Ginormous

Lee will be speaking at the London Flash Platform Users Group

Bluetube Interactive is sponsoring Lee Sylvester, who will be speaking at the London Flash Platform Users Group, his subject matter - Haxe.  He will be giving away two copies of the book he co-authored  with Franco Ponticelli -  Professional Haxe  and Neko

Agenda  (from the lfpug.com website)

Part 1 - What is haXe and what will it do for Flash developers? (19:00 - 20:00)
- What can haXe do?
- How does haXe differ from ActionScript
- Why should Flash developers embrace haXe

Part 2 - Expanding your skills with haXe; more for nothing (20:15 - 21:15)
- How Flash developers can target other platforms
- Building full cross platform apps
- Painless multiuser apps
- Integration with Flash/Flex including haXe built SWCs

Prizes for the free raffle
2 copies of Professional haXe and Neko donated by Lee McColl Sylvester.

Sponsored by Bluetube Interactive.

When/Where
Date: 29th January 2009 (29/01/2009)
Time: 19:00 - 23:00 (doors open at 18:30)
Venue: CosmoBar, 50-54 Clerkenwell Road, EC1M 5PS (click for map)
Tube: Barbican/Farringdon

You need to register and sign-up if you wish to attend and be entered into the raffle. You can sign-up in the sidebar on the right of the front page or at the bottom of the post here. Please do not sign-up if you don’t plan to attend. You cannot win unless you attend the event.

This adds to Lee's recent public engagements and we are very excited to see his column in upcoming issues of  Flex & Flash Developers Magazine.

Cheers
Grant

Enterprise Architect with source control

I was using Enterprise Architect for years without proper source control, we just checked in the whole EA file, which was akward amongst a group of developers.  Last year I had to figure out how to do it properly and without any good tutorals it was a bit cumbersome the first time.  It works very well with SVN or CVS and the bigg bonus is that your packages are under source control rather than the whole EA file so different architects can work in different packages at the same time.

I noticed the is actually now a small flash video / capture that explains it and will make things easier for people doing it today.

Flex SDK builds

I haven't been keeping an eye on the latest flex sdk builds but probably should.

Deep Linking with SWF Address and URL format

So we are on another project that needs deep linking, and trying to decide on the format of the urls.  We use SWFAddress and create a proxy for it in pureMVC which is fairly easy.  The format of the URL and query string parameters is what we seem to spend a lot of time dwelling on.

One of our other projects uses a simple token relationship since it is flex module based where the name of the module and the parameters it needs are sent in the url

e.g

http://www.somesite.com/content.html#/thepageName/moduleName/moduleArgument

so if we had a link to the home page, needed to tell the video module the video to play and the news module to show headlines it would be :

http://www.somesitecom/content.html#/home/videoModule/http://somestreamingsite.com/videoid=12345/NewsModule/show=headline

its works but its not like traditional query string style urls like we are used to in basic server based apps.

Our new projects needs to be able to provide the current page, the currently 'focused' item and arguments to other items so we are considering

http://www.somesite.com/content.html#/home&focus=video&videoId=124&someotherThing=456&anotherone=789

its a bit more typical query string style.  I'm not married to any particular style but would at least like to decide on one and then be consistent across projects, I'd love to see how others have handled more complex deep linking with swf Address. The requirements for us are

• provide a "page" in the deep link
• provide arguments to specific modules or components for that page
• allow components on the stage to get multiple arguments and not just one, e.g. the url to the video, should it auto play, should it go full screen ?
• provide a focus for the page, i.e. the video module has focus if the page is complex and you should be able to state the item with focus on the page

I welcome discussion on this topic

Sql lite admin for air

We have an upcoming Adobe Air based project and we need to user sql lite for some of the data, I like the look of this tool for creating the tables and will be checking it out shortly : Sql Lite Admin for Air

Startup Manager for pureMVC

I wrote an asset loader in actionscript 2 with John Grden and Chris Allen called fling that was the begining of flash for spring.  Of course we got too busy and it stayed as an asset loader, which I actually used in many projects.  In Actionscript 3 I've used a bulk loader that is now on Google code with success but I have to jump through a few hoops to make it work with PureMVC.  Along comes a new utility for PureMVC called the Startup Manager that manages proxies and the status and dependencies of loaded assets.  I haven't dug into it enough yet to see how deep it goes, for example it doesn't encapsulate the asset loaders required to load different types of assets like bulk loaders do, but maybe these things can be added over time.  I'll be using it for our sites portfolio component so once its ready, post my findings.

1/22/09 - update

So I've implemented it in our Portfolio project, so far I like it but it doesn't address a complete startup.  What we do is we parse our portfolio.xml that has links, images, projects descriptions etc.  Once its loaded that, it needs to load the thumbnails for projects and then if someone selects a project it loads the full size images.  So what I need to do is load all the thumbs so they are "ready" but defer loading of the large images until needed.  The startup manager helps in terms of making the AssetLoaderProxy dependent on the SiteXMLDataProxy, however we still need a bulk loader to actually load the graphical assets.  Once I finish and get a solution I like, I'll post the results, but i'd like to see the startup manager include some extensions for asset loading.

pureMVC code generator

I've always griped about having to write a lot of code for pureMVC, don't get me wrong I absolutely love the framework and find it much better than Cairngorm which we did years of work with, however I do hate all the boilerplate code you have to create.  The ANT based PureMVCgen by Greg Jastrab looks like it may help and I plan on checking this out soon.  Greg has also provided a tutorial here

Flex 3 Cookbook

I have always been a fan of the cookbook style books for developers, and I already own the AS3 Cookbook, but recently picked up the Flex 3 cookbook, I especially like their coverage of item renderers and was almost annoyed to read their solution to switching renderers at runtime was there in glorious detail when a year ago I had to fight to figure that out myself with the skimpy flex documentation :)

Components

I was impressed to see the iLog Elix components which should save developers a bunch of time when creating dashboards and analytical tools, as a previous wrestler of the the buggy flex charting components I'll be looking at this when we build our next dashboard.

Complementary for .net based development, component art release their new charting components and WebGauge set, I must say these look extremely polished and slightly more attractive that the iLog Elix flex counterparts.

Tour De Flex

I've always enjoyed having the flex component explorer for quick examples of how to use flex components, especially when using a component you don't use much.  I was looking for it the other evening when looking for some examples on the Tile container and ran accross the new Flex explorer, Tour De Flex The thing I especially like about this version is the fact its an Air application and has an eclipse plugin that can be installed from the Tour De Flex update site via the eclipse update facility.