Speaking at the Flash Platform & CF pre-Launch event in Chennai

On the 27th June 2009, The CF & Flex User Groups in Chennai are collaborating to conduct a Flash Platform & CF pre-Launch event at Hotel Dee Cee Manor in Chennai. It is a full day event with ColdFusion and Flash Platform Sessions followed by Hands-on experience using Flash Builder and ColdFusion. Bring your laptops so that you can experience the software yourselves.

I will be there from Adobe along with Manju Kiran, a Sr.Lead Software Engineer Adobe ColdFusion team and will show exciting new features of the next generation of CF & Flash Platform.

It is a free event. Register here… Seats limited! See you all in Chennai on the 27th

Announcing public beta of Flash Builder 4 & Flash Catalyst

Here is the day you have all been waiting for. Flex Builder has got a redesign and power packed with new features and titled Flash Builder 4 and one of the most awaited software from the Adobe stable Flash Catalyst is finally available for the public…

Go ahead and check it out… Here are some links to get you started:

• Flash Builder 4 page on Adobe Labs
• Flash Catalyst on Adobe Labs
• Flash Builder 4 & Flash Catalyst demo Videos
• What’s new in Flex 4 SDK an article by Matt
• Differences in Flex 3 SDK & Flex 4 SDK, an article by Joan

And watch this space for more videos, tutorials, and sneek peaks into Flash Builder 4 & all the new additions to the Flash Platform. From now on, I will tag all those posts as “Flash Platform”…

Announcing Adobe Flash Platform Tools Preview – 3rd June 2009

I am sure you have all been hearing about the new and exciting tools that we at Adobe have been building. We will preview many of these new innovations – Adobe Flash Builder (formerly known as Flex Builder), Adobe Flash Catalyst, upcoming versions of LiveCycle and BlazeDS at the “Adobe Flash Platform Tools Preview” to be held on 3rd June 2009 at Taj Residency in Bangalore. You can read more about the event by visiting our website.

Entry to this event is by invitation only. If you would like to join us for this event (it is an evening event with dinner:) drop me an email with your name, company, designation and contact number to  rrao (at) adobe (dot) com and I will send you an invite. Seats availabe on a FCFS basis. SOLD OUT! See you on June 3rd

Thanks for Voting. Adobe Rocks GIDS!

Adobe swept the “Great Indian Developer Awards – II”. Thanks to all who voted. We increased our tally from 1 last year to 3 this year and was the company with the most number of awards… w00t!

Adobe swept the stage in 3 categories:

• Best Collaboration Solution – Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional (nominated along with WebEx, MS Office Online.. etc)
• Best Web Development Platform – Adobe ColdFusion 8 (nominated along with ASP.NET, DOJO… etc)
• Best Framework – Adobe Flex (nominated along with .NET framework, Sprint & Struts)

Adobe nominated for Developer Awards @ GIDS – Vote

GIDS (Great Indian Developer Summit) is an annual event that happens in India (where else) featuring sessions and workshops by top companies… Me, Harish, Sujit, Anirudh and Ramesh are going to be there along with CF wiz-guys Rakshith & Hemanth for the event. We have several sessions and a workshop lined up from Adobe.

GIDS also has a Developer Awards along with it under many categories… Adobe has several products under various categories… vote for it and let Adobe outshine everyone at the awards.

• Development Environments – Flex Builder
• Web Development – Flash Platform & ColdFusion
• Mobile Development – Device Central
• Frameworks – Flex
• Collaboration Solution – Acrobat Connect
• Security – LiveCycle Rights Management ES

Trivia: CF won the best Web Development Platform last year and this time we have 7 nominations

Vote Here

sandbox violation – find answers to your Flex questions…

• How can we speed up the performance of DataGrid when there is a lot of data?
• How do we reduce SWF size so that the download times are lesser?
• My Flex application works fine when run from Flex Builder, but when deployed to server, I get security related errors. Why?

You always had questions like this and never knew where to go to get answers? Anirudh Sasikumar, a Technical Evangelist at Adobe has created a project called sandboxviolation. In his own words, sand box violation is  “for the flex and flash community where users can post questions / answers and vote a question or answer up or down earning reputation points along the way”.

Its available in 2 flavors:

Flex App on Google App Engine | An AIR app with offline support

Check it out, benefit from it, post your questions, answer other’s questions, vote answers up/ down and help the community churn high quality content…

Addendum: Anirudh’s written a Syntax Highlighting in AS3 as part of the above project which is awesome and then opensourced the code which has now created quite a buzz. Check it out too 🙂

Won the Yahoo! Hackday, thanks to Flex :)

Just back from the Yahoo! Open Hackday India. It was 2 days of mayhem, hardcore coding and fun.I teamed up with Harish for the event and was looking forward to having some fun…

Since I was a speaker at the last HackDay, I knew that it was 24 hrs of hacking and then a 90 seconds elevator pitch at the end of it. Me and Harish decided to make a hack in an improved version of colrful. It integrated Color Search on Flickr, Photos based on reverse geo-coding, Boss Image Search and more… We were really excited.

Once we started hacking, I had a crazy idea. Why don’t we build an application in 90 seconds. An on-stage demo that would be fun and show the power of Flex. We built a fully functional Boss Image Search Application in 90 seconds. What’s awesome is that its just 13 lines of code. We used a HTTPService to connect to the Boss Image Search service and bound the results to the display shelf. We even managed to implement pagination and applied a Yahoo! Flex Skin to it.

When we went on stage and started coding, I made some mistakes in coding it up. There was a confusion about the timer and we actually finished just as the 90 seconds bell rang out… The crowd was cheering us and the adrenaline rush was really awesome. You get the code below.

Source

and here’s what it resulted in:

Though we did not win for colrful, we won the prize in the Best “Gone in 90 seconds” category and won an iPod Touch. It was really the power of Flex that made this crazy idea possible. I am proud that I am the Flex Evangelist. Go Flex!

Invoking an AIR app from another AIR app

Today I was just trying to see how to launch one AIR app from another… The idea struck me when I was reading –Installing and running an AIR applications from a web page documentation on livedocs and I thought it is worth posting here.

There is an air.swf file file at [http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/browserapi/air.swf]. One can invoke a launchApplication() method on the file to interact with the AIR runtime and launch installed AIR applications from a web page in a browser. I decided to use the same file to launch AIR apps from another AIR app. To get this working, the trick is very simple:

1. Get the applicationID and the publisherID of the app intended to be invoked
   

   applicationID can be obtained, either from the author of the application or looking at the application.xml file funder the META-INF/AIR folder in the application install directory.

   publisherID can be obtained, either from the author of the application or in the publisherid file under the META-INF/AIR folder in the application install directory.

2. First load the air.swf in an instance of the Loader class and set the LoaderContext as mentioned here under “Loading the air.swf file” heading.
3. Do a check if the application is installed using the code under “Checking from a web page if an AIR application is installed” heading.
4. Use the following code to launch the application
   
var appID:String = enter applicationID here;
var pubID:String = enter publisherID here;
airSWF.launchApplication(appID, pubID);
5. Done…

Note:

This would only work if the application.xml file of the application that you want to launch has the allowBrowserInvocation property set to true.

Here is an example of 2 apps, AIRAppLauncher and AIRAppLaunched. AIRAppLauncher can be used to launch AIRAppLaunched. You will have to sign the AIRAppLaunched, export as AIR, extract the publisherID, install it and use that in AIRAppLauncher for the whole workflow to work. You can download the archive here…

Adobe riathon – registrations open…

If you are a Flex/ Flash /  AIR developer in India and think you can be the one behind the coolest of all  RIAs, you cannot afford to miss this event! Put on your RIA development shoes, build the coolest app that you can imagine and send it to us on or before 26^th November 2008. If your application catches our attention, you will be invited to a very special event on the 29^th of November at Grand Ashok, Bangalore where the top applications will go on stage for a demo showdown! This is your chance to Flash your design skills, Flex your coding muscles and AIR your demos in front of an elite judge panel & the Adobe community.

The Grand winner / winning team will walk away with a groovy Apple IPhone.

The runners up will take home with them a Sony home theater system.

What’s more, there are loads of IPod Nano’s, shuffles and Adobe branded goodies to be won.

This event also brings to you  an exclusive preview on the new developments in the Adobe Flash Platform. Experience the Flash Catalyst (code name Thermo), Gumbo(code name for the upcoming version of Flex) ,FXG and Flash Player 10.

Register today at http://adoberiathon.eventbrite.com

For more information and contest rules & regulations, please visit http://adoberiathon.wordpress.com

Adobe Flex 3 with AIR ACE Exam is available now

This is something the Flex community has been waiting for some time. Adobe Flex 3 with AIR ACE (Adobe Certified Expert) is out now. Go ahead and get certified !!!

Register for a test at Pearson VUE or Thomson Prometric

Here is the link to the Adobe Flex 3 and AIR ACE Preparation Guide