Together with our friend, Mihai Corlan (Adobe Evangelist) we released FxGallery, a Drupal Image Module. Mihai came with the challenge to build an image gallery module for Drupal and we liked it and got involved into the FxGallery project.

FxGallery has 3 main view: Gallery View, Cover Flow View and Single View. The image module can manage 3 kinds of image galleries: Flickr, Picasa and Local Gallery that is saved directly in the Drupal. In Single View there is also the possibility to add comments for the local gallery.

The project is kind of complex but not complex enough to use some Flex frameworks like Cairngorm. In the project we used the following libraries:

• XMLRPCFlash – for communication between the Flex client and the Drupal back end
• ActionScript 3 Flickr Library – for connecting to Flickr
• Picasa ActionScript 3 Library – for connecting to Picasa
• GreenSock Tweening Library – for some animations
• as3corelib – a utility library for ActionScript 3
• DisplayShelf Flex component – for the cover flow view

It was great to work with Mihai and Magda on this project and we hope that we will be able to develop it even further. The things we could do next are:

• Port it to Flex 4
• Add comment feature to Flickr and Picasa type of albums
• Implement deep linking
• Integration with Photoshop.com and other social web applications
• Mouse gestures using Flash Player 10.1

You can view a webinar held by Mihai and you can download the module and the sources from Mihai’s blog. Also a working example can be seen here: http://fxgallery.corlan.org.

I know you’ll want to know more so follow the following links:
http://myadobe.ro/2010/03/11/building-an-image-module-for-drupal/
http://corlan.org/creating-drupal-modules-with-flex/fx-gallery-drupal-module/
http://corlan.org/creating-drupal-modules-with-flex/
http://fxgallery.corlan.org

Together with the release of Adobe AIR 2.0 beta 2 Adobe has released Flex SDK 3.5a. The big fix is this bug (SDK-24766) – ApplicationUpdaterUI not working on Flex SDK 3.5.

From the announcement on the Official Flex Team Blog we read….

The refreshed build, SDK 3.5a, has only a few files modified in order to fix this issue and this change does not affect the signing and caching of the SDK 3.5 RSLs originally released in December.

We encourage all developers using SDK 3.5 to upgrade their build to SDK 3.5a to continue their development.

The 3.5a Flex SDK can be downloaded from http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3.

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.

If you ever got into the following error (see bellow after this paragraph) you must know how you can overcome it.

The error is triggered only in debugging. No trace of it in the normal run. But if you need to debug and get this error it will pause the debug session and even after lots of resume pressed you’ll won’t get over it because is a cyclic error.

undefined
	at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEvent()
	at mx.effects::Effect/effectStartHandler()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\Effect.as:1310]
	at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEventFunction()
	at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEvent()
	at mx.effects::EffectInstance/play()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\EffectInstance.as:580]
	at mx.effects.effectClasses::CompositeEffectInstance/play()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\effectClasses\CompositeEffectInstance.as:172]
	at mx.effects.effectClasses::SequenceInstance/play()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\effectClasses\SequenceInstance.as:150]
	at mx.effects::EffectInstance/finishRepeat()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\EffectInstance.as:685]
	at mx.effects.effectClasses::SequenceInstance/play()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\effectClasses\SequenceInstance.as:156]
	at mx.effects::EffectInstance/finishRepeat()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\EffectInstance.as:685]
	at mx.effects.effectClasses::SequenceInstance/play()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\effectClasses\SequenceInstance.as:156]
	at mx.effects::EffectInstance/finishRepeat()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\EffectInstance.as:685]
	at mx.effects.effectClasses::SequenceInstance/play()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\effectClasses\SequenceInstance.as:156]
	at mx.effects::EffectInstance/finishRepeat()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\EffectInstance.as:685]
	at mx.effects.effectClasses::SequenceInstance/play()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\effectClasses\SequenceInstance.as:156]
	at mx.effects::EffectInstance/finishRepeat()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\EffectInstance.as:685]
	at mx.effects.effectClasses::SequenceInstance/play()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\effectClasses\SequenceInstance.as:156]
	at mx.effects::EffectInstance/finishRepeat()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\EffectInstance.as:685]
	at mx.effects.effectClasses::SequenceInstance/play()
	[C:\autobuild\3.x\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\effects\effectClasses\SequenceInstance.as:156]

The error is triggered by Sequence and the code looks like this…

<mx:Sequence id="movement" repeatCount="0" startDelay="{delay}">
    <mx:Move id="movementUp" target="{this}" duration="{interval}" 
        yTo="0" />
    <mx:Move id="movementDown" target="{this}" duration="{interval}" 
        yTo="{_startYPos}" />
</mx:Sequence>

What’s the problem? After trying different things on the code I noticed that instead of setting the target property of the Sequence I did set up the target of each Move item. So by removing the target from each Move and adding one to Sequence may fix the problem.

Another thing to check is that the sequence is called only once for the target object. If the same effect is called twice or more on the same object and the previous effect did not finished their job a conflict appears. That means that starting the effect on a event that triggers more than once (ex: updateComplete, addedToStage) will end in this error also. Try use creationComplete event instead.

It is important to tell you that the Flex SDK I used to test this are 3.4 and 3.5 from Adobe Nightly Builds.

Hope this helps you.

If you’ve been following Serge Jesper son Twitter, you may have seen his tweets about a secret project called Quindici. Well… the project now is finalized and public… and is a widget created especially for Adobe MAX Conference.

You can see it bellow or on MAX Conference site.

You can find some interesting facts about Adobe MAX Conference which you can tweet further, you can see video testimonials and record yourself a testimony and post it to Quindici.

The widget is built with Flex Builder 3 using Flex 3 SDK, ColdFusion, Flash Media Server and Photoshop.

Related resources:
http://max.adobe.com/widget/
http://www.webkitchen.be/2009/08/21/project-quindici-maxwidget/
http://corlan.org/2009/08/21/project-quindici-finally-revealed/

The 3.4 version of Flex SDK is available. An important vulnerability has been identified in Flex 3.3 SDK and earlier versions which could result in cross-site scripting. This technote explains the important vulnerability found in the previous version of the Flex SDK.

Please go to Adobe Open Source website and download the Flex 3.4 SDK version.

It seems that Flex 4 SDK is not affected by this vulnerability because it uses SWFObject templates.

Resources:
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb09-13.html
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/495/cpsid_49530.html
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3