For instance, I always have Action Script Language Reference, Wikipedia, some library API site(s), Gmail and a dozen other ones open + the debug version of the app at hand.

So what used to happen when you but a breakpoint in Flex Builder with all these tabs? They would be unavailable and any process happening inside of them could not be relied on. Since not all code runs well on first attempt, if the app crashed while testing ( think 3D, data intensive apps, etc.) the browser and all the tabs went down with it.

My solution so far was to use Firefox as a development browser and Safari ( since I'm Mac based ) as a browser for references and everything else. For crashing resolution, Firefox has a nice "Restore" option but it's not fun waiting for 15 tabs to reload.

So Google Chrome recently came out for Mac. It didn't impress me on Vista so I didn't care much. I guess I was in between of curious and bored so I decided to give it a spin.

What a pleasant surprise to see every tab running in a different process. My workflow feels so much better now that I'm not afraid that a bad line of code is going to take down my whole browser.

I've heard that IE8 also runs tabs as different processes but I'm not crazy about returning to development on Windows. I did try out Chrome on Windows 7 as a result of the Mac test and all the issues I've seen the first time around have been addressed. Kudos to Chrome development team.

Let's not forget to mention all the features that are missing on Google Chrome for Mac, primarily the lack of Bookmark Management, but Google Bookmarks or any online bookmarking service will do for now.

I can not wait to see more development being done on Google Chrome for Mac and it getting out of beta. I will not uninstall Firefox anytime soon but as a Flex developer I give Google Chrome for Mac high scores for beta.

Related posts:

1. Why Chrome OS is the Future of Netbooks
2. How much Excel can we get in Flex?
3. Using Adobe Flex Builder 3 on a Mac

We've been building a lot of mapping/GIS data visualization applications over the last few months, mostly using flex with various back end services (ArcGIS, google and yahoo maps, open source mapping frameworks.) One of the more fun little projects was putting together this flex widget for displaying maps and graphical data together on a timeline. It's meant to be distributable so that anyone with a blog can display it. We put it together using presidential election data and national debt, not because we thought the correlation was particularly significant, but because the data was available going back a long time. The widget is pretty flexible; it can go against a local data source or a web service, and we can easily modify it to show different kinds of data. We'll be coming out with a few more of these over the next few months, hopefully with some more 3D maps, drill down on geographic level, as well as more charting and other visualizations. If you'd like to use this one, or have ideas for other data sets and visualizations you'd like to see, let us know.

Related posts:

1. Flex Camp Chicago ‘09 Community Showcase Presentation Summary
2. Pathfinder Launches Beer Hunter, A New Flex + Ruby RIA
3. Flare on PureMVC in Flex example

The other day, I was trying to get the icon for a button in flex programmatically for a FlexUnit test. The code I was testing set the icon of a button using setStyle('icon', ICON). I attempted the obvious button.getStyle('icon') in the test, but was surprised that this always returned null.

A little bit of digging revealed that the I needed to go through the style declaration for the button. When changing my test to assert on button.styleDeclaration.getStyle('icon'), I was able to successfully access the icon.

I found this a bit non-intuitive, but fortunately it only involved some investigation and minimal code changes.

Related posts:

1. Using Flex Code Generator (FCG) with Flex & PureMVC
2. Flex Camp Chicago ‘09 Community Showcase Presentation Summary
3. Skinning Flex with Illustrator CS3

I'm skeptical that the tools assume a rigid and defined workflow between design and development, which would make them useless for building applications in an agile iterative manner. Perhaps the format necessitated it, but each of the online tutorials I went through assumed that the front end interface would be completely finished graphically before any coding started. This is just not the case in any projects I have worked on. In reality, design iterates along with development. It evolves as new requirements are uncovered. Catalyst does maintain a dynamic link to its source PSD or IA files, and therefore conceivably designers could iterate on those files as developers are working on application logic. But I get the sense that Catalyst wasn't created with that workflow in mind, and using it for iterative design/development would lead to major inefficiencies.

I hope to use it more as I have time, and hopefully get it involved soon as a prototyping tool on an upcoming project. Then I'll learn some more about its strengths and weaknesses. I've only spent about an hour total on it as of this writing, so I'm not expert, but these were just my first impressions. Feel free to let me know what you think.

Related Services: Flex, Flash and Air, Custom Software Development

Related posts:

1. Performance Optimization for Flash Player
2. Pathfinder releases version 1 of its Flash Platform microsite (codename Mica)
3. Skinning Flex with Illustrator CS3

We just published a case study on a Hedge Fund Analytics application developed in Flex. It's an extensible Flex based platform for real time analysis of hedge fund performance data, with dynamically updating charts, graphs and sophisticated filters for cumulative performance, return distribution, alpha, beta and correlations, commissions and fees, credit and sector exposure.

The system is designed as a modular platform which can consume data services from multiple sources, and can integrate multiple custom components. Custom components were designed to conform to a standard API. Components expose standard flex component properties and events so that properties and method references could be passed. This allowed individual dashboard applications to be built, fed data and customized at run time. Take a look at a video demo or read the longer case study on the Pathfinder site.

Hedge Fund Analytics

Related posts:

1. Flex Camp Chicago ‘09 Community Showcase Presentation Summary
2. Pathfinder Launches Beer Hunter, A New Flex + Ruby RIA
3. Google Analytics Tracking Component for Flash Platform

Before anything else said, Axiis is a brand new framework so I have to give it some credit if all the bells and whistles are not there. What intrigued me about it in the first place is that Axiis is heavily relying on Degrafa, a well proven declarative graphics framework that I have a lot of good experience with.

After looking at Axiis examples, here are my first impressions of how it stands against Flare.

Firstly, they are both open source. Needless to say, this goes a long way.

Axiis, unlike Flare, is solely Flex based because of its reliance on Degrafa. Not that I'm crazy about doing data visualization projects in Flash, but it is a good feeling to have options.

Axiis code looks better structured and organized - at a first glance. While it is a little bit tricky to organize Flare code, I have made it a standard to use it in conjuction with PureMVC, (my favorite MVC framework) and that setup makes it much easier to deal with Flare code. Code in Flare examples looked scary at best when I saw it the first time. Axiis code in the examples they provided is mostly neat MXML, but there is only so much of MXML per component that I'm willing to look at. My guess is that combining it with an MVC framework and AS3 would be a nice thing for me to try and see how that workflow looks like.

Flare was not quick to jump into in my experience, but well worth the trouble. Jumping into Axiis with previous knowledge of Degrafa took a really short time. Although there is example code for Flare, I didn't learn a lot from it because of the very different coding style from what I generally do. I learned most about it from forums, fidgeting with classes and somewhat reading through the source code. Axiis example code is clear as day and a ready source for your first Axiis project.

What rocked my world about Flare to begin with were the layout transitions and how well they performed with larger data sets. I haven't seen that in Axiis examples. I'm not sure if I should care about transitions that much but I think that it is not to ignore when it comes to interactive data visualizations. Performance testing is the first thing I'm going to pay attention to when it comes to Axiis.

So at the end I will do a prototype in Axiis to see how is it to work with and how well it performs. It definitely seems very promising but I'm not going to drop Flare anytime soon.

What will be hard to top about Flare is that I keep finding new ways to do things with it and new wonderful expressions made possible with its endless flexibility.

Related posts:

1. Flare on PureMVC in Flex example
2. Flex Camp Chicago ‘09 Community Showcase Presentation Summary
3. Data visualization and the art of conveying information

photo credit: Paul L. Nettles

We're starting a software development summer internship in our Chicago office this year. If you're a college junior, senior or recent graduate who want to learn the agile/OO development ropes while developing really cool products and services and earning $20/hr per hour (you should pay for the privilege, right?), give the internship posting a look here.

Related posts:

1. Ruby on Rails Internship
2. Google Summer of Code 2008
3. Software Development and Wasted Motion

There's more information in the case study on the Pathfinder web site, Sasha has written a related post on RubyAMF and Flex from the Flex perspective , and Justin has written one on Rails, AMF and Flex from the Rails perspective.

Related posts:

1. Flex Camp Chicago ‘09 Community Showcase Presentation Summary
2. Pathfinder releases version 1 of its Flash Platform microsite (codename Mica)
3. Rails, AMF and Flex

I recently had an issue in flex where I needed the click event for a component in an ItemRenderer to not bubble up to the parent list. Since the click event was being dispatched by Flex SDK code, I could not directly do this by passing false into the event's constructor. I had hoped to find a property I could set on the object, something like "clickBubbles", which I could set which would accomplish this.

Either that property doesn't exist or I could not find it. My solution was to basically hijack the event and send an impersonator in its place.

What I ended up doing was writing an event listener function which would stop propagation on the event. It would then dispatch another event with the same properties as the original, except it would set bubbles to false. This will prevent the event from bubbling up to parent components, but still allow event listeners to be added to the component itself.

The following is the function I wrote:

 
private function removeMouseEventBubble(event:MouseEvent):void {
	// if the event already does not bubble, we don't
	// need to do anything.
	// also, this will prevent any infinite loops from occurring
	if (event.bubbles) {
		// stop the event from being handled by other code
		event.stopImmediatePropagation();
 
		// dispatch a new event which does not bubble
		event.target.dispatchEvent(
			new MouseEvent(
				event.type, false, event.cancelable,
				event.localX, event.localY,
				event.relatedObject,
				event.ctrlKey, event.altKey,
				event.shiftKey, event.buttonDown,
				event.delta
			)
		);
	}
}
 

Now, all you need to do is set the click handler on the component:

 
<components:Foo click="removeMouseEventBubble(event)"/>
 

In order to make sure that this code prevented the original event from propagating and to ensure that it dispatched a similar event which does not bubble, I wrote the following FlexUnit test. N.B. This code is adapted from an actual test, I wouldn't recommend having the code under test defined in the test case itself, nor do I like the fact that the removeMouseEventBubble function is being added in the test.

 
public function testShouldRemoveBubbleOnClickButAllowEventListenersToStillFire():void {
	var component:UIComponent = new UIComponent();
	component.addEventListener(
		MouseEvent.CLICK, removeMouseEventBubble
	);
 
	// if we cannot add other event listeners, then the
	// async function will not get fired and the test will fail.
	component.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, addAsync(
		function(event:MouseEvent):void {
			assertFalse(event.bubbles);
 
			// assert that the event was translated properly
			assertEquals(MouseEvent.CLICK, event.type);
			assertTrue(event.cancelable);
			assertEquals(8, event.localX);
			assertEquals(9, event.localY);
			assertEquals(renderer, event.relatedObject);
			assertTrue(event.ctrlKey);
			assertTrue(event.altKey);
			assertTrue(event.shiftKey);
			assertTrue(event.buttonDown);
			assertEquals(5, event.delta);
		}, 1000)
	);
 
	component.dispatchEvent(
		new MouseEvent(
			MouseEvent.CLICK, true, true, 8,
			9, renderer, true, true, true, true, 5
		)
	);
}
 

I then wrote a test to verify that the event did not bubble up to the parent:

 
public function testShouldNotBubbleClickEventToParent():void {
	var parent:UIComponent = new UIComponent();
	parent.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK,
		function(event:MouseEvent):void {
			// this won't cause the test to fail per say,
			// but it will cause an exception to be thrown
			// and this will show up when executing the
			// test.  This will fail the build, especially
			// if run on a CI server like hudson or cruise.
			fail('did not expect event to bubble');
		}
	);
 
	var child:UIComponent = new UIComponent();
	child.addEventListener(
		MouseEvent.CLICK, removeMouseEventBubble
	);
	parent.addChild(child);
 
	child.dispatchEvent(new MouseEvent(MouseEvent.CLICK));
}
 

This solution works, but I was hoping there was something more elegant and less hacky which accomplished the same thing.

Related posts:

1. Notification Testing with PureMVC and FlexUnit
2. Grails: Custom Parent/Child Aware Tags
3. Mouse wheel (scroll) Event in Flash Player running on a Mac

We recently launched a new Touch Screen Kiosk deployed in both Adobe Air and Flex. Touch Screen Kiosks pose some interesting usability challenges, some of which overlap with those for the iPhone. Take a look at a video demo or read the longer case study on the Pathfinder site.

Touch Screen Kiosk Demo

Related posts:

1. Adobe “Open Screen” is not “Open Source”
2. the iPhone and Touch screen technology
3. Hedge Fund Analytics in Flex

Having learned a long time ago the value of automated testing tools like Selenium, jMeter, and soapUI, I'm always on the lookout for new improvements in these tools. While I love Selenium and other frameworks like it, it has the limitation of not being able to test Flash/Flex/Silverlight or Java Applets. But if you need to test flash and silverlight components of your web app, in an automated way, the  iMacros testing tool might be worth checking out.

No Free Ride

While the free version of the iMacros plugins for InternetExplorer and Firefox allow powerful web scripting similar to Selenium, to be able to do the flash/flex and silverlight, you have to get the paid version or the 30-day trial. I downloaded the trial version to see how it compares to Selenium and what kind of damage I could to.

Going through some of the online demos, I saw you can actually do an image comparison to assert that something is visible in flash, and even have the test click on that part of the app.  The process involved taking a screen shot of the app, grabbing the section you want to use as the target, and then specifiying if you want the script to just assert that section is contained with in the app, or if you want it to also click on it.

I  followed the example to create a test that opened up a flash swf file and navigated through the app, asserting that certain image sections, like buttons and instructional messages appeared in the flash app. While the process wasn't that hard, I could see how it would be brittle as the tests would break whenever slight changes to the graphics happened.

One possible way to defend against brittle tests is to share the image assets that make up a flash app and its assertions between the flash designer and the tester. If the testing person has the access to the source code and images that make up the app, the script could refer to 'start_button.png' from the source tree, and even if the designer updates that file, the test will still pass.

You don't have to use the image detection to drive the script, you can just have it click on things according to their position, but the image detection was more interesting to me,  and I noticed that if you resized your window, the positional detection would be incorrect.

Feeding the script with User Data

One of the stand out features is having the script prompt the user for input, which I think could be extremely powerful when using the test as a data generator.  One of the ways that I've found to encourage Selenium adoption on a new project is to set up the tests so that they automate the most common tasks, and help developers and the BA/QA team generate test data to aide their manual testing.  With Selenium that required that we put some extra components into the iframe, to let the user select values that would be used within the script. I've also used selenium in the past as a way to automate certain personal tasks like filling out online surveys, or reconfiguring my stupid motorola router after a power failure, and I could see the prompting feature of iMacros making those scripts easier to create.

iMacros also lets you feed a script with a .csv file, and have it loop over and repeat for each row, which can be a good way to seed some test data in an app, while putting it under a bit of load. (Not sure how to best have two iMacros scripts going against one server like I used to with Selenium, but I bet its possible)

Iopus, the company that makes iMacros, is actively encouraging a community to share common scripts, and includes several good examples of their own, one which fires off searches against multiple sites, after prompting you for a search term.  (which I plan to create my own to blast searches against my favorite online classified sites like craigslist, oodle,  googlebase, kijiji,  listpic, and ebay)

Overall, I would say compared to Selenium, iMacros is:

• Slightly less intuitive to me in terms of syntax, assertions, and scripting capabilities
• Capable of working in Firefox and InternetExplorer
• Loaded with great examples, documentation and video tutorials
• Similar to the Selenium IDE interface for recording, editing, and  rerunning tests
• Designed with user interaction in mind (easy to record, prompting for user input, csv import)
• Taking web scripting to the next level with powerful  data extraction capabilities

Stuff I didn't look into yet

• Integrating the tests into the Continuous Integration build with either Cruise or Hudson
• How to use the Data extraction capabilities
• Invoking Javascript from the test
• Having the script take  a screenshot on failure
• Invoking the test script from  Java  or Ruby
• Drag & Drop Ajax
• Stepping through the debugger
• Firing off multiple sessions

No matter which tool you choose, having some level of automated functional and UI tests is critical. It saves everyone on the team time on menial and repetitive tasks, can be a great way for new people to learn the app, provides a suite of smoke tests you can run throughout the development cycle, and it can help you free up your QA resources to focus on higher value goals.

And what about you?

1. How do you test flash/flex/siverlight/java Applets in your apps?
2. Is there anything that Selenium can't do for you? (Other than Flash/Flex, Selenium has always been able to do what I need)
3. What parts of your UI testing have you been able to automate? (And what's your next goal?)

What do you think you could do with iMacros? Could you use it to help your Business team be more efficient? (Post a challenge, we'll see if we can tackle it with iMacros or Selenium)

Related posts:

1. Ajax Testing: Doubling Down with Selenium and JMeter
2. Skinning Flex with Illustrator CS3
3. Flash/Flex physics engines and examples

One of the nice extensions available for FlexUnit is the ability to easily unit test event behavior using EventfulTestCase.

This library has support for testing Cairngorm, but unfortunately support is lacking for PureMVC. I searched for existing solutions which added PureMVC notification support, but was not satisfied with their APIs. Luckily, it was not difficult to write some code to support PureMVC which mirrored the API of EventfulTestCase.

The code at the end of this post is a start at duplicating the EventfulTestCase behavior. It doesn't have all the functionality, but it is enough for simple tests.

Here are the methods which are made available:

• expectNotification(notificationName:String) Sets up the expectation that a notification is sent with the passed name. Can be called multiple times to set the expectation for multiple notifications.
• assertExpectedNotificationsOccurred(userMessage='') Asserts that all expected notifications were sent. The userMessage parameter indicates an optional message to be prepended for a failure message.
• lastActualNotification Property which represents the last notification which was sent (the last actual notification).

The following is an example of the kind of test you can write:

 
public class ChuckProxyTest extends PureMvcTestCase
{
    private var chuck:ChuckProxy = new ChuckProxy();
 
    public function testShouldSendFlashNotificationWhenSeeingTerrorist():void
    {
        var terrorist:Terrorist = new Terrorist();
        expectNotification(ApplicationFacade.FLASHED);
 
        chuck.lookAt(terrorist);
 
        // asserts FLASHED notification was sent
        assertExpectedNotificationsOccurred();
        // asserts notification body was the terrorist
        assertEquals(terrorist, lastActualNotification.getBody());
    }
}
 

Finally, here is the code. Notice the package; you will need to add it to test/org/puremvc/as3/test.

 
package org.puremvc.as3.test
{
    import flexunit.framework.AssertionFailedError;
    import flexunit.framework.TestCase;
 
    import org.puremvc.as3.core.View;
    import org.puremvc.as3.interfaces.INotification;
    import org.puremvc.as3.patterns.observer.Observer;
 
    public class PureMvcTestCase extends TestCase
    {
 
        private var expectedNotificationNames:Array = [];
        private var actualNotifications:Array = [];
 
        public function PureMvcTestCase(methodName:String=null)
        {
            super(methodName);
        }
 
        protected function expectNotification(notificationName:String):void
        {
            assertNotNull('No instance exists for View.getInstance()', View.getInstance());
            expectedNotificationNames.push(notificationName);
 
            View.getInstance().registerObserver(notificationName, new Observer(
                function(notification:INotification):void {
                    actualNotifications.push(notification);
                },
                null));
        }
 
        protected function get lastActualNotification():INotification
        {
            if (actualNotifications.length == 0) {
                return null;
            }
            return actualNotifications[actualNotifications.length - 1];
        }
 
        protected function assertExpectedNotificationsOccurred(userMessage='The expected notifications were not sent'):void
        {
            var actualNotificationNames:Array = [];
 
            for(var notificationIndex:int = 0; notificationIndex < actualNotifications.length; notificationIndex++) {
                actualNotificationNames.push(actualNotifications[notificationIndex].getName());
            }
 
            assertArraysEqual(expectedNotificationNames, actualNotificationNames, userMessage);
        }
 
        protected function assertArraysEqual(expected:Array, actual:Array, userMessage:String = null):void
        {
            var equal:Boolean = (expected.length == actual.length);
 
            if (equal) {
                for(var i:int = 0; i < actualNotifications.length; i++) {
                    if (expected[i] != actual[i]) {
                        equal = false;
                        break;
                    }
                }
            }
 
            if (!equal) {
                if (userMessage &amp;&amp; userMessage.length > 0) {
                    userMessage += ' - ';
                }
 
                throw new AssertionFailedError(userMessage + 'Expected: <' + expected + '> but was: <' + actual + '>');
            }
        }
    }
}
 

Related posts:

1. Using Flex Code Generator (FCG) with Flex & PureMVC
2. Flare on PureMVC in Flex example
3. Learning PureMVC the Hard Way (is there any other way?)

Optimizing Flash performance is certainly the most boring part of Flash Platform development but it's a cornerstone without which you, the Flex developer, can not do without.

An app is worth nothing unless you provide that effortless flow of interaction at all times.

There is not too much information on this topic as it is not the most interesting one but here are some simple guidelines that have helped me tremendously over the time, as well as a few great papers.

Firstly, one simple rule: Don't try to do too much at the same time. As a RIA developer, figure our a way to engage the user usefully while you spread out the workload so the app doesn't choke. Remember, we are dealing with people. People don't need to have something done faster for 14 milliseconds, they need to know what's going on.

Second simple rule. I know we are all developing on flying fortresses of computers because we need a lot of juice in development. But start testing early on a crappy machine. Not that your end user will necessarily have a crappy machine but it will show tell-tell signs of where the app might need some improvement.

Than for Flex Builder users, do use the Profiler. The more you use it, the more it will make sense and after a while you will start seeing some really useful information that you might have not found out about otherwise.

Other than that, read these articles. They really helped me a lot to understand the way Flash Player works and plan accordingly in the shortest time.


Optimizing Flex Application by David Coletta

David makes a great point: designating between improving actual performance vs. perceived performance. That point is worth gold. Also provides excellent examples/solutions for particular problems.


Garbage Collection from Alex’s Flex Closet

Hardcore nuts and bolts of garbage collection. Look for the link to ppt.


ActionScript 3 Performance Tuning by Matt Chotin

A great overview of what Flash Player does with your code.


Some Actionscript 3.0 Optimizations by Dennis Ippel

Apart from some really nice examples, there is a list of references for Flash optimization at the bottom of the post.


And at the end, seeing is beliveing. Try these suggestions and see for yourself what makes a difference.

Related posts:

1. Flash Player on iPhone gossip
2. Mouse wheel (scroll) Event in Flash Player running on a Mac
3. Flash Technology vs. Flash Developer

Now we have a new player in Flash Remoting arena - ZendAMF. Why should anybody care when AMFPHP was just fine?

A few reasons.

1. First of all, both come from Wade Arnold, who has provided the Flash community with these custom tailored, top shelf, free, Flash Remoting systems.
As far as I’ve noticed, Wade is putting his time now in ZendAMF which is a tell-tell sign to begin with.

2. I really like the custom class mapping in ZendAMF. It offers quite some flexibility in comparison to AMFPHP. Options are explained (options - wow!) under "3.2.4. Typed Objects".

Of the three approaches, I personally prefer the setClassMap method in the bootstrap file because it provides me with a single point of reference.

3. It's a part of a PHP MVC framework called Zend. Not that I have tried it out much so far, but it sounds appealing that there is a MVC framework that you can rely on behind this.

4. Once you get through all the quirks, it is really easy to set up. The major issue that I had was making PHP files always processed as PHP5 which is necessary for the Zend Framework to run.

I didn't know that at the time so I was cursing away but eventually I found this little line for .htaccess file that did just that:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Otherwise, Zend setup is easy as pie and you can read about it here.

5. Lastly, Adobe supports it. Sure sounds good.

Here are also some video tutorials that might be useful to start with:

Zend_Amf-classmapping

Getting Started with Zend AMF (Zend_Amf) - Part One

I'm curious to hear opinions about ZendAMF as I'm about to adopt it as a standard in production.

Related posts:

1. Google learns to crawl Flash
2. Flash Technology vs. Flash Developer
3. Performance Optimization for Flash Player

Spreadsheets are necessary because people use them because they know how to use them. It is a straight forward interface that can yield good in high complexity situations.

Now most people want to use them online. And luckily there are plenty to go around.

EditGrid , Expresso , ThinkFree , Zoho and Google Docs to name a few. So why build another one in Flex?

Integration, for first. It would be much easier for Flex developers and cheaper for Flex shops to have a component or an API to handle this task easier and faster.

Further, interaction design is very important for user efficiency and you can do a lot there to improve on a vanilla spreadsheet. If the actual spreadsheet wasn't based on Flash Platform, how would you as a Flex Developer handle the interaction development, if possible at all?

So we need them and we need the in Flex too. There is something cooking in this area too.

Idubee has claims to be working on it, but there example link was not working when I was checking them out. I will be back to see if that changes.

Rouge Development does have a working example, albeit a not very complex one. But - it's working good and it's a step in the right direction.

blist which is in beta suprised with their level of detail. It has a very nice amount of functions and plenty of examples and templates which is a victory in itself. I just opened an account and will be checking them out more.

If you know any Flash/Flex based spreadsheet component, library or anything similar, please leave a comment.

Related posts:

1. Flex Camp Chicago ‘09 Community Showcase Presentation Summary
2. Making a good choice when using Flex components
3. Flex Gauge Component Example with source

Here is some follow up information from the Flex Camp Chicago '09 Community Showcase presentation.

Beer Hunter

Technologies:

• Adobe Flex
• Ruby on Rails (RubyAMF)
• Degrafa

Flight-Tracking

Source and other resources for this prototype can be found here.

Technologies:

• Adobe Flex
• Papervision3D
• Yahoo Maps
• Degrafa

Pathfinder-Development.com

Technologies:

• Adobe Flex
• TweenMax
• Google Analytics
• PureMVC
• Degrafa

Related posts:

1. Using Flex Code Generator (FCG) with Flex & PureMVC
2. Upcoming Conference: FITC Chicago 2008, June 22-23
3. Hedge Fund Analytics in Flex

Out of all visualization frameworks for Flash Platform that I came in contact with, Flare is looking like the most customizable. I also like it's structure. At first I didn't, but now I love the fact that Visualizations are based on Sprites. I find that good for performance and transitions. You have to do a little extra work, but you will be happy with the result. All in all, I'm sold on it for now.

I was happy to see that PureMVC plays well with other kids (frameworks). In this example you can see among other things:

• How to run Flare on PureMVC
• How to dynamically register Proxies and Mediators

Now I'm not saying this is the best way, but a prototype that I'm working on is doing really well with this approach.

One important thing missing in this example is removing Proxies and Mediators when you delete an object. The principle is exactly the same as is for dynamically adding them, so I didn't go into it.

I would be very curious to hear any comments on this approach.

You can view/download the source here.

Hold Control(Windows) or Command(Mac) and click on a node to add a child node.

Related posts:

1. Using Flex Code Generator (FCG) with Flex & PureMVC
2. Flare vs. Axiis
3. Griffon and a PureMVC Plugin: Some Initial Thoughts

Related posts:

1. The Blogs Have Moved
2. PureMVC, Spanning the Platform Spectrum?
3. Touch Screen Kiosk in Adobe Air

Starting out with PureMVC is not a particularly easy task. It is a good thing that there are decent documentation and examples, at least for AS3. At first when I read the documentation, it made sense only on a high level, but translating that high level understanding to code right away was out of the question. I solved this initial sticking point by looking at a couple of AS3 examples like CafeTownsend and EmployeeAdmin, where you can see how the framework works on the right size demo app, not too big and not too small.

One of the things that you will first notice is a constant repetition of code when creating your Mediators and Proxies. Nothing bad about it, it's all for a good cause, but it's extra time. Flex Code Generator (FCG) by David Deraedt is an excellent tool that saves you time by automatically doing the obvious. And more.

• It creates Mediators and Proxies.
• It can create AS3 Value Object out of PHP, Java or C#.
• It can create AS3 Commands and Business Delegates out of your Remote Service files.
• It can publish AS3 files you made directly to your development environment.

The greatest thing about it is that it has an extremely easy to use interface. Like any other code generator, it can not do all the work for you. That is your job. But for the part that it does -- and it's the laborious part too -- it does it well. I have read comments about bugs but I haven't experienced them myself yet. The author of the project is not thinking of taking this any further than it is at the moment because Adobe seems to be picking this issue up. You can read about this more at the bottom of this page. Until they do, FCG is a great tool to use to bump up your Flex productivity with PureMVC. Kudos to David for making it available!

Related posts:

1. Flare on PureMVC in Flex example
2. Learning PureMVC the Hard Way (is there any other way?)
3. PureMVC, Spanning the Platform Spectrum?

So what should we Java/GWT developers do? Taking a cue from my colleague Noel Rappin, we should Read the Source, Luke. This code reading is a triangulation excercise worthy of Bill Clinton, involving API docs, source in other languages and source in other versions and platforms.

ActionScript Code

• All the best examples are in ActionScript. Most useful is this minimal example showing how to wire up key presses to a controller and simple model.
• A much more sophisticated, multipart tutorial. The underlying application features an integration with Jabber.
• A tutorial on how to build a Flash site with PureMVC.

Java Code

• The J2ME simple login example is based on the singleton/standard version.
• The puremvc2gwt project has the simple login example ported from the J2ME example above. GWT doesn't have reflection, and this is a singleton/standard version project, so you have to mentally factor out some of the resulting artifacts.

Other Sources

• Best Practices doc from the PureMVC site. This is probably the most critical doc in the whole PureMVC docuverse. Best practices and idioms.

Since I'm looking to use PureMVC accross my firm in Flex, GWT, JavaScript, WinForms, Swing, etc., I'm going to have to come up with a reference app and some best practices. Lots of work, but ultimately worth it. I may borrow liberally from Cocoa. And of course I'll share my learnings here. Stay tuned.

P.S. For those looking for the next OpenSocial update, I'll have something next week.

Related posts:

1. PureMVC, Spanning the Platform Spectrum?
2. Using Flex Code Generator (FCG) with Flex & PureMVC
3. Flare on PureMVC in Flex example