development with Flex!

Montreal AUG meeting June 1st

This upcoming Wednesday June 1st 2011, will be the first Montreal AUG meeting in a year. The event will be held at the Atwater Library (Google map details here) from 6:00 to 9:00 pm. You can find some details here. The primary presentation will be about the newly released Flex SDK 4.5 and Flash Builder 4.5, which will be given by Martin Arvisais, a Flex/Flash developer and trainer here in Montreal.

There is no need to sign up, you just need to show up and bring any friends/colleagues along with you. I will not be able to attend due to a prior commitment, otherwise I would have loved to give a presentation of my own.