Flex API contest extended

Flex, Internet, Projects
Mar 042008

The guys with the Flex 360 conference have extended the deadline for their Flex API contest, so that participants for Europe can sign in as well, The new deadline is 4th of April, the friday before the conference begins. See more information on this here and here.

Also, there’s almost a month to go until the conference. From the Romanian side of Flex I and Mihai Corlan will participate, with two sessions – Mihai with Developing Data-intensive Flex applications and me with a session on Flex and (web) services. I will mostly talk about SOAP services, but won’t ignore REST ones. As part of what I will present  at Flex 360 I’ve started a series of articles on the blog – the first one is already live and presents a sample application that searches videos using web services. So let me know in the comments if I’m off track or not.,

Posted by cristi at 22:53 Tagged with: , , , ,

FlexCamp is upon us

Announcements, Internet, Projects
Oct 102007

Today at Adobe Romania takes place the FlexCamp Bucharest. It’s a conference about Flex which had already sold out in the first three weeks from its announcements.

I will hold a camp session showing off the improvements we have added into Flex Builder in terms of web services – the introspection wizard which generates strong typed classes for both the operations, types and even request / result wrappers.

If you already registered and received an invitation, I’m looking forward to meet you there. Otherwise (or if you simply cannot come) the entire camp is broadcasted live over Acrobat Connect. Recordings of the presentations will also be made available afterwards. You can watch the live camp session on Connect at this address: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/flexro.

Now back to adding the finishing touches on the presentation.

Posted by cristi at 08:27

Silverlight 1.0 is out the door with a surprise

Internet, Programming, Projects
Sep 052007

Yesterday Microsoft launched Silverlight 1.0. Officially it is supported by Microsoft on Windows and Mac. So if you’re running on Linux, tough luck. Or is it?

Along the lines of what seems to be an ongoing internal disagreement on how to treat open-source, the developer division seems to be the one that opens up first – they signed a collaboration document with the Moonlight team, promising to share test suites, specification and in-depth documentation to make the Mono version of the plug-in as good as possible. There are also hints that it will be supported by Microsoft, although indirectly through Novell. Microsoft will provide the binary codecs to use with the plug-in. Novell will distribute Moonlight, as said in a recent blog post.

Moonlight is the current implementation of the Silverlight plug-in, made available by the same guys that make Mono, the .NET for Linux. Currently they also work for Novell, so an agreement with Microsoft could be at least guessed. Since it aims to dethrone Flash, the logical move would be to attack it on all platforms, but Microsoft has not released any projects for Linux (per my knowledge). But it does have a prior agreement with Novell, so this is not so unexpected.

It will be interesting to see how will the Linux version stack up against the “originals” – the Mac and Windows plug-ins. Regardless of the results this agreement remains a good sign, a sign that Microsoft can change. And allthough they have us (and most probably themselves) confused about what they’re doing, I can only hope that the developers’ division ideas on Open-Source software gains momentum and adoption inside the behemoth.

For those who want to try out the current implementation of Moonlight, you can see the build instructions here.

Posted by cristi at 23:18

New Flex Module is out

Programming, Projects
May 072007

A new version of the Flex Module for Apache and IIS has been released on labs late last week. It includes several important changes:

1. A zip folder with instructions for manual installations has been added to help users running Unixes without X and users with more weird configurations with which the installer couldn’t cope

2. Major speed increase. This is the biggest stuff yet, as it now uses a caching slots mechanism to keep the latest 5 compiled mxmls in memory. Incremental compilation times bumped down to under a second (for the FlexStore sample application). Due to the need for the browser to render and display the flash it still shows as almost 2 seconds. But it’s way faster than the previous release.

3. Fixed some bugs and compiled the entire server on Java 1.4. So now the JRE/JDK 1.4 will be enough to work on.

4. Added Vista / IIS7 / Apache support, and Ubuntu 7.04/Apache. Added Mac/PPC support.

5. Fixed some issues with Windows / Apache 1.3.7 (the java virtual machine refused to start when invoked by the module).

6. Fixed Content-Length value  – in some casse, on Windows the pipe from the compilation server to the Apache module added some junk characters, causing the page to never stop loading. Now we check for specific markers before setting the final value on the content length.

You can also find the release notes on the project’s wiki page, over on Adobe Labs. One thing to note though: if you already have a previous version installed, do a full uninstall and then put in the new version.

Posted by cristi at 21:55

Flex Module for Apache and IIS is out the door ..

Downloads, Projects
Mar 162007

And into labs. Last night Adobe launched on Labs another tool to help developers create Flex Applications free and easy, an the Operating System of choice. I’ve talked before how you can create Flex Applications using only Vim (or any other text editor for that matter), the free Flex 2 SDK and the command line. Now I can strip the command line off that list. No more write > shell > compile > copy > preview in browser once this baby is installed.

So what does it do?

It installs snugly next to your free copy of the SDK (or brings its own one with it if you need it) and plugs itself into Apache (my choice) or IIS. Then all you have to do is point your browser to a mxml file (like http://localhost/flex_app/index.mxml :) ) and it will do all the heavy lifting. You’ll get a swf wrapped by some basic html.

So, if you think it may be interesting for you, grab your copy here (free as in beer of course).

So if you were wondering why I had to poke around Apache modules, now you know ;)

Posted by cristi at 09:53
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