Flare vs. Axiis

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, May 28, 2009 @ 10:37 am

After a long time of searching for the right data visualization framework for Flash Platform, some time ago I've put my money on Flare which is based on a Java framework called Prefuse. I have been very happy with it and haven't looked back until a new framework of same purpose crossed my way - Axiis.

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.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (3)

agile ajax

Pathfinder Launches Beer Hunter, A New Flex + Ruby RIA

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, May 4, 2009 @ 6:51 am

We just launched a new rich internet application for Destinationbeer.com, called Beer Hunter.  It was written in Flex and Ruby on Rails and features mapping and 150 beers from around the world.  We think it's pretty cool, so check it out, and let us know what you think.  One of the things I really like about it is that the design pattern can be applied anywhere you're filtering products geographically and on attributes.  Coffee? Wine? Jewelry? Chocolate? Travel Books? I particularly like the way the beer list visually sorts when you change a filter and the zoom interactions on the map.

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.

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (1)

agile ajax

Remove/Cancel Bubbling for an Event in Flex3

Anthony Caliendo, Thursday, April 30, 2009 @ 2:18 pm

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.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

agile ajax

Touch Screen Kiosk in Adobe Air

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, April 20, 2009 @ 3:09 pm

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

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

agile ajax

Notification Testing with PureMVC and FlexUnit

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, March 11, 2009 @ 4:00 am

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.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

agile ajax

Performance optimization for Flash Player

Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, February 13, 2009 @ 7:48 am

Time and again the same scenario arises. An app is being built and it's all going fine until the very end when performance issues start to appear.

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.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

agile ajax

ZendAMF vs. AMFPHP

Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, February 6, 2009 @ 8:36 pm

So far, of all the AMF frameworks I have been a proponent of AMFPHP and RailsAMF. I still don’t know RoR very well (working on it), but I’ve been using PHP for a long time and have grown to love it so AMFPHP was always my natural choice.

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

A few reasons.
Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (4)

agile ajax

How much Excel can we get in Flex?

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, January 29, 2009 @ 7:28 pm

...and why would we go around doing that when there are perfectly good solutions out there for online spreadsheets? For instance Google Docs in which I still haven't found a bug or a feature I'm missing.

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.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (1)

agile ajax

Flex Camp Chicago ‘09 Community Showcase Presentation Summary

Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, January 23, 2009 @ 2:43 pm

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

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (1)

agile ajax

Flare on PureMVC in Flex example

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, January 8, 2009 @ 4:13 pm

By this time, I am very happy and impressed with PureMVC. In combination with Flex Code Generator, plumbing downtime is minimal and more you work on a project, the more you see the benefits.

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.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (3)

agile ajax

Using Flex Code Generator (FCG) with Flex & PureMVC

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, December 25, 2008 @ 11:43 am

Recently I've been working on a Flex prototype using the PureMVC framework. I will talk at length another time about just how much PureMVC successfully solves a lot of problems that we encounter in interface development and especially about how much this framework is important for all those complex interactions that we expect out of our RIA interfaces.

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.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

agile ajax

Learning PureMVC the Hard Way (is there any other way?)

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, December 23, 2008 @ 1:29 pm

This ends week one of my investigations into PureMVC. So far I'm impressed with the framework itself in it's many versions and incarnations, but the documentation and tutorials for platforms other than Flex leave something to be desired. To all those folks that claim that Cairngorm is easier to learn than PureMVC, I can agree, but only because of this lack of good documentation.

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.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (2)

agile ajax

Google Analytics Tracking Component for Flash Platform

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, December 11, 2008 @ 11:17 am

Although it's not too hard to set up Google Analytics tracking on Flash based web sites the traditional way by referencing JavaScript, there are still good chances for something to go wrong in the process and debugging it is notoriously hard. The good people at Google have provided the Flash Platform Developer community with a great "little" library that wraps the whole process and provides a good debugging mode.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (1)

agile ajax

Pathfinder releases version 1 of its Flash Platform microsite (codename Mica)

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, December 4, 2008 @ 1:30 pm

You can see the site here. Come often as it will be updated on a regular basis.

The goal of this site is to shed more light on what is it that we do here at Pathfinder with the Flash Platform.
We would be very grateful to hear feedback about the site from any perspective.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

agile ajax

Bandwidth profiling Flex projects and more with Charles

Sasha Dzeletovic, Wednesday, November 19, 2008 @ 11:25 pm

Adobe Flash comes with a very useful feature for bandwidth profiling. It allows you to see how will your site/app act under certain network conditions.

Flex Builder unfortunately does not have that option so we have to look somewhere else for a solution for testing.

While there are many applications that simulate various network conditions, Charles stud up as the most practical for Flex developers, in my opinion.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

agile ajax