Well since you can get Flex Builder for free, why not have some free training to go along with this as well.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/
That came across my reader the other day but I forgot about it so now it is shared. 
Well realized I hadn’t posted anything lately so I figured I should do an update.
Been playing a lot with Flex and can’t wait to get some real work done with it. Played around and got it talking to a Database through PHP and that was cool. Been looking at how to skin the apps so we can make some nice looking ones.
Started writing a Groupwise Flex Chat client and hit a pretty big road block. The issue is when making the login request to the server they want you to identify the local port you assigned to talk to it (which is stupid since the server already knows this information because I’m talking to it from that port) which unfortunately it seems I can’t get that information from the socket. Still poking around trying to find somewhere to get it but no luck so far. This doesn’t stop the project but changes how it would work. Now it would have to talk to a middle man that handles all this stuff which makes it not as “flex”able as I had intended because I was wanting to convert it to an AIR app that people could use from their desktop to connect. Now we could open up the middleman to the outside world to handle this but I really wished for a way around it.
Lately a big thing that’s been taking up a bunch of my time is that we are moving our CMS from Solaris to Linux. This is a big annoyance because the software provider says they support Solaris but it’s pretty obvious they don’t after having them attempt to troubleshot our “Going Live” issue. They said they couldn’t duplicate the issue on an OSX machine????????? We are now looking to move to a Suse machine and the test server I setup on a past dump of the database (running on the same MySQL server on the same Solaris box) and have had no issues. Should be a simple move once we have our live server up and going and the longest part will be waiting on the dns change for the name.
Still trying to figure out what I want to give presentations on next semester. Probably talk about RIA’s and hopefully I hear something that others might want to hear about so we can have talks on it.
Other then that hopefully I’ll catch some tutorials that really peak my interest and I’ll share but been kind of stale lately out there with things.
Have a good holidays if I don’t post before then.
On giant leap for integrating with the worst documented POS messaging service ever, Groupwise Messenger.
After much research and finally just breaking down and fumbling through the Kopete Source (which was 100 times easier to read then the GAIM source) I finally figured out that all they were doing was using HTTP to send things. Not very complex at all but really a waste.
So I now have officially logged in through PHP (which I could tell cause it logged me off GAIM) which made me very happy. After doing that I tested if it was using TLS or not which it isn’t which gives me a reasonable shot at actually integrating it straight with Flex instead of needing PHP as a middleman. Not saying there couldn’t be some cool uses for bot and running fake users through PHP, or even just using that for a simple AJAX chat script. Next is the step of actually creating functions out of what I did to make it a lot simpler to create.
But seeing it work makes me a VERY happy person. If anyone has a want to play with a GW Messenger client let me know and I’ll share with you what I have. And once I have it actually all nice and functionalized I’ll let it out there for others to play with.
Here’s the press release ***Updated link***. This is going to be great for us since now it makes it have no cost to develop flex apps.
This will definitely be one of the things in the suite of applications we put together for students to use. I’ll get more in detail on that once we have completely set that in stone.
Adobe has released a alpha version of their Flex Builder for Linux. Don’t have my laptop with me tonight but will definitely grab tomorrow and install and hopefully it will be a nice tool to use on the linux side to create Flex applications.
Once I have some time to play with it I’ll try to put a seminar together to give you guys an intro to it. This will most likely be a second semester seminar.
There is a lot of power over the web gained by Flex and hopefully over the next year we will really begin harvesting it for the university and making lots of spiffy things. If only there were enough play hours in the day
**** UPDATED ****
Well it requires that you have Feisty Fawn so it’s a no go for right now. This could start me on a Java rant but I’ll hold off for now
I saw an interesting blog post today about multitouch displays.
There has been a lot in the news lately (especially about Microsoft Surface) about these but what caught me as neat about this one was that it was written in actionscript. What makes that very interesting is how easy it is to roll out a Flex app to many kiosks with just a simple refresh. Web apps make roll out simple and easy with little to tip the user off (if done properly) that a change has even happened between visits.
Now the one down side to multitouch is that fact that it’s not really out there. But here are a few links discussing how to make yuor own device to accomplish this.
Touchlib – Open source library to power the software side of the touchscreen.
Jeff Han Presentation – Interesting presentation on what can be done in an interface like this.
NUI Group – Lots of info
Building site 1
Building Site 2
Building Site 3
Hope this gives people a look into what could be a neat toy to have in the future. With a lot of the cool desktop features that have popped up with OSX, Vista, and Compiz there coudl be a plethora of new ways to interact with your desktop and help to make things easier to work with. And to overall just look really cool
Recently I have really had a desire to play with Adobe Flex. For those who don’t know what Flex is it’s basically a framework to allow people of a programming mindset to create flash applications. So instead of having to work with timelines, you work with a XML based GUI and Actionscript to make everything work. With this framework it gives me a chance to make some really interesting Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and with the introduction of Adobe AIR these applications can become offline desktop apps.
And best of all the Flex SDK is FREE. The GUI Flex Builder is not free but you do not need it to create an application. Most of the tutorials out there use Flex Builder but it’s not really needed.
So one effect I found extremely cool that I saw when I attended PHP|Tek this last may was in a presentation by Mike Potter about cool things you could do with Flex. There was a interesting live chat application done by Active Media Architects called Activa LiveChat that used PHP in the backend but not through a webserver but by using sockets. This would help remove a lot of the overhead of using a web server to send things back and forth and would help them support more users. Another example Mike displayed (before his Apple died ) was of a book app that used transparencies for replicating a human anatomy book. I had seen something of this effect prior but not as cool as this looked.
So recently I was just searching around to see if there was any examples out there of this effect done in Flex and I came on couple things.
First I found someone who open sourced there implementation for people to use. You can get it here. Check out the Demo to see some cool effects.
Through that site I found another site with even more info. It has this walkthrough which explains the whole process. A great learning tool. Also it has this anatomy demo that I saw at the conference.
Lots of great things to see there. I’m hoping to use this in some projects in the future because it can give a stylish and smooth look to things for us. The ultimate end result will be to use our CMS to generate the content to create the books and allow people to modify pages inside the CMS and easily publish out.