Open source and commercial software

Miti posted a great post (On Open Source and Communism) about why the world is a better place if you have both open source and commercial software. So if you feel that commercial software should die, maybe you should reconsider. I lived in communism, and I know that “ideal” worlds are better to exists only on paper, and not to be experimented.

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

Munich Flex and PHP user group meeting

Last evening I had the pleasure of presenting an introductory session on Flex, AIR and PHP to PHP developers in a nice location, downtown Munich. It was fun to code two examples with all the people watching me (I demonstrated how to bring data into Flex using REST and XML, and how to use Remoting and Zend AMF for an AIR client). Actually it was a kind of Extreme Programming, because they helped me to catch the typos and things earlier rather than later.

Of course, the PHP debugger kicked me! After my session, Tobias von Klipstein gave a session on Dojo.

But what I enjoyed most was the kind of round table we had after-wards, when we talked about open source and Adobe, about JavaScript and ActionScript, and more. Actually, some of the people stayed late into the night: we left the pub after midnight.

Some folks asked for the code that I wrote during the presentation. Instead of giving that code, I have a better proposal, just click on the following links for some nice articles and projects with code that you can download and look at.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex_php.html

http://corlan.org/2008/11/13/flex-and-php-remoting-with-zend-amf/

http://corlan.org/2008/10/10/flex-and-php-remoting-with-amfphp/

http://corlan.org/2008/09/10/kind-of-a-data-service-implementation-for-php-using-amfphp-and-remoteobject/

If you want to try Flex, just download Flex Builder and give it a spin. It will work as a trial for 60 days, plenty of time to play with it.

If you have questions, just drop me an email. Thank you again for a nice evening, and I hope we can meet again next year!

Later Update: Many thanks to Raju Bitter for all the help, and care! I hope to meet you again soon!

December 9, 2008 | Filed Under Others, Presentations | 5 Comments

Text Layout Framework for AIR 1.5 and Flash Player 10

I remember my first FlexCamp, back in 2007. In one of the breaks I was asked this question: “When will we get support for languages from right to left?”. Now I have an answer to this question :). Because Text Layout Framework, which was released on http://labs.adobe.com can handle this type of usage.

Just visit this link and play with the demo a little bit (the source code of the demo is available too). I think you will like it as much as I do.

The Text Layout Framework can do more than handling right-to-left languages. Here is an excerpt from the labs page:

Bidirectional text, vertical text and over 30 writing systems including Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Lao, the major writing systems of India, and others.
Selection, editing and flowing text across multiple columns and linked containers, and around inline images
Vertical text, Tate-Chu-Yoko (horizontal within vertical text) and justifier for East Asian typography
Rich typographical controls, including kerning, ligatures, typographic case, digit case, digit width and discretionary hyphens
Cut, copy, paste, undo and standard keyboard and mouse gestures for editing
Rich developer APIs to manipulate text content, layout, markup and create custom text components.

You can use this framework with Flex 3.2, Flex Gumbo (the next version of Flex), and with Flash CS4. I plan to try it myself in a Flex project (3.2), and I will write a post about it.

In the meantime, I am curious to hear your thoughts on this.

December 8, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Flex | Leave a Comment

Improved course on building Flex & AIR clients for various service types available online

If you want to learn how to write Flex and AIR clients that consume different services types (REST, Web Services, RPC), then just take a look at what James Ward and Duane Nickull did. There is about 8 hours of course material, and you can download it and play with it as you wish.

December 6, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Flex | Leave a Comment

Client-to-client direct streaming in Flash Player 10

Here you can read an excellent post about client-to-client streaming, RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol) – do not mistake with RTMF (Real Time Message Format used in LCDS), and COCOMO. About the ability of FP 10 to stream video, and sound, its new sound codec Speex, and more.

Enjoy!

December 5, 2008 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment