The Architecture of Flash from the horse’s mouth

A continuation from the last post, this is again from PodTech. Here Ely Greenfield (Flex Architect), David Wadhwani (Vice President of Flex Product Line), and Mike Chambers (Senior Product Manager, Developer Relations), gives us an inside on Flash’s architecture and gives further details about what is being open sourced.

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/04/PID_011047/Podtech_Adobe_Flex_Announcement_Whiteb.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/scobleshow/2827/the-architecture-of-flash&totalTime=1773000&breadcrumb=98439cdf-6f55-4eba-a454-69a11a504168]

(or you can download it here)

Come in, We’re OPEN !!!

I love working in the Flex World. Things are never stale… Stuff happens everyday (every hour sometimes… check out RIAPedia for the exciting happenings).

Last November, Adobe created quite a buzz by open sourcing the Flash VM to Mozilla Foundation for their Tamarin Project.

Now Adobe does it again… Here’s the news

Flex SDK going Open Source… Woohoo !!

There is a press release with the announcement as well as a FAQ on the basics. Quoting the article on Adobe Labs…

Adobe is announcing plans to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, which have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released, but also includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger and the core ActionScript libraries from the SDK. The Flex SDK includes all of the components needed to create Flex applications that run in any browser – on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux and on now on the desktop using “Apollo”.

And it doesnt stop there… Starting Summer 2007 we will put out daily builds of the Flex SDK and provide an open bugbase online. The Flex community will then have direct access to all the tools we now use internally and the community will thus have an unprecedented chance to contribute to the quality of Flex directly. This means, no more frustrations on mailing lists.

Quoting Ted Patrick… “In December of 2007 after the release of “Moxie” (aka Flex 3) we will be posting all software assets
into a public Subversion repository for public access. During this transition period we will be clarifying governance on the Flex SDK and how contributions will be handled in phases.”

See the videoCast on PodTech by David Wadhwani & Ely Greenfield (or shall i say quietlyscheming.com) on this topic (or download the video here)

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/04/PID_011045/Podtech_Adobe_Flex_Announcement_interv.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/scobleshow/2826/breaking-news-adobe-flash-flex-goes-open-sourc&totalTime=1525000&breadcrumb=98439cdf-6f55-4eba-a454-69a11a504168]

This is really exciting. It opens up a chance for a viral adoption opportunity for Flex and also raises a lot of challenges for us which is what we here at Adobe thrive on. Adobe has also set up a Google Group for anyone that wants to discuss the news and project over at http://groups.google.com/group/flex-open-source. The fun has just started… stay tuned for more.

Wanna Read more??

• Thoughts by Ted Leung (a famous open source developer)
• Ted Patrick
• Ryan Stewart on ZDnet (has a lot of insight, this one)

“Hello Blog World” thru ScribeFire

I’m writing this post from ScribeFire… It is a cool FireFox Addon which sits at the bottom of your FireFox as a small icon like and you can configure it and add multiple blogs and use it as a single interface for all your blogging. I had it installed on my firefox for a long time, but thanks to Nisheet for showing me its real use :)I guess I’ll switch to this for blogging from now on and i can now manage all my blogs (on blogspot as well as here on wordpress) from this…

Get the plugin here…

Powered by ScribeFire.

ZamZar – That’s what I call “Software As A Service”

An awesome site I came across today… ZamZar.com is an online file conversion website. It can convert files from-to a lot of formats which basically include doc files, audio, video and images. Being true to its characteristic, ZamZar website is spewed with chameleon images and I found that there’s more to ZamZar’s connection with metamorphosis… Quoting the site,

What’s in a name ?

The name “Zamzar” is based on a character from the Bohemian author Franz Kafka’s book “The Metamorphosis”. In the novel Kafka describes the extraordinary story of a young man who is transformed whilst sleeping into a gigantic insect.

The man’s name – Gregor Samsa – was used as the basis for our company name because of its’ powerful association with change and transformation.

I’ve been going crazy, converting my guitar videos from mpeg to 3gp for my mobile and converting some flv’s I had to avi’s. They have a really amazing way of integrating with browsers. Checkout the video below

What’s more… they email it all to you, and for FREE (They get their money through ads). Neat… Really awesome guys.. way to go.

Now that’s what I would call Software As A Service… a real Web2.0

Hello Silverlight… KaBoom !!

I just had my first experience with SilverLight (for those who came in late.. it used to be called Microsoft WPF/E  and now they have changed it). I read about it on Ryan Stewart’s Blog and went to the Microsoft site here…

And… KaBoom… Browser Crash. My FireFox went bonkers (probably it hates all things Microsoft). And someone has said that “First Impression is the Best Impression”

Anyway.. it didnt crash the next time i went in there (probably my FF got used to it). I downloaded the plugin and saw the promo video… Typical Microsoft, really awesome PR.

The next step was to look at a Silverlight apps… This one looked “inspired” by Ely’s FlexBook. Frankly… i wasnt too impressed. There were some abnormalities in the mouse interactions (probably due to coding than due to the technology). But i would say a good start. The other demos were nice.

I would still agree with Ted that it looks like a Flash clone and has its own inherent problems. Read what Ted has to say about this. SilverLight comes with a motto “Light Up the Web”… Lets wait and watch if it lights up the web or torches the competition.

Custom PreLoaders

A lot of people have been asking me if this is possible. I was aware it was, but didn’t have a working code or even a pointer for them. But now I do…

I just found a post by Ted Patrick which has examples on how to make SWFs, GIFs or PNGs as Custom PreLoaders.

Read all about it on this post

A Flexible Python is a deadly animal

Check out this really cool app by my friend and colleague Swaroop. He’s combined the power of Flex and Python. He has used the Win32 API Lib in Python to get info on how much time the user is spending on each of the apps running on windows and then using the power of Flex to parse the data to generate a clean Pie Chart… Pretty Neat Bro 🙂

Read his blogpost here

Conditional Drag & Drop

We had a small presentation lined up for some Flex users today at our office. I did a presentation on E4X, something I have been discussing a lot on this blog. Harish was taking a session on Drag & Drop and someone in the audience had a very interesting question.

He wanted conditional drag & drop. This meant that he wanted to decide on “dragEnter“, if the data was good enough to be accepted by the destination. I just put together an app which i wanted to share here.

Here, I have 2 DataGrids, one which is a Stock List and the other, a Buying List. You can drag and drop items from the Stock List to the Buying one, but subject to availability. What it does is that, on dragEnter, the following function is executed.

private function enterDrag(event:DragEvent):void{
var obj:Object = event.dragSource.dataForFormat(“items”);
if(!obj[0].available){
event.stopImmediatePropagation();
}
}

The function checks the availability of the item and if unavailable, calls the event.stopImmediatePropagation() method, which doesn’t allow the drop operation on the grid for that item.

You can view the application and the source here

AWS WebService App

Here’s the AWS WebService Application I mentioned in my last post.

Thanks to e4x, i could query the AWS (Amazon Web Service), get books with the tag of “Flex” and populate them in a DataGrid (complete with itemRenderers and all) . The challendges i faced in the application were as follows

• Understanding the way of using the required namespaces to access the result of the WebService. This was done using

private namespace AWSNS = “http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService”;
use namespace AWSNS;

• Since the data was coming in as e4x XML, the sort functionality of DataGrid was not working as expected. I needed to write sortCompareFunctions to get that to work.

So, here’s the AWS WebService App

and its source

E4X, My mx:WebService Buddy

For an internal project (kindof), i had to use E4X to parse my results from a mx:WebService. I really found it a pleasure to work with it. The thing is that WebService class in Flex allows the return type to be “Object“, “xml” or “e4x“. The difference is as follows.

• Using Object – Setting return type as Object, returns data in the form of an ObjectProxy. Below, I have provided the example of a WebService response from Amazon Web Service, inspected in FlexBuilder. As you can see, the ObjectProxy contains several complex datatypes, including ArrayCollection and mx.rpc.xml.ComplexString, which can be tricky to handle. Also you would have to do same parsing logic to parse the incoming result to your liking.

• Using XML – Using an xml return type, returns the data as an Array of XMLNodes as below. I have earlier mentioned the pains of accessing nodes in a legacy XMLDocument way.

• Using E4X : Makes it so much simpler. Gives me an XMLList as the result as below.

What this does for me is that the parsing becomes a cakewalk. I can just do the following and filter out all the Items in my result. res below is a ResutEvent of type mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent.

myXML:XMLList = res.result..Item;

Then, this XMLList variable can be bound to a mx:DataGrid (as DataGrid will internally convert it to an XMLListCollection) and you can work seamlessly with it… What a joy 🙂