Tour de Flex – a new tool for Flex/AIR developers

A new tool for Flex developer was launched last night: Tour de Flex. It is an AIR application, and an Eclipse plugin that gives you:

“Tour de Flex includes over 200 runnable samples, each with source code, links to documentation, and other details. Topics include the Flex Core Components, Flex Data Access, AIR Desktop Capabilities, Cloud APIs, Data Visualization, Mapping, and a growing collection of custom components, effects, skins, etc.”

Screenshot_0

PS. If you are attending the MAX event and you want get the Tour de Flex on a memory stick, just look for a Platform Evangelist and ask us.

November 17, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Others | Leave a Comment 

AIR 1.5 is out!

AIR 1.5 is out, just go to http://get.adobe.com/air/. You can read more about it here, and here.

PS. I am proudly and shamelessly brag about my articles on the Update Framework for AIR, which now works with AIR apps created in Flash too: Using the Adobe AIR update framework, and the article about the BlackBookSafe - an AIR app created entirely with HTML/JavaScript that uses Pixel Bender, 3D transformations and encrypted local database. Enjoy them!

Later Update: Almost forgot! AIR1.5 means also JavaScript debugging support. More to come.

November 17, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Others | 1 Comment 

Couple of days ’til MAX

Tomorrow morning I’ll leave for San Francisco. Working for Adobe has some advantages, because I know for a fact we will announce so many new and cool things at MAX. On the other hand, it is so hard to wait for the actual announce, when I can talk about and share with you…

Juuuust a little more patience, my friends!

PS. While I am used to be like Indiana Jones when I travel in Europe (do you remember my Ukrainian advendures?),  in the States I didn’t have any trouble. I hope it will stay this way…

November 15, 2008 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment 

Flex and financial institutions at MAX Milan

We will have an interesting session at MAX Milan about how Raiffeisen Bank uses Flex. The description of this topic is:

Discover how Raiffeisen Bank benefited from a Flex-based online solution. We will share the experience and unveil guidelines for how to implement visionary projects in financial institutions. Learn why usability, security, and other factors drove the decision to use Flex.

The speaker is Mariusz Gliński from Raiffeisen Poland.

November 14, 2008 | Filed Under Others | 1 Comment 

Flex and PHP: remoting with Zend AMF

The latest PHP library to add support for AMF and remoting is Zend Framework. The preview prelease version 1.7 offers a new component Zend_AMF that lets you create Flex applications that talk to PHP backends using remoting. Since I am a big fan of remoting as a way to get data to your Flex/AIR clients, I wanted to add a short post explaining how to use it. Here is another post I wrote on remoting with AMFPHP. Actually this post is a part of a larger article I did for Adobe Developer Connection. I want to keep it more focused, so I wrote this one.

You can download a Flex Builder project that contains the code I explain in this article from here. Inside of the archive you will find a readme.txt file explaining what to do with it.

Installing the Zend Framework

After downloading the Zend Framework 1.7 archive, extract the files. Next, you have to add the library folder to your PHP include path. Open the php.ini file and add the path to the library folder to the include_path; on my machine looks like:
include_path = “c:htdocszend_frameworklibrary”

Next, save the file and restart your web server. You can read more about installing Zend Framework here. With this, you’ve completed the “installation” of Zend Framework.

What is AMF and remoting and why should you use it?

If you already know these answers, you may want to skip to the next section. Let’s start by understanding remote procedure calls. Remote procedure calls let Flex applications  make direct calls on the methods of your server side classes. Using BlazeDS or LiveCycle Data Services you can expose your Java and ColdFusion classes to the Flex application. However, if you use PHP you need a third party library on the server to expose PHP classes directly. Existing solutions include Zend AMF, WebORB, and AMFPHP. This article focuses on remoting with Zend AMF. AMF is a binary protocol for serializing the messages. Because it is binary, it is more efficient in terms of bandwidth and server processing load than JSON or XML methods. If you want to see for yourself how much more efficient it is, James Ward has put together a nice benchmark.

Zend AMF is a PHP library that knows how to serialize and deserialize the AMF protocol (it is part of the Zend Framework starting with version 1.7), and thus lets you expose PHP classes to Flex applications. Another compelling reason for using remoting is code reuse. Because you can call methods on PHP classes and these methods can return PHP objects, you don’t have to modify your existing code to output JSON or XML.

As I noted earlier, Zend AMF remoting uses AMF to serialize messages between the server and Flex client. It also offers the ability to map an ActionScript class to a PHP class. For example, suppose you want to display in Flex the information from a table with the following structure:

contacts
-------------------------------
id      primary key int
name    varchar(255)
email   varchar(255)

When using remoting, you create an ActionScript class to model this data in the client and a PHP class to model the same data on the server. When you create the PHP class that you want to call from Flex, you add a method that, for example, retrieves all the contacts from the table. This method will return an array of PHP VO classes, and in Flex you will get an array of ActionScript objects. All the conversions from PHP objects to AMF to ActionScript objects are done automatically for you by  Flex and Zend AMF.

When you use XML or JSON for remoting, you’ll tipically need extra steps in Flex to process the data in order to display or store it.

Let’s look at a working example.

Create the Flex PHP project

Usually, when I work with Flex and PHP projects, I prefer to use Flex Builder and Zend Studio installed together. It is possible, however, to work with Flex Builder and a PHP plugin to help you with the PHP code. Either way, you should create a Flex project that uses PHP on the server side (if you plan to use Zend Studio and Flex Builder, first create a Zend PHP Project, then use the Add Flex Nature wizard to add Flex PHP nature on the project). This way you streamline the deployment of the SWF file (the compiled result of the Flex project) to the PHP server. I chose to create a new project called “flex_php”.

Next, create a folder inside the PHP server root named “zendamf_remote”, and add this folder to the project. Choose New > Folder, and then click on the Advanced button. If you want to have the source files for the Zend Framework available to your project, and you use Zend Studio too, then open the properties page for the project, go to the PHP Include Path > Libraries tab, and add an External Folder pointing to the place where the Zend Framework is installed.

Create the PHP code

In the “zendamf_remote” folder, create three PHP files: MyService.php, VOAuthor.php, and index.php. Open the MyService.php page and paste the following code (you need to update the connection information for your specific database setup; to do this, look for the four constants at the top of the class):

<?php
require_once('VOAuthor.php');
//connection info
define("DATABASE_SERVER", "localhost");
define("DATABASE_USERNAME", "mihai");
define("DATABASE_PASSWORD", "mihai");
define("DATABASE_NAME", "flex360");

class MyService {
/**
* Retrieve all the records from the table
* @return an array of VOAuthor
*/
public function getData() {
     //connect to the database.
     //we could have used an abstracting layer for connecting to the database.
     //for the sake of simplicity, I choose not to.
     $mysql = mysql_connect(DATABASE_SERVER, DATABASE_USERNAME, DATABASE_PASSWORD);
     mysql_select_db(DATABASE_NAME);
     //retrieve all rows
     $query = "SELECT id_aut, fname_aut, lname_aut FROM authors_aut ORDER BY fname_aut";
     $result = mysql_query($query);

     $ret = array();
     while ($row = mysql_fetch_object($result)) {
     $tmp = new VOAuthor();
     $tmp->id_aut = $row->id_aut;
     $tmp->fname_aut = $row->fname_aut;
     $tmp->lname_aut = $row->lname_aut;
     $ret[] = $tmp;
     }
     mysql_free_result($result);
     return $ret;
}
/**
* Update one item in the table
* @param VOAuthor to be updated 
* @return NULL
*/
public function saveData($author) {
if ($author == NULL)
     return NULL;
     //connect to the database.
     $mysql = mysql_connect(DATABASE_SERVER, DATABASE_USERNAME, DATABASE_PASSWORD);
     mysql_select_db(DATABASE_NAME);
     //save changes
     $query = "UPDATE authors_aut SET fname_aut='".$author->fname_aut."', lname_aut='".$author->lname_aut."' WHERE id_aut=".  $author->id_aut;
     $result = mysql_query($query);
     return NULL;
}
}
?>

This is the class you will call from Flex. It has two methods: one to get all the records from the table, and another to update the values for one record.

Let’s create the code for the Value Object, the data model. This is used by the MyService class to wrap one row from the table. Thus, the method getData() returns an array of VOAuthor, and the method saveData() receives one argument: the VOAuthor of the row that was changed. Open the file VOAuthor.php and add this code:

<?php
class VOAuthor {
     public $id_aut;
     public $fname_aut;
     public $lname_aut;
}
?>

As you can see, this class is very simple; it just provides the same members as the fields from the table. Finally let’s create the code for index.php file. This is the plumbing code that expose the MyService class to Flex clients with the help of the Zend AMF. Add the following code:

<?php
require_once('Zend/Amf/Server.php');
require_once('MyService.php');

$server = new Zend_Amf_Server();
//adding our class to Zend AMF Server
$server->setClass("MyService");
//Mapping the ActionScript VO to the PHP VO
//you don't have to add the package name
$server->setClassMap("VOAuthor", "VOAuthor");
echo($server -> handle());
?>

I use an instance of Zend AMF server to create a PHP end point that can be called from Flex. Then I register the MyService class to the server, thus I can call this class from Flex. And finally I map the ActionScript data model (VOAuthor) to the PHP VOAuthor data model.

When you use remoting, you get the casting of the data to the right type for free. For example, MyService.getData() method returns an array of VOAuthor PHP objects. However, as you will see later, in Flex the result is an array of VOAuthor ActionScript objects.

Creating the Flex application

Now that you have the PHP code in place, you are ready to create the Flex code that will call the PHP class. I want the Flex application to have a button that gets the data from the server, uses a data grid to display the data, and enables the user to edit any cell (except ids) within the data grid. Whenever a cell is edited, the update is sent automatically to the server and saved to the database as well.

First, be sure to select the Flex perspective from the top right icons of Eclipse.

The next thing you need to do is to create a configuration file that Flex can use to reach the PHP service. Create the file services-config.xml in the root of the project. Open the file and add this code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<services-config>
    <services>
        <service id="amfphp-flashremoting-service" class="flex.messaging.services.RemotingService" messageTypes="flex.messaging.messages.RemotingMessage">
            <destination id="zend">
                <channels>
                    <channel ref="my-zend"/>
                </channels>
                <properties>
                    <source>*</source>
                </properties>
            </destination>
        </service>
    </services>
    <channels>
        <channel-definition id="my-zend" class="mx.messaging.channels.AMFChannel">
            <endpoint uri="http://localhost/zendamf_remote/" class="flex.messaging.endpoints.AMFEndpoint"/>
        </channel-definition>
    </channels>
</services-config>

Be sure to check the endpoint node (at the bottom of the file); your URL to the zendamf_remote folder might be different. Set the value appropriately for your setup.

Now you need to tell Flex Builder to use this file when compiling the project. Right click on the project name in the Project Explorer and choose Properties. Select Flex Compiler and add the following to Additional compiler arguments field: -services “absolute_path_to_the_file/services_config.xml”:

Adding services_config to compile arguments

You will use a RemoteObject to communicate with the server, so add a mx:RemoteObject tag. You need to set the source attribute to MyService (this is the PHP class name) and the destination to zend – this is the destination created in the services-config.xml file. Also give a name to this object by adding an id attribute and set it to myRemote. Set the attribute showBusyCursor to true (whenever a call is made this will render the mouse icon as a watch, until a response from the server is received). The code should look like this:

<mx:RemoteObject id="myRemote" destination="zend" source="MyService" showBusyCursor="true">
</mx:RemoteObject>

Now you need to declare the methods you want to call on the PHP class, and add the listeners for fault and result events. The code is:

<mx:RemoteObject id="myRemote" destination="zend" source="MyService" showBusyCursor="true" fault="faultListener(event)">
     <mx:method name="getData" result="getDataListener(event)"/>
     <mx:method name="saveData" result="saveDataListener(event)"/>
</mx:RemoteObject>

Next you need a UI to make the call to the server and display/edit the data. A button and a data grid will do. Add this code above the RemoteObject code:

<mx:VBox top="30" left="100">
           <mx:Button label="Get data" click="{myRemote.getData()}" />
           <mx:DataGrid id="myGrid" editable="true" itemEditEnd="save(event)"/>
</mx:VBox>

As you can see, the button calls the getData() method on the remoteObject. The data grid has an event listener registered for the itemEditEnd event.

The last step is to create the listeners you declared. For this, add an mx:Script tag to your MXML application and define four functions in it:

<mx:Script>
     <![CDATA[
           import mx.controls.dataGridClasses.DataGridColumn;
           import mx.events.DataGridEvent;
           import org.corlan.VOAuthor;
           import mx.controls.Alert;
           import mx.rpc.events.FaultEvent;
           import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent;
           import mx.collections.ArrayCollection;
           /**
            * listener for the data grid's itemEditEnd event
            */
           privatefunction save(event:DataGridEvent):void {
                //we don't want to update the id of the item
                if (event.dataField == "id_aut") {
                     event.preventDefault();
                     return;
                }
                //retrieve the new value from the item editor instance
                var dataGrid:DataGrid = event.target as DataGrid;
                var col:DataGridColumn = dataGrid.columns[event.columnIndex];
                var newValue:String = dataGrid.itemEditorInstance[col.editorDataField];
                //retrieve the data model that was edited
                var author:VOAuthor = event.itemRenderer.data as VOAuthor;
                // if the value wasn't change, exit
                if (newValue == author[event.dataField])
                     return;
                //update the model with the new values     
                author[event.dataField] = newValue;
                //call the remote method passing the data we want to be saved
                myRemote.saveData(author);
           }
           /**
            * Result listener for get data operation
            */
           privatefunction getDataListener(event:ResultEvent):void {
                //set the result array as data provider for the data grid         
myGrid.dataProvider = event.result as Array;
           }
           /**
            * Result listener for save data operation
            */
           privatefunction saveDataListener(event:ResultEvent):void {
                Alert.show("The data was saved!");
           }
           /**
            * Fault listener for RemoteObject
            */
           privatefunction faultListener(event:FaultEvent):void {
                Alert.show(event.fault.message, "Error");
           }
]]>
</mx:Script>

Finally, you need to create the ActionScript Value Object that will act as a data model for the data sent from PHP. Right-click on the src folder from Flex Navigator, and choose New > ActionScript class. For the package type org.corlan, and for the name type VOAuthor. Click OK. Now it is time to add the members and some meta-data:

package org.corlan {
     [RemoteClass(alias="VOAuthor")]
     [Bindable]
     publicclass VOAuthor {
           publicvar id_aut:int;
           publicvar fname_aut:String;
           publicvar lname_aut:String;
     }
}

The RemoteClass meta-data is very important. This tells to the ActionScript that the remote class (the one from PHP) that it maps to is called VOAuthor. If you forget this or you misconfigure it, you will get generic objects in ActionScript instead of VOAuthor, and associative arrays in PHP instead of VOAuthor.

You are done. There shouldn’t be any errors.

Now you are ready to test the code. Start the Flex application by clicking Run in the toolbar. When the application opens in your default browser, click the Get data button. You should see the data grid populated with some data:

Testing the application

To edit the items, just double click on any name and change something. When you finish editing, click outside the data grid. The changes will be sent to the server. If you don’t believe me, just go to the database and view the records.

Editing a cell

That’s it people!

November 13, 2008 | Filed Under Flex, PHP, Tutorials | 185 Comments 

Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR

SitePen has released a library called “Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR“. What you can do with? Well, if you develop AIR applications using AJAX, then this library is for you. It plays nice with Dojo Toolkit, and offers features like playback video, managers for windows…

This is joined effort between SitePen and Adobe. More here, and here, and a screencast here.

November 13, 2008 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment 

Do you like beer?

You can see a cool RIA application dedicated to all of us that have a special feeling for beer: http://destinationbeer.com/beer_hunter/. It seems to be created in Flex with remoting using AMF Ruby.

Enjoy, and have a beer!

November 13, 2008 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment 

MAX 2008 Award Finalists

The MAX Awards Finalist Gallery is now live, and you can start to vote! Go here and start voting for your favorites. The vote will close on November 18th at 12:00 noon PST.

If you attend the MAX, then you can see the finalists displaying their submissions Monday evening, starting at 6:30 PM in the Community Pavilion, Nosecone West Level 1.

The winner will be announced in November 18th.

November 12, 2008 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment 

Do you want to get your hands on Thermo?

If you want to get your hands on the Thermo bits before anyone else, then the only way is to attend MAX USA, or MAX Milan, and get a place in one of the two Intro to Thermo sessions.

Later on we will have a release on Labs too. Good luck people!

November 11, 2008 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment 

Adobe MAX Milan is coming

There are only 20 days until MAX Milan starts. I’ll be presenting two sessions there: one is “Maintaining security with Adobe AIR”, and the second one is “Building High-Performance Applications for Adobe AIR”. Also it will be the perfect time to meet you :). Be sure you don’t miss the MAX Community Lounge – this is a space where some of us (Adobe evangelists) will be available for chatting to anyone.

Here is a short movie with Duane and Piotr, my fellow evangelists:

http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2008/11/piotr-and-duane-come-to-max-in-milan.html

November 10, 2008 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment 

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