RIA

Maybe I’m missing something here, but why does FlexBuilder generate css styles as “styleName” but suggests auto completions as “style-name” ?   Generated Style   Auto-Complete  

Raghu has announced on his blog that Adobe will give out free Flex Builder licenses to everyone who attends their upcoming Flex Developer event in Bangalore. The dates of the event are still being decided, so if you want to stay informed signup on Raghu’s little flex app … he promises not to spam but trust him at your own risk I’ve been very vocal in the past about the problems Adobe needs to address to help the Flex community grow in India and one of my biggest concerns has been the problems relating to buying Flex Builder in India. Although, those problems still stand, I…

This is slightly off topic, but I just couldn’t help but express my disappointment. Let me start with a quote from an email I just received from iPhone@vodafone.in Thank you for registering for your Apple iPhone 3GTM with us. We are delighted to announce that the iPhone 3G will be available in India from August 22, 2008 It will be available in 8GB & 16GB models, priced at Rs 31,000 and Rs 36,100 respectively. According to today’s rupee-dollar exchange rate that’s $715 for 8GB and $832 for the 16GB model. The email is not very clear if there is a contract involved or not…

Thomas Jung over at SAP Developer Network has posted the details of a workshop he will be leading along with Rich Heilman, Dan McWeeney and Ed Herrmann at the SDN Community Day in Las Vagas. The workshop is aimed at educating developers about the new UI features in the new version of Web Dynpro (SAP’s UI development technology) available in Netweaver 7.0 Enhancement Pack 1, Thomas also posted the below video that shows a preview of these new features that they will be discussing in the workshop. All the new enhancements are exiting, but what really got me charged up was the feature…

Sun Microsystems today announced a preview release of the JavaFX SDK. I’ve been observing this new entrant into the RIA space from the outside but today I thought it was time to dig in a little bit. So I got my hands on the latest Netbeans wit JavaFx support and cooked up this little Hello World application.   Initial thoughts Here are my initial thoughts of the technology .. I will try and share more detailed opinion, once I know the technology a little better .. I don’t particularly like the YAML like declarative syntax for describing UI .. I think XML as used by Flex and…

Jordan Snyder turned more than a few heads at 360Flex when she demoed a lego Mindstorm robot controlled through an AIR interface. Adam Flater took some videos of the 'bot (since named "Nathan") cruising around the eBay campus. Cool stuff, to say the least. Videos of the bot and some more info on this project in the full entry.

ILOG released another preview of the 2.0 version of their charting framework, Elixir, last week. The new release features, among other things: A new Gantt task chart that improves upon the existing 1.0 Gantt chart to cover new use cases. New heatmaps components New OLAP & pivot charts to mimic excel-like pivot charting. Improved flex calendar and numerical indicators components.

It's been all over the blog world today... Google's chrome. Well, it is finally out, and it can be downloaded here.

Google is going to release its own open source web browser called, Google Chrome.

The Rich Web Experience conference is happening this week in Washington D.C. and next week in San Jose. It's going to be a great learning experience!

There is a really, really good interview with Chuck Geschke, one of the two founders of Adobe, in Knowledge@Wharton this week. He goes through a bunch of the history of the company, talks about how Adobe made the transition from PostScript to regular Software, and there are a couple of digs at Microsoft. It’s long but worth the read. Having been an internal employee for a little over a year, I think it gives good context to how and why Adobe does certain things. The interviewer, Kendall Whitehouse, has some additional thoughts worth reading.

Adobe has officially announced the announcement date of Creative Suite 4 (you know it’s a big deal when they announce an announcement). On September 23rd we’ll be unveiling the new stuff and show off the bundles, features, and products that will be included in the next version of Creative Suite. You can register for the special webcast here and see all of the action live. This will be my first Creative Suite launch as an Adobe employee and I’m excited. There’s a ton of great stuff in Flash CS4, Fireworks CS4, and Photoshop/Illustrator that are going to help designers…

I gave a talk at 360|Flex on how to use the new features in LiveCycle Data Services 2.6 to handle online/offline synchronization with your AIR applications. It was probably one of the worst talks I’ve given. For whatever reason I just wasn’t on my game. But I did create a code sample and I’ve got the slides for anyone who wants to jump in and try it out. I highly suggest checking out Christophe’s demo from which I drew a bunch of my inspiration. He’s implemented the functionality in Java while I’ve done it on the ColdFusion side. Hopefully if nothing else…

There’s been a lot of good talk about Google Chrome and what it means for the web. I actually like Chris Messina’s take a lot partly because he’s so enthusiastic, but also because he’s generally right. Mozilla has failed the web in a lot of ways. It’s hard to move things forward when you’re also working through the standards process and a legacy code base doesn’t help. So Google did what Google does. They stepped over everyone else, used some standards where they could, took others that weren’t quite baked yet, and created a browser for the…

Back in July I announced the Flex SEO contest and said I was going to give out some prizes based on certain rules. The goal was to find out what tricks were needed to make Flex applications searchable. There was a bit of ambiguity to the rules but in general my goal was to figure out a way to make it so that specific content was exposed to Google. Because it’s kind of pointless to index an actual application, I was mostly concerned with content. What if I wanted to build a word processor (like Buzzword) and expose specific documents? What if I want to create a storefront and expose…

This presentation from David Heinemeier Hansson is a great presentation for people who want to make money from their rich Internet application. Share and annotate your videos with Omnisio! Via CNET.

Convos is a recent Flex application that provides an easy way for people to manage groups and subscriptions. Like Google Groups, Convos allows users to create online groups with their own email address. Once logged in, users can easily see messages, to do items, calendar events, photos and more from each of the groups that they subscribe to. I like the central spot for all group notifications - when you login you can easily see all the messages for all the groups that you belong to, same with the to do items, notes, photos etc... I also love the clear pricing scheme for users and groups - not…

Emmy Huang, product manager for Flash Player, has posted a blog entry that details the number of daily downloads and installs of Flash Player. As expected, the numbers are really, really big. "In July 2008, successful downloads averaged about 33 million per day, and successful installs averaged around 18 million per day." The latest number from Microsoft (that they give publicly) for Silverlight downloads is from April of this year, when they were averaging 1.5 million per day. Its probably worthwhile to look at the numbers for the Olympics recently and compare those to the number of installs…

USA Today has a cool RIA built with Flash that follows the polls in the US presidential race, state by state and for the entire country. The application provides historical results for each poll, and also graphs them over time to see how the race is changing. This is a nice, simple application that displays a lot of information in a format that is meaningful and intuitive. Not an easy thing to do.

Dave at PXL Designs has a blog post about a new Flex project they just launched called Peek-a-boo Paperie. The Flex application allows new parents, like me, to build custom baby announcements. The application allows new parents to upload photos of their new baby boy or girl, and then customize the baby announcement with details of the newborn. The invitations are then printed and sent to the new parents. Pricing is reasonable, ranging from $1.85 per card to $1.20 per card, depending on how many you order. If you're a new parent or parent to be, check out the application and build your own…

Yesterday I was playing around with Google Chrome. Yes, it is a very simple UI and I love this. One of my comments at the IE8 roundtable in Berlin was that I would like to get all the options and configuration dialogs replaced by a HTML page inside the browser (similar to about:config). Well, when playing with the history search which looks really cool I noticed that Google crawls all my content. It doesn’t matter if you are using http or https. As you can see in the screen capture above I have searched for richard and Google shows me some content from a mail in Google Mail I got from…

Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier. One box for everything Type in the address bar and get suggestions for both search and web pages. Thumbnails of your top sites Access your favorite pages instantly with lightning speed from any new tab. Shortcuts for your apps Get desktop shortcuts to launch your favorite web applications. Learn about Google Chrome »

Google has announced their own Web browser called Google Chrome, the Browser War 2.0 has been started. Here are some useful links: Google Chrome home address will be http://www.google.com/chrome (currently returning http error 404) Google post about Google Chrome at their blog Wikipedia Google Chrome Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project (Philipp Lenssen) Google Chrome Comic (Google) Google Chrome Process Manager (John Resig) Screenshots of Google Chome with Google Gears, more screenshots Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows about Google Chrome Dethroning Microsoft or killing off…

Yesterday Google announced that they are working on a own Web browser. The first beta version will be available for Windows today in more than 100 countires, Mac and Linux versions are coming soon. An official starting point could be http://www.google.com/chrome as it returns an http error 404 instead of a simple redirect to the Google search. While writing a lot about missing features in Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 I’m very happy that Google will introduce their new browser as open source browser, Google Chrome. There is a comic available that gives you some information. We're hard at work…

I will collect some of my thoughts about the current beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8 I have noticed during IE8 community roundtable last week: Address Bar and Searching Since months I’m using a great Firefox feature that I still miss in Internet Explorer 8 (beta 2): the searchable address bar. With the current beta of Internet Explorer Microsoft introduce several groups inside the auto-complete suggestion. The entered text will now be searched in the history, in your favorites, feeds,… and using your registered search providers. With last Internet Explorer versions it was only possible to…

Areez Gangji, an intern here at Adobe, has written an article about the top 10 Flex and AIR applications for students. The article covers such great applications as Timetoast, Craig's List Desktop, Adobe's own Acrobat.com and more. Read the article, and if you're interested, help Digg it up.

The team at PHP Architect have recently announced a new course for Flex and PHP training. The course is split into 7 units and lasts 19 hours, covering everything that a PHP developer needs to know to get up to speed with Flex, including an introduction to Flex and Flex components, and how your Flex application talks to PHP. There's also a session on Adobe AIR, and extending your PHP applications to the desktop. Developers taking the course will get a first hand look at Flex - the actual application delivering the material was recently rewritten with Flex. As well, the August issue of PHP…

Adobe is looking for Adobe Student Reps for RIAs. Adobe Student Reps receive community recognition, speaking opportunities in some Adobe sponsored events, access to Adobe resources (presentation slides, information posters, contact with AIR and Flex team) and some funding available for approved events. If you are a passionate about RIAs and willing to help your classmates to know more about RIA technologies, you should consider joining this program. This is a great opportunity to get to know the Adobe team and to network with other reps. The application form is available here. Note that you…

A new round of specs are posted on the Gumbo site. Check out the revised Gumbo Component Architecture whitepaper, the Gumbo Skinning overview, along with specs on the Range, Track Base, Slider, Spinner, and Numeric Stepper classes.

We are very pleased that Flex 3 has won Best Open Source developer tool for RIAs as part of InfoWorld's Best of Open Source Software Awards. Help us continue to be the best by staying connected on the Flex Open Source site and contributing in the various ways we have listed.

Many thanks to those who made it out to the CD2 users group meeting last night and checked out my presentation. After a bit of pizza and soda, we got started and covered a lot of ground. I think we had a good discussion afterwards. It was great. As promised, I thought I would share the presentation notes. Here they are in PDF and Keynote formats. Enjoy. Many many thanks to the organizers of CD2, Anthony, Corey, Sandra, David, etc… I was very happy to be invited to speak! Hopefully this weekend, I’ll get a chance to post the reading list as promised. This week has taken a toll on…

In the ever growing trend of Moo card mania (most recently Aral Balkan and David Stone), I bought some of the pint sized beauties. I’ll be handing them out at the CD2UG meeting. They feature customized mini prints of my CoolerKreator compositions. Come one, come all (but please RSVP, here). Take a look… Hope to see you there!

A few months ago, I was interviewed by a local TV station for a tech interest segment on mashups. I spoke with Tim McGinnis, the reporter featured in this clip and really had a good time. It was a short piece, but I still really enjoyed getting my couple minutes on the tube. My wife’s grandfather, (now 90!), saw me and immediately called her. The call went something like this: Grandpa:“Chad’s on TV!” Renee:“Yeah, we just saw that. Pretty cool, huh?” Grandpa:“What the hell was he talking about?” Renee:“I have no idea, either.” I…

Bradley is back in session. I have two classes I’m teaching this semester, so it’s going to be a busy one. MM365 – Designing with Web Standards, this is one I have taught for 3 years now. It’s focused around CSS, XHTML and some simple JS, with an emphasis on using best practives and writing markup that validates. It’s a great class and one that serves the students pretty well. After that on Tuesdays, I am very happy to teach my MM491 – Mashups and RIAs class… This is going to be great. I have a group of students I will be helping to learn Flex, AJAX and using…

Though many of you may have seen this already, I would be remiss in not showing the rest of the readers here this amazing new interface concept from Adaptive Path and The Mozilla Labs. Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo. This video was released a couple of weeks ago and represents some key concepts that are sure to come to fruition sooner rather than later. The fact that the browser serves as the primary user interface that is interacted with in the system is pretty similar to how many users are just now working with their PCs today. This trend is sure to continue with the move…

There is a really, really good interview with Chuck Geschke, one of the two founders of Adobe, in Knowledge@Wharton this week. He goes through a bunch of the history of the company, talks about how Adobe made the transition from PostScript to regular Software, and there are a couple of digs at Microsoft. It’s long but worth the read. Having been an internal employee for a little over a year, I think it gives good context to how and why Adobe does certain things. The interviewer, Kendall Whitehouse, has some additional thoughts worth reading.

Adobe has officially announced the announcement date of Creative Suite 4 (you know it’s a big deal when they announce an announcement). On September 23rd we’ll be unveiling the new stuff and show off the bundles, features, and products that will be included in the next version of Creative Suite. You can register for the special webcast here and see all of the action live. This will be my first Creative Suite launch as an Adobe employee and I’m excited. There’s a ton of great stuff in Flash CS4, Fireworks CS4, and Photoshop/Illustrator that are going to help designers…

I gave a talk at 360|Flex on how to use the new features in LiveCycle Data Services 2.6 to handle online/offline synchronization with your AIR applications. It was probably one of the worst talks I’ve given. For whatever reason I just wasn’t on my game. But I did create a code sample and I’ve got the slides for anyone who wants to jump in and try it out. I highly suggest checking out Christophe’s demo from which I drew a bunch of my inspiration. He’s implemented the functionality in Java while I’ve done it on the ColdFusion side. Hopefully if nothing else…

There’s been a lot of good talk about Google Chrome and what it means for the web. I actually like Chris Messina’s take a lot partly because he’s so enthusiastic, but also because he’s generally right. Mozilla has failed the web in a lot of ways. It’s hard to move things forward when you’re also working through the standards process and a legacy code base doesn’t help. So Google did what Google does. They stepped over everyone else, used some standards where they could, took others that weren’t quite baked yet, and created a browser for the…

Back in July I announced the Flex SEO contest and said I was going to give out some prizes based on certain rules. The goal was to find out what tricks were needed to make Flex applications searchable. There was a bit of ambiguity to the rules but in general my goal was to figure out a way to make it so that specific content was exposed to Google. Because it’s kind of pointless to index an actual application, I was mostly concerned with content. What if I wanted to build a word processor (like Buzzword) and expose specific documents? What if I want to create a storefront and expose…

I spent the afternoon playing around with Google Gears in order to get a basic feel for how it works. Specifically, I wanted to see how much work it would take to add support for offline viewing for tostring.org (an online book site). I used the Gears LocalServer API which “allows a web application to cache and serve its HTTP resources locally, without a network connection”. The implementation can be though of as a small web server that intercepts requests for remote resources and serves them (seamlessly) from a local cache. This has a couple of advantages: Can access content…

I have been playing around with the jQuery Autocomplete plugin to get it working with the ActionScript 3 documentation API that I posted about earlier today. The Autocomplete API is really nice, and pretty flexible, but one issue I ran into is that the query argument containing the user input that is passed to the server is hard coded to “q”. For my api, I needed this argument to be “api”. The fix is actually pretty simple, although it does require a slight modification to the jquery.autocomplete.js file. Here is a diff that shows the change for the AutoComplete…

I have just uploaded a new ActionScript 3 reference / online documentation API to Google App Engine. Basically, the service takes an ActionScript 3 class name (or a fragment of a class name) and returns the URL for the online documentation for the specified class. For example: http://as3reference.appspot.com/getapi?version=flex3&api=String returns: {"items" [ {"path" "String.html" "name" "String"} {"path" "mx\/utils\/StringUtil.html" "name" "StringUtil"} {"path"…

I have just created a new Firefox Ubiquity plugin command named “fyi”. The command makes it super simple to email info about a web page to anyone. I wrote the command because I am often finding myself forwarding URLs to friends and co-workers. This is normally much more tedious than it needs to be, involving the following steps: Copy the URL from the browser Switch to mail client Create new Email Paste URL into the email body Switch back to the browser Copy the post title Switch back to email Paste the title as the subject Switch back to the browser Copy a snippet from the page…

One of the cool things about FXG is that it works with Flex data-binding just as your would expect it to. Below is a simple example (which requires Flash Player 10 RC), followed the code, that shows data-binding with FXG and Flex 4: As you can see, there are still some bugs in the rendering, but that is to be expected as these are very early Flex 4 builds. Source <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:Application xmlns:mx="library:adobe/flex/halo" xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" xmlns:gumbo="library:adobe/flex/gumbo"…

The following example shows how you can use an embedded font with the Flex LinkButton control by setting the fontFamily and fontWeight styles. The LinkButton control uses a bold font weight by default, so you need to either embed the bold font weight, or set the LinkButton control’s fontWeight style to normal. Full code after the jump. (more…)

The following example shows how you can embed an icon in the Flex LinkButton control by setting the icon style. Full code after the jump. (more…)

The following example shows how you can set the corner radius on a Flex LinkButton control by setting the cornerRadius style. Full code after the jump. (more…)

In a previous example, “Setting the roll over color on a LinkButton control in Flex”, we saw how you can set the roll over color on a Flex LinkButton control by setting the rollOverColor style. The following example shows how you can set the selection (mouse down) color on a Flex LinkButton control by setting the selectionColor style. Full code after the jump. (more…)

The following example shows how you can set the roll over color on a Flex LinkButton control by setting the rollOverColor style. Full code after the jump. (more…)

I've had my iPhone for about a month now, so I thought I'd chime in with the rest of the iPhone reviews flooding cyberspace. I've been reading about the various problems people have been having and I've got to say...

I started a whole new career path in November 2004 when I joined the Flex Support team at Macromedia. In the 3+ years since, I have answered a lot (and I mean, a lot) of questions from Adobe customers....

Adobe Reader 9 adds new capabilities, better performance and stronger security. Here are the highlights: Improved launch speeds Looking for faster launch speeds? Adobe has enhanced general performance and, in particular, has reduced launch times with Adobe Reader 9. Try...

Please visit the MAX NA Experience site: http://max.adobe.com/na/experience/ It is a 100% Flash based website with interactive landscapes (click the background). The backgrounds were created by several of the best digital design agencies on the planet. If you can figure...

itemEditor,itemRenderer The previous article in this series discussed item editing events. Using events can make your application respond to what the user enters and help the user make fewer mistakes. This article is about using itemRenderers as itemEditors - one...

Fall conference season starts for me next week with Office 2.0 in San Francisco. With one post conference organizer Ismael Ghalimi started a blog avalanche and Dennis Howlett, Zoli Erdos, Vinnie Mirchandani and Susan Scrupski provide a long list of reasons why you shouldn’t miss this event. However there is one more reason to attend. I will do the first public presentation of Genesis (code-name of the product I have been working on for the last 9 months) and talk about the motivation for the project, the upcoming pilot and our roadmap. I truly believe Genesis has the potential to change…

SAP TechEd is only two weeks away and I am proud that Adobe once again is the main sponsor of the RIA Hacker Night this year. Last year Mark Finnern and I were sitting in the courtyard of SAP Labs in Palo Alto and discussed ideas for new TechEd activities Adobe could sponsor. We thought why not rent a hotel suite in Vegas, order some pizza and do some serious hacking. Well it turned out a suite would have been to small and Craig Cmehil took the lead in setting up a great event. This year Hacker Night will be even bigger and better. So I thought we need T-Shirts and a mascot. Since we did not…

Guy Kawasaki’s new venture Alltop collects popular Blogs and categorizes them. It makes it very easy to stay up to date on a wide area of topics like Social Media, Marketing, Enterprise IT, Food and Wine (some of my favorites). Yesterday Alltop launched the category Rich Internet Applications. It includes great resources on RIA and specifically Flex and AIR development, like the blogs from Ryan Stewart, Mike Chambers and Peter Ent. Check it out! P.S.: Yes, this humble little Blog is included as well.

Wordl is a nifty tool to create word clouds from text or del.ici.ous tags. Here is my del.ici.ous cloud…

Just found this good article on ReadWriteWeb about Flex and AIR usage for enterprise applications. Specifically interesting since I have been pushing this topic for the last 3 years with a special focus on the SAP ecosystem. Today there are many companies using Flex and/or AIR to make enterprise apps user friendly and engaging (Philips, Fender, SAP and many more) and that number is rising fast. With SAP’s announcement to enable embedding of Flex applications in their WebDynpro UI framework we will see a further surge of Flex adoption in the enterprise. To learn more visit SAP TechEd…

It seems a common challenge for smaller service industry software shops & agencies is scheduling. If you are spending too much of your resources attempting to get new work, you may be neglecting your current customers’. If you spend no resources on getting new work, you’ll have some down time with no money coming in. Obviously the ideal is to end one job on Friday and start the next on Monday. This is even harder if you’re an independent. July this year was particularly dry for work, but August quickly made up for the dry spell and then, before I knew it, I was…

…now with 200% more “typically”! I was originally scheduled to speak about Making Bling with Flex at the 360Flex conference here in Atlanta. I then got the flu, learned I needed to have an organ removed at the emergency room, and missed the entire conference. Doug & Juan filled in for me. Days later after the surgery, upon regaining some semblance of consciousness, I received “get well” cards signed by the Flex community from the conference (thanks for mailing, Leif!). I was so bummed about missing the conference; I always get to meet new people and some…

Here I am in Flash CS3, coding AS3 on the timeline with a few Document classes here and there for sanity on an insane deadline. While waiting for my source control to download (someone apparently checked in the WHOLE internet), I figured I’d blog about an interesting observation I came across this week. I’ve been working with traditional software developers and receiving assets from Flash Designers for integration into a big Flash site. We had problems with a particular file awhile ago, and since I’m usually the guy who fixes stuff, I opened it up to see what’s wrong.

I’m using Gaia , the framework for Adobe Flash , for one of my projects. As a n00b, I’ve screwed up my site.xml a few times since I didn’t read the manual. Gaia 2.2 helps a tad in that regard by now validating your site.xml before it goes about scaffolding the whole thing wrong. Having to delete all of the scaffolded classes and FLA’s for a new project 5 times because I’m a moron was frustrating. Another thing that’s nice is Steven finally put event metadata tags on classes, including on some interfaces. Since I code mostly in Flex Builder , I can actually…

Two Directory Source Control is a work flow where you utilize one directory from source control, one directory that you work out of, and you then shuttle between them at your convenience. In this article, I’ll describe how traditional work flows work, the problems with them, and how you can use the Two Directory option to overcome them. This article assumes you know what source control is, what a merging tool is, and the value they bring to your work flow. Traditional Source Control Work Flows Many tools such as Flex Builder , Flash , and Visual Studio have plug ins that allow…

For those of you who don’t know who Tinic is, he is one of the masterminds behind the Flash Player. He and the rest of the development team are responsible for all of the cool new features coming in Flash Player 10. Tinic’s blog is a mandatory addition to your RSS reader as it is chock full of detailed information straight from the Flash team. In Tinic’s latest post he dispels a lot the myths behind some critic’s attacks on Flash Player performance. He also gives some excellent advice for Flash developers on things they can do to limit the amount of resources that…

I just finished uploading a new tutorial that shows you the basics of getting started with Pixel Bender. This can be scary for people who don’t have a background in pixel shader programming (i.e. me). Over the last few days I have finally figured out enough to be able to record a tutorial on it. This is part 1 of 2 and it shows you how to create a couple of simple filters. Part 2 will show you how to export and load those filters into your Flash movies. Check it out at http://www.gotoandlearn.com. Lee

Today I spent a few hours getting up to speed with Pixel Bender. It definitely has a steep learning curve but it is well worth the effort. Below you can check out my first creation called SquarePattern for lack of a better word. This filter essentially samples the current pixel as well as a different pixel and averages them out. Which pixel is dependent on the amount parameter. The result is a kind of crosshatch effect. I was actually really excited earlier because I created a cool blur effect but I couldn’t export it to Flash because you can’t use for loops if the filter will be…

That’s right we will be officially announcing the 4th version of the Creative Suite on September 23rd. Now before you get the wrong idea, this is NOT the release date but rather our official unveiling of it. You can register to view a special web broadcast that will take place on the 23rd. I highly recommend you check it out if you want to learn more. Get plenty of sleep now as you will have more new toys than you’ll know what to do with very soon. Lee

Here is another class that I wrote thanks to this old tutorial. This is similar to the Arc class except that it draws wedges instead. These are great for doing lightweight charting stuff. You can get the code at my Google Code repository. The example below rapidly animates new wedge shapes creating a cool effect. You can click on the image below to check it out. Below is the source code for the above example: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 import com.leebrimelow.drawing.; import com.leebrimelow.utils.;   var…

I think I can finally say I got something published! Gordon Smith and I contributed to the first issue of Flex Authority, a new magazine (made of actual paper!) that focuses on Flex and AIR. We hope to be regular contributors. The link to find out more is: http://www.flex-authority.com/. Buy your subscription today. We won't make any money from it, but this post is to thank them for working with us and to help them get the word out so they can make some money.

Today I presented more information about the Marshall Plan at the 360Flex conference in San Jose. The PowerPoint presentation can be downloaded here. Download Presentation There is a series of demos in the presentation. The code and source are linked below. To get the third child to load you will need to download zoomer.swf and copy it to a server somewhere and fix the URL that loads it Zoomer is a simple app that has a rectangle you drag around and it will magnify the area under the rectangle. The demo shows how it needs to be modified for being loaded by a main application in different…

Some folks seem to be in need of an itemEditor in the DataGrid that can popup or float over the DataGrid. The DataGrid currently limits the editor to fit within its size and if you need more space than that, you'll need to popup an editor. It is tricky to do so because of a bug in DataGrid plus the complexities of focus handlng and how it is normally used to end the edit session. Here's a workaround for the bug and my take on how to create popup editors. Usual caveats apply. Download Source Run Example

Several folks have been asking about how to have a DataGrid ItemEditor with two input fields (say you want to separately edit first name and last name or something like that). It's a bit tricky because of some missing pieces in the underlying Flash focus APIs and because of how Focus events work. Here is my take on how to do it. Usual caveats apply (i.e, code is not supported and may have bugs etc). Download Source Run Example

While most of my colleagues are busy working on Flex 4, a few of us have been working on something we're calling the "Marshall Plan". Most of you won't ever need it, but some really important customers do. If you want to make a Flex Portal, or have the kind of application where it is impractical to update all of the SWFs that make up the application to the latest version, or if you just have a lot of time on your hands, then the following link might be of interest to you. The Marshall Plan

Survive campus life with these apps: organize your notes, connect with others, edit your photos, tame your media, and share your documents.

Write your own external itemRenderers in Flex.

Get a quick summary of what is included.

Use Grails to connect a Flex application with a Java server application.

Use inline itemRenderers to give your lists a custom look.

Bask in the glow of helping your fellow developers during O\'Reilly\'s contest, and you might win some great prizes too.

Get an overview of the functionality of the Salesbuilder application

Use Dreamweaver CS3 to create a simple, custom-chrome Adoeb AIR application.

Meet Benjamin Dobler, picked for his knowledge of Flex and AIR and contributions to the RIA developer community.

Meet Benjamin Dobler, picked for his knowledge of Flex and AIR and contributions to the RIA developer community.

This past Thursday the ASP.NET MVC feature team published a new "Preview 5" release of the ASP.NET MVC framework.  You can download the new release here.  This "Preview 5" release works with both .NET 3.5 and the recently released .NET 3.5 SP1.  It can also now be used with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as (the free) Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 edition (which now supports both class library and web application projects). Preview 5 includes a bunch of new features and refinements (these build on the additions in "Preview 4").  You…

I've received a number of (very nice) emails recently asking if I was ok - since my blog has been silent the last few weeks (and much of the summer).  Just to address people's concerns - I'm alive and well. :-)  I've just been on vacation the last 6 weeks, and have unfortunately not had free time to post (I've been changing a lot of diapers).  I am still on vacation another week before I officially return to work.  I did get a chance to write up a quick post this weekend that covers some of the new ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 features, though, that will hopefully provide some…

The ASP.NET MVC team is in the final stages of finishing up a new "Preview 4" release that they hope to ship later this week.  The Preview 3 release focused on finishing up a lot of the underlying core APIs and extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC.  Starting with Preview 4 this week you'll start to see more and more higher level features begin to appear that build on top of the core foundation and add nice productivity. There are a bunch of new features and capabilities in this new build - so much in fact that I decided I needed two posts to cover them all.  This first…

Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released today.  You can download both Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools support to target it here. Beta2 adds a lot of new features (more details below), but is still a 4.6 MB download that takes less than 10 seconds to install on a machine.  It does not require the .NET Framework or any other software to be installed for it to work, and all features work cross-browser on both Mac and Windows machines.  These features will also be supported on Linux via the Moonlight 2 release. Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live…

Last week I blogged about the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 release.  One important thing I forgot to mention about this release is that you can now use it with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition.  The SP1 release of Visual Web Developer 2008 Express adds support for both class library projects as well as web application projects (previously only web site projects could be used with it).  This new support is useful in itself, as well as in enabling both ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight project support with VWD Express.  If you install…

Earlier this year I wrote my thoughts on the current mobile scene and what troubles certain players more than others.  I made the assertion that Android will face the same troubles that Windows Mobile is challenged with.  That being that Google/Android are providing a platform and not a physical device.  I think it would be hard to argue that owning the complete platform and hardware is not a good idea.  Apple’s complete control of every aspect of the channel provides them with the ability to deliver in a somewhat more reliable fashion (except for the fact that Contacts suck and their…

I first saw the accelerators (the artists formerly known as activities) during The Code Trip, when Woody created an IE8 activity for Wikipedia.  It was a convenient tool to have in your right-click toolbox on IE and I loved it (and still do). Well, now that IE8 Beta 2 is out, I decided (well, my selfishness decided) that I should create an activity accelerator for something that I use often so I introduce you to: IE8 Accelerator for TinyURL.  So with a little XML, it was done.  Seriously, like < 5 minutes.  I ran into one problem with URL encoding, but Kevin at TinyURL fixed his end to…

A new (and great) idea has been making its way across the country.  It’s called Startup Weekend.  What is it?  From their site: Have you ever wondered what a group of highly talented and motivated people could accomplish in a weekend? Could they start a company from concept to completion? Startup Weekend answers that question and more. A unique three-day experience, Startup Weekend brings the best and brightest people together in a local office space to select the concept, break into teams, and develop the product, marketing and revenue model.  Occurring in cities across the world,…

Had enough media players, games, and animated shapes with Silverlight?  How about integrating into some line of business applications?  Microsoft produces an application called Microsoft CRM, now in it’s 4th release (those closer to the CRM information can correct me if I’m wrong…I’m actually not too familiar with the roadmap/releases of CRM).  What is CRM?  What you’d expect, a customer relationship management system…define your use of those systems as you wish.  There are many CRM systems out there, but what struck me as interesting about MS CRM is based on a demonstration…

A while back I pondered doing a “live” debug session with people who were/are working with Silverlight 2 and data access via services, etc.  I really like a live concept because it allows people to ask real questions and feels more conversational than a one-way presentation.  After some consideration, I’m not sure I could quite guarantee the environment I was looking for to accomplish this type of style. So as a second best, I’ve set up a webcast: Troubleshooting Silverlight Data Access.  I hope to keep the question channel open during the webcast though and answer as many…

Currently, Expression Blend does not have a scissor tool which allows you to cut shapes like you can in Expression Design. Instead, what you do have are geometric operations that allow you to not only achieve a similar result as “cutting a shape” but...(read more)

In Blend you use the Pen tool to draw lines and they appear in the XAML as <Path> elements. But after you’ve drawn your lines and you test your application, the Paths appear immediately: they don’t replay the gestures you used to create...(read more)

A few months ago, we asked you for feedback on what are some of the things you would like to see improved in Expression Blend. You all had a lot of great suggestions...A LOT. If you are interested in helping us both implement some of the feedback but...(read more)

To address many of the issues you all had with the PhotoZoom functionality, we have released an updated preview version of Deep Zoom Composer. You can download the updated version from the following link: Download Deep Zoom Composer Be sure to uninstall...(read more)

A few hours ago, we released another update to Deep Zoom Composer. Click on the link below to download it: Download Deep Zoom Composer Some of the major new features outside of the usual bug, performance, and stability changes include Panoramic Stitching...(read more)

We're happy — no, ecstatic — to announce that GWT 1.5 is now officially released and available for download. Download GWT 1.5 GWT 1.5 delivers what we think are an impressive number of improvements, about four hundred issues if you're counting. We're also happy that one of those is issue 168, our most-requested feature, Support for Java 5. We've blogged about several of the new features already. Now that it's official, let's recap and expand the list a bit... Java 5 language support and enhanced JRE emulation You can now use Java generics to add clarity and type safety to your…

We're happy to say that the first Release Candidates for the Google API Libraries for Google Web Toolkit are now ready to be taken for a test drive. The project is a collection of libraries that provide Java language bindings and API specific plumbing for some Google JavaScript APIs. The goal is to make it easy for developers to use these JavaScript APIs with GWT. Libraries available at this time include a new version of Gears, as well as new libraries for Gadgets and the Google AJAX Search API. Gears 1.1 Library (Release Candidate) A new version of the Gears library is available. In addition…

The second release candidate of GWT 1.5 is available for download now. Thanks to everyone who started using GWT 1.5 RC1 and shared feedback. With your help, we're very near the end of the big GWT 1.5 development cycle. If you haven't already, now would be a great time to start upgrading your project to take advantage of all the new features and great performance gains in GWT 1.5. Enjoy!

Suppose you're happily using JSNI to call bits of handwritten JavaScript from within your GWT module. It works well, but JSNI only works at the level of individual methods. Some integration scenarios require you to more deeply intertwine JavaScript and Java objects — DOM and JSON programming are two good examples — and so what we really want is a way to interact directly with JavaScript objects from our Java source code. In other words, we want JavaScript objects that look like Java objects when we're coding. GWT 1.5 introduces JavaScript overlay types to make it easy to integrate…

Google has recently launched Google Health, a place where you can organize health information, keep it up to date and stay current with the latest health issues. We're happy to say that Google Health was built with the Google Web Toolkit, and pleased to have Samantha Lemonnier from the Health team share her experience using GWT. Google Health started to pick up speed around the time I first joined Google. A few of us had whipped up a prototype in our 20% time. GWT naturally came into the picture as we tried to decide what we would use to build our client infrastructure: hand-written…

Deep-linking is important. It’s what makes the web so … webby. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen tells us that Deep Linking is Good Linking, and hypertext pioneer Doug Engelbart encourages us to make “Every Object Addressable.” With the old-web, deep-linking was easy because everything was a page and every page had a URL. In the new RIA web however, a complex web app can fit into a single page, and without some careful programming, we lose the ability to bookmark or share objects and places inside the app. To get deep-linking in an RIA, we need to store the link info in the…

Today we launched an interesting experiment here at Appcelerator and I’m curious to see how it plays out. Certain technologies are such that description is a poor substitute for personal experience (think Tivo or iPod).  This is often the feedback we receive from people who decide to build something with our Appcelerator RIA + SOA platform (e.g. “wow, this is so friggin elegant!”).  But the investment that someone must make to achieve that epiphany is non-trivial because they must step back to grasp basic Appcelerator concepts like our message-oriented architecture and our…

The intent of this message is to provide a little clarification to those wanting to write their own Appcelerator backend (Service Broker). Appcelerator Service (server side) and Message (client side) Brokers use a simple, standard JSON protocol to send and respond to messages. Data is posted to the server via an Ajax request and the Service Broker first parses the request to find messages, which are mapped to some service handler, function, or method via the type (name) of the message. Next the Service Broker delegates the message to the handler to finish its computation and returns the…

Problem Definition Are you considering integrating a bunch of web services together but may not feel too comfortable with the vulnerabilities of a mash-up approach, the overhead of setting up and using an ESB, or writing a bunch of mind numbing spilling crushing service transformation code? If thats what you want then, yeah sure that would work for a problem definition. How does it do it? The java:axis2 plugin (an appcelerator plugin) installs an appcelerator command that can be run either silently or prompt for input to generate and build axis2 stubs from your WSDL url. Once the stubs have…

It’s the GUI stupid! Many years ago, I consulted for a large semi-conductor company during the early stages of a software project. They had a highly detailed and fairly rigid process for software projects that started with a complete requirements document based on an extremely verbose and granular template. As the project progressed and I saw the size of the document balloon from 50 pages to more than 200 pages, I had the realization that this document would never be read by ANYONE from beginning to end. The business owners who were responsible for ensuring that the requirements fit…

In part one of this series I showed you how to set up a loading image, including an animated spinner gif. In this part I'll show you how use a screenshot or poster frame to speed up page loading. Quicktime...

You may have heard that JavaSE 6 update 10 is supposed to improve the experience of applets. You may have even seen the demos of dragging and dropping applets out of the webbrowser, but there's a lot more to it...

The initial JavaFX Preview SDK release has gone pretty well. There were a few snafus and broken links, but overall it has gone pretty smoothly for a first preview release. As we plan our next steps I thought I'd ask...

Whew! Our launch of the JavaFX Preview SDK yesterday went pretty well. Only a few broken links which have since been fixed. After waking up at 5:30 am to turn on the new sites I spent most of the day...

I'm happy to announce that we have released the first preview version of the JavaFX SDK. Head over to JavaFX.com to check it out. We've all been working very hard on it for the last few months, so it's quite...

In the JFX Custom Nodes category of this blog, graphics designer Mark Dingman of Malden Labs and I have been collaborating on an imaginary Sound Beans application. This category contains a growing series of posts in which we are demonstrating how to create JavaFX UI custom controls.  This series also provide a case study in how a graphics designer and an application developer can work together effectively in developing JavaFX applications.  Today I'd like to highlight the recent Google Chrome browser announcement by showing you how to create and run a JavaFX applet in Chrome.  Here's a…

I've featured Silveira Neto's JavaFX work (play?) in a couple of recent posts, and it appears that he's had gaming on his mind lately.  Silveira is a CS student, CEJUG member and Sun Campus Ambassador at Federal University of Ceará. His latest creation, shown above, is a game in which the player tries to vacuum up the dirty clouds with a sphere-shaped cleaner.  It demonstrates several techniques in JavaFX, such as creating a side-scrolling game, capturing keyboard input, and ascertaining when a graphical object intersects with a pixel in another graphical object.  You can see…

As I announced in the TableNode: Creating a Custom Scrollable Table Component in JavaFX post, there is (now was) an Ask the Experts: JavaFX Preview, on August 18-22, 2008.  Several developers took advantage of this opportunity to pose questions to Joshua Marinacci, Martin Brehovsky, and Lawrence McDonough of the JavaFX engineering team. Take a look at the transcript if you'd like to learn more about the JavaFX SDK Preview from their answers.  Please leave a comment if you missed this opportunity to ask questions, and I'll try to answer your questions or redirect them to people who…

Many of you know that Danny Coward is the Chief Architect of Sun's Client Software (Java SE, Java ME and JavaFX).  In his August 19, 2008 blog post, Danny stops just short of breaking out into a Rogers and Hammerstein song while reciting some of his favorite things about the JavaFX SDK Preview. Enjoy! Jim WeaverJavaFXpert.com

In July 2008 I started the JFX Custom Nodes category that contains a growing series of posts in which a graphics designer (Mark Dingman of Malden Labs) and I are collaborating on an imaginary Sound Beans application.  The objectives of building this application are to demonstrate how to create JavaFX custom nodes, and to provide a case study in how a graphics designer and an application developer can work together effectively in developing JavaFX applications.  The first post in this series, Rolling Your Own JavaFX "Custom Nodes": A Graphical Menu Example, shows you how to…

Last year at JavaPolis Bruce Eckel, Christoph Rooms, and I did a keynote about Flex. That talk has been posted on Parleys.com (which btw is an awesome Flex app!). You can watch it there, in their Adobe AIR application, or right here using the new Parleys.com Share (beta) widget. If you have any problems watching it here please let me know or file a bug. Thanks! BTW: You can click on the video to swap the video and slides.

A podcast I recently did with Chariot Solutions has just been published. Let me know what you think.

A friend of mine recently asked me to help him troubleshoot some performance problems with his Flex application. In his scenario he had a large list of data and wanted to filter the data such that each time the search string grew by a character the complex filter would only be run on the results of the previous filter. A very simple approach to this is just to keep a record in each item indicating if the item matched the filter for each search string. Even though the filter function will still run for each item, the complex part of the filter function could easily be isolated and only run for…

It appears the Flash Player engineering team is making progress on 64-bit Linux support. There are no details yet on when this will ship. But I’m sure they could still use your help.

Intuit has been using Flex in some very exciting ways recently. One of those is to use Flex as a developer SDK for QuickBase. This allows developers to easily build a great user interface on top of the solid and in-the-cloud back-end of QuickBase. You can find out more about this in the QuickBase Developer Program. A few weeks ago I presented to developers in the QuickBase Developer Program about making Flex applications look and feel great by adding effects and by skinning components. Intuit has allowed me to repost that presentation here. Let me know what you think.

Chrome, the new Google browser, was released a couple of days ago as a beta version for Windows Vista/XP and officially entered the browser war, currently dominated by Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Chrome offers many interesting features, aimed at making the browsing experience more robust, more secure, and faster. I was especially interested in the new V8 JavaScript engine, with its just-in-time compiler and a full-fledged garbage collector. We tested Lightstreamer on Chrome soon after its release, and the results were amazing, as all the Comet demos worked seamlessly out…

HTTP Channels is the proposed Comet protocol for leveraging the semantics of HTTP REST for subscribing to resources and receiving resource/data modification notifications and closely integrates with HTTP. HTTP Channels is most obviously expressed in the MIME-style format used by HTTP, however the MIME format is not necessarily the easiest format to work with, particularly in JavaScript. Fortunately the semantics of REST notifications can easily be expressed in JSON format, which is very easy to parse and handle in the JavaScript environment. This proposed resource modification based…

Performance of a rich internet application (RIA) can manifest itself in a number of ways, such as responsiveness of user interaction and speed of rendering. This article is a follow-up to Performance of Grids for Streaming Data and covers Firefox 3. These tests all use Liberator as a source of data and use three implementations of grids: A simple HTML table using SL4B for real time data. The Caplin Grid using SL4B for real time data. This grid is part of the Caplin Trader product and is designed specifically for financial trading applications. A Flex grid using a native RTTP (connection to…

Oracle has announced a new version of WebLogic with Bayeux support. Developers from BEA contributed efforts towards defining the Bayeux protocol, and it’s great to see them ship this update to WebLogic. They also have a tutorial available, Using the HTTP Publish-Subscribe Server, providing detailed information for WebLogic users.

ItsNat is a new Java web framework with Comet capabilities. In this article we’re going to see how ItsNat fits in the ecosystem of Comet technologies, and how ItsNat works and provides support for Comet. When Dylan Schiemann invited me to write for Comet Daily I thought: “What can I contribute to Comet Daily?” I’m not involved in client-side technologies (e.g. Dojo) because I’m a supporter of server centric development so I don’t have experience with Comet oriented servers typically controlled by JavaScript code in the browser (Lightstreamer, Caplin,…

The Summer of Code is over; where did the time go? Demo The final demo is available at http://jbalogh.dojotoolkit.org/dojo-svn/release/dojo/soc/test.html There isn't anything new visually. In the last stretch I: added documentation, cleaned up the code, fixed some little bugs As Peter suggested, I moved each of my classes to a separate file, and then I wrote an overview of how it all works. taught the Canvas how to populate itself from a JSON string In the last blog, I mentioned that the Canvas can export it's current state to an array of objects, which can then be turned into JSON. Now the…

This morning I had the pleasure of running our `build_release` script for the first time, and am proud to announce the availability of the first cut of the much-anticipated 1.2.0 release. Secretly, I tried to do it on a holiday (yesterday), but had to nurse the script a little due to internal ops changes regarding svn locations. So without further ado, I give you: Dojo 1.2.0 beta1 Please, everyone grab a copy, drop it in your existing apps and do some serious regression testing. Some things have changed, though we strive for backwards compatibility, so if you hit any bumps by just dropping it…

Dojo 1.2 will sport a nice API standardization for widgets. Widget.attr() is now the standard interface for setting/getting all widget attributes. For example: // set title myTitlePane.attr('title', 'hello world'); // find out if button is disabled var dis = myButton.attr('disabled'); // set to the current date myDateTextBox.attr('value', new Date()); It also supports a hash API like dojo.attr(), for setting multiple attributes: myInput.attr({ tabIndex: 3, disabled: true, value: 'hi'}); Notes for widget developers: The first thing to think about as a widget developer is that all the…

Hi dojoers, I am sure you got question what the heck is Dojo Furniture! Is Dojo changing its profession from javascript framework to furniture wholesaler? Well allow me to explain about it! Since my project proposal, I promised to give many things from code library, documentation and couple tests but *hrmmmm* something missing... then