Flex 3.1 Feature: Marshall Plan or how to handle version and portals in Flex

In the next release of the Flex SDK (3.1) you will get this Marshall Plan. What is Marshall Plan? It helps you to handle the following use cases: you have a big application and it is very hard to recompile each piece of it with the same Flex SDK version or you want to make a Flex portal and you need to be able to load SWFs from multiple domains.

You can read more about this on Alex’s Blog, the Flex Engineer who leads this project.

June 11, 2008 | Filed Under Flex | Leave a Comment 

Holland Flex User Groups meeting

This Friday (June 13th) I will do a presentation about Flex Builder tips and tricks and some Flex - PHP examples. I can’t wait for it. I have only one problem: the meeting place is about 100 km from Amsterdam in a small town. I hope I will manage to get there in time. So if you don’t see my blog post about it this weekend then I got lost over there :D

June 11, 2008 | Filed Under Flex, Flex Builder, Others, PHP | Leave a Comment 

onAIR Tour Prague report

So I was there (I’m lucky I know). First of all let me give you an advice: if you are really interested about AIR you should definitely go to this event especially if it is coming to your town/country (last two stops: Munich and Milan). Did I mention that it is free? If you can’t, then you have a second chance: go to MAX - either in States, San Francisco or in Europe, Milan Italy; MAX is THE Adobe conference and it covers all the products, there will be a lot of talks about AIR and Flex).

First of all there were no empty chairs, about 160 people showed up. Second the organization was excellent: the Staropramen brewery provided a great location, the food was yami-yami and after 4PM we were able to taste the Czech beer (I think this is the rock and roll part :D). The single downside I can think of: it was a little too hot for my taste.

There were 11 presentations from 10 AM to 6 PM. Three of them were held by people outside of Adobe: first talk was done by Czech Flex User Group (as I am not a speaker of this language I can not tell what it was about), second speaker was Dion Almer from Google and he talked about Google App Engine (did you know there is a page for working with Flex/Flash on top of Google App Engine) and the third one was Using JavaScript libraries and Frameworks to build HTML and JS-based AIR apps by Andre Charland the CEO of Nitobi.

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June 11, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Others | Leave a Comment 

RIA, AIR, Web 1.0 and Cycles

I was talking last week with someone about this kind of applications: Pizza Hut Shortcut. Basically this is a new Channel for reaching the clients (of course is an AIR application). And it has a big advantage over fliers or web sites or radio ads: it delivers to the client when the client wants, it delivers non intrusive and makes the act of reaching the product so simple that you could become addicted.

Let’s do an imagination exercise together. Suppose you have a refreshment/restaurant business. And suppose you are based in a big town and many of your clients are employees who are ordering from you for lunch. Now suppose that there are another couple of hundreds or maybe thousands of similar businesses in your town and you all compete basically for the same clients. So what are you doing to do in order to ensure that you get clients each working day? Probably you are offering discounts for anyone who is eating from Monday to Friday between 12PM - 2PM. Or maybe you are offering free catering. But guess what? all the other business are doing exactly the same. So what can you do?

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June 10, 2008 | Filed Under AIR | 4 Comments 

Adding a Flex Nature to an existent Java (WTP) project

Sometimes you already have a J2EE project (made with WTP) and you want to be able to make it also a Flex project. Probably you don’t like the idea of creating a new Java/Flex project and copy the files. Neither do I :D (If you want to create a new Java/Flex project then check my previous posts about creating a Java/Flex project and debugging this project).

Fortunately the solution is there in Flex Builder. You need to select the project in project explorer and right click to bring up the contextual menu for the project. Then you should select Flex Project Nature > Add Flex Project Nature:

Selecting this command will open a wizard that looks like the one for creating a new Flex project (the differences are that some options are disabled as the project already exists and you are just adding new things to it). So here is the first page and you can see you have the option to choose if you want to use LiveCycle Data Services / BlazeDS or not. On the second page you can enter the path for Flex WAR file (if you choose remote object access on first page). Click “Finish” and you got yourself a Java/Flex combined project.

Final words

I will not lie to you, these two features (combined Java/Flex project and Add Flex Nature) are very dear to me as I was the engineer who worked on them for Flex Builder 3 :) But besides the sweet memories and countless meetings to shape up these wizards and endless fights with my quality engineer on what should happen, I had another reason to write my first technical post on this subject: I talked in the last couple of months with Java developers who work with Flex and they didn’t know about these features yet :(

So, I am really curious if you guys find this helpful or not and if there are other things you still need (I have friends inside Flex Builder team so we can push our wishes :) ).

June 7, 2008 | Filed Under BlazeDS, Flex, Flex Builder, Java, LCDS, LiveCycle Data Services | 7 Comments 

Help Nominate Flex SDK For SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards

If you think Flex changed your way of coding or doing business and you love it, now you have the chance to help Flex :)

You could do so by nominating Flex SDK for SourceForge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards. Click here if you want and choose “Best Tool or Utility for Developers” category.

June 6, 2008 | Filed Under Flex, Others | 1 Comment 

Debugging a combined Java/Flex project

In my previous post I described how you can install WTP in Flex Builder and how you can create a combined Java/Flex project and run it.

But what if you want to debug both the Flex and Java code from the project at the same time?

Actually, it is pretty simple. The steps are very similar with the ones described in the previous post for running the application.
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June 6, 2008 | Filed Under BlazeDS, Flex, Flex Builder, Java, LCDS, LiveCycle Data Services | 2 Comments 

Creating a combined Flex/Java project in Flex Builder w/o LCDS/BlazeDS

Whenever I work on a Flex project with Java backend I create a project in Flex Builder that combines Java and Flex. I find that this is the easiest way to work even if I don’t touch at all Java code and I just mess around with Flex/AS files. This is one piece of news brought by Flex Builder 3.

What advantages do you have using this setup? You can edit/run/debug both Java and Flex files in the same editor and same project; you can see the changes as soon as you save the modified files.

Let’s see what you need and how you can create a combined Flex/Java project with or without LiveCycle Data Services or BlazeDS.

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June 5, 2008 | Filed Under BlazeDS, Flex, Flex Builder, Java, LCDS, LiveCycle Data Services | 26 Comments 

AIR Tour Prague

Next Monday (June 9th) I will be in Prague for Adobe AIR Tour event (more here). I can’t wait to meet the people, watch the talks … and of course have a taste of the Czech beer. Well it will be my first time in Prague :)

So, I guess this is my first post on AIR. More to come and technical ones too, so stay tunned.

June 2, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Others | Leave a Comment 

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