This is my first post in a couple of months, I’ve really been slacking on my blog.. Primarly becuase I spent most of July and August finishing up my last work term @ Adobe, they kept me busy creating a portal system that will be used internally to help manage releases of one of there products. I also was presenting a Flex 101 session at the Flex camp that happened here in Ottawa on August 24th.

Now I’m back in school and finishing up my final year at Carleton University in Ottawa. This is already proving to be a tough year but I’m going to do my best to keep up with my blog. In the mean time below are some pictures and youtube videos of my presentation at Flex Camp Ottawa.

Click here for some photos of the event

Introductions to Rich Internet Applications

Introduction to Flex

Flex Builder, deploying Applications to the browser and the Desktop with AIR

OpenScreen Project

With this release, the AIR runtime has gone global:
- The runtime has been translated into ten additional languages: Japanese, French, German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese.
- The AIR APIs and file formats have been updated to enable AIR-based applications to be localized
- International keyboard input is fully supported
- AIR 1.1 is GB18030 certified

Additionally, a new certificate migration feature is available which allows developers to migrate their applications between different digital signing certificates. 

Get your copy of AIR 1.1

In order to use the new functionality there are a few steps that must be followed first. Matt Chotin has written an article outlining these steps.

FunFX is an test framework for functional testing of Flex applications. It’s open-source and leverages Ruby for writing testcases. I haven’t given it a try yet but I thought I would blog about it as it looks like a great resource for creating Automated testcases.

The framework is the result of a master thesis at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Justin Everett-Church recently released some new details about the new RTMFP protocol that can be used with Flash Player 10. RTMFP stands for Real Time Media Flow Protocol and is going to be used to leverage the new peer to peer capabilities of Flash Player 10. The communication between peers is going to be managed by a future Adobe server technology (Flash Media Server 4.0???) which will keep a list of peers that can be connected to. If one peer want to connect to another, the server translates the peer IDs to a network addresses, and also assists in setting up the connection if one or both ends is behind a Network Address Translation (NAT) device. RTMFP is a UDP-based protocol and packets are sent directly from one Flash Player to another!

Some pretty exciting stuff to look forward to! I can think of a couple cool applications that could be built using this technology!

At the Flex camp in Toronto Last month Mike Potter gave a presentation on How to Promote Your Flex and AIR applications. In the presentation he examines and provides advice on how to promote to Communities, Blogs, at Events and Offical Adobe Programs. This is a great resource if you’ve got a new application that you want the world to know about : )

You can check out the slides from the presentation Here

Today I was trying to create a DataGridColumn Item renderer that would set the background color based on the data in the column. Usually this is a simple thing to do, you would just created and ItemRenderer that extends Label and then set the background color to whatever you want.

The problem I ran into was that my data was Hierarchical, and when you create an Item renderer that extends Label for Hierarchical data you lose the “Parent” “Child” indentation for each leaf node. After messing around for a bit I found a solution which I thought I would share.

Inside the ItemRenderer you have access to a item called listData which is of type AdvancedDataGridListData. This object has a property called indent which refers to the actual number of pixels this item should be indented based on its position in the tree. To set the indentation for the text inside the label all you have to do it create a variable which is bound to the paddingLeft property of the Label. Then inside the updateDisplayList method set the variable to the indent property passed in from the AdvancedDataGridListData.

Pretty simple solution. Would love to know if anyone has solved this problem another way!

Lee Brimelow has released a video tutorial that shows you how to create content for the Flash Player 10 beta which was released last week. As of right now there is no tools available to author Flash 10 content but you can download the latest command-line MXMLC compiler to get started creating content. In this tutorial he also shows you how to do that as well as some of the new features.

View Video Tutorial

Recently I tried to set up a Java backend with Tomcat 6.0 to use with Flex. I have to say that I ran into a few problems that caused me a bit of a headache, so I thought I would share my solution to hopefully help anyone else who might have this problem.

If you are looking to create a Java backend with the Database wizard that comes with Flex Builder you will need to install the Web Tool Platform (WTP) plugin for Eclipse. WTP contains various tools for developing Web and J2EE applications.

The problem I ran into was locating this plugin inside the “Find updates” feature of FB. Unfortunetly the WTP plugin is called something else so I was searching around for the words WTP only to realize that it’s not present in the list of addons and features that comes up. What your actually looking for is the “Web and J2EE Development” features which includes the Web Standard Tools (WST) and the Java Standard Tools (JST) which from my understanding are two of the main components of the WTP.

Here are the steps to install WTP in Flex Builder

1. Select Help > Software Updates > Find and Install > Search for new features to install

2. Check the Europa and Eclipse Project depots

3. Under Europa Discovery Site select the “Web and J2EE Development”

4. Click the Select required button to include all the dependent features for the install

Hope this helps someone!

Poll Everywhere - Is a SMS voting system for US cellular phone customers.  You can sign up for an account and have Poll Everywhere host your SMS vote contests.  Prices are anywhere from free, to over $300 per month.  The voting display is done using Flex and Flex charting options.  For Canada, LiveVote.ca is a similar solution.  LiveVote only works in Canada, and Poll Everywhere only works for US cell phone customers.