The initRIA Conference Experience…

The initRIA conference conducted by the Bangalore Flex User Group on Sunday, 16th Dec, 2007 was just awesome. It was a platform for me to learn a lot of things, meet other fellow Flex enthusiasts and network with guys from startups who were trying out Flex. The event had a lot of people talking on several topics…

• Data Visualization in Flex – by Me
• RIAjaxified – Rakshith, Adobe
• Designing RIAs with RC pattern – Yash Mody, TeknoPoint Multimedia
• Flash for Flex developers – Bhavin Padhiyar, SAP
• Building Live Documents – An online Office suite leveraging RIA technologies by Sumanth Raghavendra and Adarsh Kini, InstaColl
• Optimizing Flex and AS3 – Mrinal Wadhwa, SAP
• Developing Flex RIAs with Cairngorm Microarchitecture Debabrata Acharjee, CapGemini
• and a Birds of a feather session

What really cheered me up was that people had flown down from Mumbai, Pune & Hyderabad for the event. We even had a couple of students coming from Tanjaore, TN. It was a platform to meet the most passionate of Flex developers in India.

The early birds..

We even had some FlashLite folks coming down. Both Vivek & Mariam are very well known people in the FlashLite Community.

Me with Vivek & Mariam

I opened the sessions with a talk on “Data Visualization in Flex 3“. If you missed it, you can catch it in the following links…

The SlideShare version of my PPT

• My AdvancedDataGrid App
• My Charts App
• You can get the source in a zipped format here…

The sessions I personally was looking forward to were the ones on Performance Tuning in AS3 by Mrinal, the Flash for Flex Developers talk by Bhavin & the talk on Cairngorm by Debabrata.

Me during my session

Mrinal in deep thought

Deb on Cairngorm

But the highlight of the day was the presentation by the InstaColl guys, where they demoed their new (and much talked about) online suite called LiveDocuments. Sumanth did an awesome job in the demo and we were all excited to see LiveDocs in action. I had heard a lot about the company and the product before the day, in connection with the famous Sabeer Bhatia. The fact that it was built in Flex made it extra sweet for us 🙂

Sumanth Raghavendra (CEO, InstaColl – Live Documents)

Live Documents in Action

I also met some very interesting people and had some very exciting discussions in the birds of a feather session. I can safely say that this was probably one of the most enjoyable conferences that I have attended… Thanks for Mrinal & Saurabh Narula (from Honeywell) for making this happen and to Abdul for the photos 🙂

Drag & Drop of a file into an AIR app (Beta 3)

I thought I will post this as there has been a lot of API changes between Beta2 & Beta3. I will try to compile some info on the migration from Beta2 to Beta3.

For now, one of the major changes affecting this particular scenario is the fact that flash.Desktop.DragManager has now been renamed as flash.desktop.NativeDragManager. Here is how you can achieve the drag & drop of file(s) from desktop. The app actually accepts an image file on drag & drop from desktop and displays it in an Image control.

1. import NativeDragManager & NativeDragEvent
2. add event listeners for NativeDragEvent.NATIVE_DRAG_ENTER and NativeDragEvent.NATIVE_DRAG_DROP
3. In the DRAG_ENTER handler, you call NativeDragManager.acceptDragDrop(this);
4. In the DRAG_DROP handler, you can get to the file(s) dropped using the following code…

public function onDrop(event:NativeDragEvent):void{
var dropfiles:Array = event.clipboard.getData( ClipboardFormats.FILE_LIST_FORMAT) as Array;

5. Now you can loop through the files using a for… each loop as below

for each (var file:File in dropfiles){

6. Use the file as required in your app. Here I extract the extension of the file, check if it is an image and then load it in an Image control.

You can find the code of the application here…

Application Source

Flex3 & AIR Beta 3s out there

 

Adobe released the Beta 3 version of Flex product line & also of the Adobe Interated Runtime (AIR) on Adobe Labs. Get it and try it out… there are some really cool features awaiting, especially in Flex Builder.

• AIR runtime installation
• AIR SDK
• Flex SDK 3
• Flex Builder 3

initRIA: 15 more seats added on public demand, 12 available as of now

 

 

I was talking to Mrinal and he mentioned we will be adding some more seats due to public demand for the initRIA conference and now he’s blogged about 15 seats being available.

Hurry, grab your seat, if you haven’t done so already. Looks like India is really taking big strides in the RIA domain. I was really happy to see Ryan Stewart blogging about the conference. Its going to be an awesome sunday.

Lastly, even I wanted to make an appeal to the people who earlier registered and now cannot attend due to some unforeseen reason. Please un-register so that someone else could attend in your place.

Breaking News: Adobe Announces Open Source Technologies for Enterprise RIAs called BlazeDS

Adobe today announced the labs release of its remoting and messaging technologies under a new open source product named BlazeDS. Now, developers can easily connect to back-end distributed data, as well as push data in real-time to their Flex and AIR applications, for more responsive RIA experiences for no cost at all…

This is particularly exciting for me as one of the biggest hindrances to the advancement of Flex in India was that companies were reluctant to buy license of LiveCycle ES, just for a data-push capability. With BlazeDS, developers can add data connectivity to RIAs for real-time collaboration and data-push capabilities that enable better decision-making and more engaging user experiences for no cost at all.

Previously available only as part of Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES, the technologies included in BlazeDS, along with the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification, are being contributed to open source under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL v3), and are available immediately as public beta on Adobe Labs. Here are the links for more details…

• Adobe Press Release [PDF]
• Adobe Labs BlazeDS page
• Action Message Format Specification [PDF]
• Discuss the BlazeDS beta in the Labs forums
• Blog Post about BlazeDS by Cristophe
• James Ward talking about the annoncement

InitRIA Conference in Bangalore on 16th Dec 2007

initRIA is a day long developer conference of Rich Internet Applications enthusiasts, at HoneyWell Technology Solutions (opposite IIM Bangalore), Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore. The conference is on 16th of Dec 2007 (Sunday).

Please register if you have not done so already. There are limited number of seats and registrations will be closing soon..

I am speaking at the conference , hope to see you all there… If you are the venue, do come and chat with me. I look something like this 🙂

A whole lotta awesome stuff

I was very distracted from looking at the happenings in the Flash/Flex/AIR world in the last month due to certain personal and work related reasons. But looks like a lot has happened in this time… This post is trying to capture some of those interesting stuff.

• Yahoo! announced that from now on, you will be able to edit your Flickr Photos on Picnik – This is awesome news, something that prompts me to go for premium accounts.
• YUI Got a Little More Flashy! – Yahoo! Flash Blog talks about the YUI 2.4.0 release that has the experimental YUI Charts widget that makes Yahoo! Astra Flash Charts accesable to YUI folks
• Oracle bets on Flex UIs – James Ward has an awesome series on how Oracle is convinced of the Flex technology. The series talks about his visit to the Oracle OpenWorld.
• Nominate your rich Internet application for a Crunchie award – Ryan has a scoop on the Crunchies, a start-up competition being hosted by Read/WriteWeb, TechCrunch, Venture Beat and GigaOm. The deadline to submit a nomination is December 12th
• Online Video Series: Salesforce.com & Adobe – Catch this interesting series on James Ward’s blog…
• Progressive Image Loading with URLStream and Loader.loadBytes in Flash Player 9 – Thanks Ted… I’m sure a lot of people would dig this.

MovieStar released to the public…

Adobe today announced the immediate availability of Adobe® Flash® Player 9 Update 3, previously code named Moviestar. Adobe Flash Player 9 includes H.264 standard video support, the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray® and HD-DVD® high definition video players, and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio capabilities.

The latest update also features hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers. The combination of Adobe Flash Player 9 and Adobe Flash Media Server 3 (also announced today) enables the delivery of HD quality video to the broadest online audience

• Click here to view the features of Flash Player 9, including an interactive Demo
• Download the player from Adobe Flash Player Download Center (for Win, Mac & Linux)
• Also released today is the beta version of Flash Player 9 Update for Solaris. Get it here

Adobe 25th Anniversary Celebrations at Parikrama Foundation

December 1982 – John Warnock and Chuck Geschke left Xerox PARC and founded Adobe Systems with $2.5 million in seed money from a venture capitalist. The company was named after the creek that ran behind John’s home in Los Altos, CA. As this December dawns, Adobe celebrates its 25th birthday. Celebrations are kicking off in all Adobe offices across the world and we here in Adobe Bangalore decided to do something special…

Parikrma Humanity Foundation is a nonprofit company aiming to help the poorest of the poor break their cycle of poverty and to enable them to live meaningfully. To do this they provide them the tools necessary to succeed in a knowledge based world. We at Adobe are proud that Adobe is sponsoring a whole school that is being run by Parikrama at Jayanagar, Bangalore. This was initiated last year, when our earstwhile CEO, Bruce Chizen was here and today that facility is known as Adobe Parikrama …

Adobe Parikrama

So we decided to celebrate our 25th Birthday with these kids and we had a great time today. Here are some pics from the same.

The Adobe 25 cake

All lit up…

Eagerly waiting

The volunteers

Blow the candles

Cut the cake

Singing Happy Birthday Adobe 🙂

The kids even wrote poems for us and it was beautiful hearing them. I was amazed by their command of English which enabled them to write such wonderful poems. Go Parikrama…

A poem for Adobe

The poems

There’s a card too 😀

Cake time…

Serving cakes with lunch

Yummy !

A prayer for Adobe