Wednesday, 27th of January, in Bucharest, Mark Anders, the creator of Flash Catalyst will tell us how Flash Catalyst appeared and how it got done. For anyone who doesn’t know about him, Mark Anders is a major contributor for the whole Adobe Flex platform.

The meeting starts at 6 PM but we will start gather and 5:30 PM and it will be mostly an opened discussion. Mark will tell us what’s behind the scenes not only for Flash Catalyst but also for other Flex related products.

For registration go on MyAdobe, http://myadobe.ro/2010/01/21/how-its-made-versiunea-adobe/ (Romanian only).

Hope to see you all there.

As a was write the post about Tour de LiveCycle I just realize that we don’t have a post about Tour de Flex. So …

I use Tour de Flex from last year and I got what I need some times. It’s a tool for large use but it’s all you need in order to get the picture.

Tour de Flex has three primary goals in Adobe’s vision:

1. Provide non-Flex developers with an overview of what is possible in Flex in a “look and see” environment
2. Provide Flex developers with an illustrated reference tool
3. Provide commercial and non-commercial Flex developers with a place to showcase their work

If you need more information and you want to download Tour de Flex please go to: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/tourdeflex/.

There is a Dashboard provided by ILog together with IBM where we can see how the Tour de Flex is accessed over the world.

Many of you may already know about the rebranding of Flex Builder. It will no longer be named Flex Builder but Flash Builder. Adobe took this action in order to make the Flash name (and platform) a stronger one. Flex will not disappear but it will remain as framework. Neither Flash IDE. I know many of you have questions. This is what I found on Lee Brimelow blog…

Flash IDE will be discontinued?
Of course not. Flash authoring will continue to be the premiere tool for design and animation for the Flash Platform.

Confusion when talking about Flex?
People should understant that Flex is an ActionScript framework for creating RIAs and that is not changing. This will make Flex brand more solid and understandable.

Why not earlier?
Flex Builder was created to easy the creation of Flex framework projects. Over the years massive amount of people is using it for their pure ActionScript work.

Will Flash Builder still be based on Eclipse?
Yes it will continue to be an Eclipse-based product.

Too much tools for creating Flash content?
Animators and designers are used to the Flash IDE and like its focus on creating completely custom Flash experiences. Flash and Flex developers generally do not like spending their time in the Flash IDE and prefer to be in a powerful code-centric environment like Eclipse.

Flex SDK?
It will not be renamed.

These are from Lee Brimelow post. You can read more over there.

In my opinion this is a good movement and by doing this Adobe will make many aware of the link between Flash and Flex, and that Flex is a framework on top of Flash platform.

Last week I had to write a small piece of code to send to a webservice a number from a text input. All was fine for the normal test values (0,1,100). The problem appeared when I tried to send the number -9223372036854775808. Instead of receiving this number I got -9223372036854776000.  So I started to do some debugging I saw that the problem was in the soap functions from the Flex SDK when they did a number.toString().

I did a small test project to verify that the issue is with the toString() function. Here is the code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" width="160" height="70">
	<mx:Script>
		<![CDATA[
			[Bindable]
			public var stringValue:String = "-9223372036854775808";
			[Bindable]
			public var numberValue:Number = Number(stringValue);			
 
			private function testToStringIssue():void
			{
				lbl.text = numberValue.toString();
			}
		]]>
	</mx:Script>
	<mx:Label x="10" y="10" text="{stringValue}" id="lbl"/>
	<mx:Button x="10" y="36" label="Button" click="testToStringIssue();"/>	
</mx:Application>

As you see we first display the stringValue and that is ok. Then we do a number toString() and display that result.
]]> http://www.flexer.info/2008/11/20/numbertostring-bug/feed/ 6 http://www.flexer.info/2008/06/02/flex-builder-cannot-locate-the-required-version-of-flash-player-error-firefox-fp-90124/ http://www.flexer.info/2008/06/02/flex-builder-cannot-locate-the-required-version-of-flash-player-error-firefox-fp-90124/#comments Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:36:55 +0000 Andrei Ionescu http://www.flexer.info/?p=191

Today I upgraded my flash player to version 9.0.124 and I’m referring to the debug version of it.

The upgrade went OK on IE, I downloaded the version for IE from Adobe’s download page (http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/9/flashplayer_9_ax_debug.exe), I installed it and everything worked out.

I was thinking: “Great! That was easy! Let’s do it for Firefox also…”. I had a previous bad experience trying to upgrade the flash player which ended in reinstalling the Flex Builder but seeing that on IE was very easy I upgraded it also for Firefox. I downloaded the Firefox version from Adobe (http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/9/flashplayer_9_plugin_debug.exe) and installed it. Although the flash player installer had no errors and was saying that the install was complete when I tried to debug a project the following error occurred:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins\NPSWF32.dll

Flex Builder cannot locate the required version of the Flash Player. You may need to install Flash Player 9.0 or reinstall Flex Builder. Do you want to try to run your application with the current version?

I think many of you got this error. I pressed YES and I expected not be able to debug but Flex Builder did catch the errors displaying them in console view (also tried breakpoints and that is working). That was somehow strange…

That means that Flex Builder is looking for the debug version of flash player elsewhere than where it was installed. The flash player package is installing files in C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash but Flex Builder is looking for it in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins. I just copied the file from C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins and the error disappeared.

One important notice: I was using Flex Builder 2.

Some resources:
Adobe Flash Player download page
About your installed flash player
Other got into this also

During last week I had to do a small application for AIR. That was until friday when I had to release it and found out that the app had to work also in normal browser. Since almost all the code was independent of the type of app (AIR/Flex) my task was pretty easy:

• Get all existing code into an external library
• Update the AIR program to use that library and remove all other code except the main function
• Create a Flex App to use the new library

One problem that I found was that my library that was initially written for AIR had some references to the FILE object
that is not available in a normal Flex App. So I had to override my library class to use SharedObjects instead of FILE.

So here is a quick tutorial on how to override a class inside a library (any library – even the flex framework one):

1. First locate the exact name of the package you want to override.
   Ex: info.flexer.common.storage.Settings (settings beeing the class I have problems with)
2. In your app create the folder structure info/flexer/common/storage/
3. Copy in this path the Settings.as and modify it as you want.

Once you build the project the class you placed in your program will override the one that is in the library.

This only works if the library is merged into code.

Bellow you can find a list tags and their attributes that are supported by flash player (and also by flex framework). This list applies to TextArea, TextFields and other controls that are html enabled.

Anchor tag (<a>)

Creates a hypertext link.

• href
• target

Bold tag (<b>)

Renders text as bold.

Break tag (<br>)

Creates a line break in the text field.

Font tag (<font>)

Specifies a font or list of fonts to display the text.

• color
• face
• size

Image tag (<img>)

Lets you embed external JPEG files, SWF files, and movie clips.

• src
• id
• width
• height
• align
• hspace
• vspace
• alt

Italic tag (<i>)

Displays the tagged text in italics.

List item tag (<li>)

Places a bullet in front of the text that it encloses.

Paragraph tag (<p>)

Creates a new paragraph.

• align
• class

Span tag (<span>)

Available only for use with CSS text styles.

• class

Text format tag (<textformat>)

Lets you use a subset of paragraph formatting properties of the TextFormat class within HTML text fields.

• blockindent
• indent
• leading
• leftmargin
• rightmargin
• tabstops

Underline tag (<u>)

Underlines the tagged text.

Some aspects need to be known… <ol> and <ul> are not supported by flash player and any of the two tags are rendered as bullets. As you already noticed the tags do no comply with new standards, they do not necessarily close as is should and tags without closing do not have /> at the end.

More info about this is on Adobe Livedocs following this link.

Last week I tried to convert a small flex 2 application to air. It went pretty smooth with some minor exceptions that were fixed fast. So if you have a flex 2 app and did not do anything fancy in it then it all should work fine.
Keep in mind that flex 3 has some modifications in the framework than flex 2.

These are the steps I took to convert the app.

1) Create a new empty AIR application
2) copy old app files into the src dir of the new AIR app.
3) build.
4) installed FlexSpy to fix the small visual errors
5) fixed all visual stuff
6) removed FlexSpy
7) exported the app
used the AIR badge to create an “installer” for the AIR app.

As you can see I had no problems with the logic or stuff functioning wrong (but I can not say that will not happen – it depends with each project.)

During 7-9 April 2008 there is a Flex meeting in Milano. Price 360 euros. More details here or here.

I may be there as well .

Table of contents

1. Web Service small how-to
2. Flex and PHP web-service

Yesterday I had to do a small flex application that resided on a server with php. Since I required a connection to mysql I wanted to use the same class I did before to connect to web-services. But PHP does not support web-services (and WSDL) by default.

So after I did some search on the net I found this nice php class: NuSOAP. Here it is the small php webservice I did to test it all (file test.php):

// Pull in the NuSOAP code
require_once('nusoap.php');
 
// Define namespace to use
$ns="http://localhost/wsdlphp";
 
// Create the server instance
$server = new soap_server;
 
// Configure WDSL response
$server->configureWSDL('hello',$ns);
 
// Set default namespace for output
$server->wsdl->schemaTargetNamespace=$ns;
 
// Register the method to expose
$server->register('hello',
array('name' => 'xsd:string'),
array('return' => 'xsd:string'),
$ns
);
 
// Define the method as a PHP function
function hello($name)
{
return 'Hello, ' . $name;
}
 
// Use the request to (try to) invoke the service
$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA = isset($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA) ? $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA : '';
$server->service($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA);

As you see here there is one service called test.php and one webmethod called hello. This method has one parameter as input (name):

$server->register('hello', array('name' => 'xsd:string'), array('return' => 'xsd:string'), $ns);

Here is the flex code to connect and use the webmethod:

<mx:application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute">
	applicationComplete="init()">
	<mx:script>
		<![CDATA[
			import mx.rpc.soap.Operation;
			import mx.rpc.events.InvokeEvent;
			import mx.rpc.soap.LoadEvent;
			import mx.rpc.events.FaultEvent;
			import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent;
			import mx.rpc.soap.WebService;
			import ro.qbic.testmessage;		
 
			private var _service : WebService;
			private var _currentMessage: testmessage;
 
			public function init():void
			{
				_currentMessage = new testmessage("a");
				_service = new WebService();
				_service.wsdl = "http://localhost/WSDLPHP/test.php?wsdl";
				_service.addEventListener(ResultEvent.RESULT, handleResult, false, 0, true);
				_service.addEventListener(FaultEvent.FAULT, handleFault, false, 0, true);
				_service.addEventListener(LoadEvent.LOAD, handleLoad, false, 0, true);
				_service.addEventListener(InvokeEvent.INVOKE, handleInvoke, false, 0, true);
				_service.loadWSDL();
			}
 
			public function handleResult(event:ResultEvent):void
			{
				// Get data from RESULT node
				var tmpResp:XML = event.result[0]
			}
 
			private function handleFault(event:FaultEvent):void
			{
				var errorMessage:String =  event.fault.faultString + "\n" + event.fault.faultDetail;
			}
 
			private function handleLoad(event:LoadEvent):void
			{
				_service.getOperation(_currentMessage.webMethod).arguments = _currentMessage;
				(_service.getOperation(_currentMessage.webMethod) as Operation).resultFormat = "e4x";
				_service.getOperation(_currentMessage.webMethod).send();
			}
 
			private function handleInvoke(event:InvokeEvent):void
			{
			}
		]]>
	</mx:script>
 
</mx:application>