Last week I had the second Flex 4 Crash Course session at the Adobe office in Amsterdam as an introduction to Flex for people with no previous Flex experience. (Although there were some familiar faces in the audience.) The training material was provided by Adobe and I am not allowed to publish all the originals, but I can share the slides with all the links to external resources.
Posts tagged ‘Flex’
I have uploaded version 0.0.5 of ForumClient. I really didn’t want to do a release just yet (it is halfway a SOAP to REST rewrite), but the previous version had expired and people couldn’t use it anymore. More soon.
It doesn’t look like much yet, but the alpha 2 is available for download. Server communication stuff should mostly work, except for the gazillion bugs and missing functions in the Jive webservices. UI is modelled after the Thunderbird NNTP client, so you download a list of forums, then you subscribe to certain forums and then messages for those forums will be downloaded into a local SQLite database so you can even read them offline.
Since I am in Bangalore for a training I dropped in on the “Adobe Flash Platform Tools Preview” this evening. The agenda promised short sessions on Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst and LiveCycle ES, followed by food and networking. The Flash Builder (previously known as Flex Builder) session was solid. It showed Data Centric Development, where services are defined in Flash Builder and can then easily be wired into the UI because all the code for the services and value objects is generated. (See Raghu’s blog for the demo screencast). Next up was Flash Catalyst, showing a design - development workflow where a .psd file was transformed to a .fxp, which was then imported in Flash Builder to wire the data in through the new services management. Last was LiveCycle ES. Unfortunately, but understandably considering the audience, this was all about data management and not process management. What was new for me was that apparently this now wires directly into Hibernate so you don’t need to write any server side code anymore, you can have everything generated.
The Q&A focused mainly on the designer - developer workflow with Flash catalyst. The main question that was repeated several times in different words was whether this workflow put any additional constraints on the designer. And each time the answer was that good development on the design side, including the judicious use of layers, was all it took. I think this reflected the audience of architects and project managers, from developers I would expect more technical oriented questions.
Afterward the food and networking were great. Not just the Flash team from Adobe was there, but also people from the LiveCycle team and the ColdFusion team., so I got an opportunity to thank some people in person for fixes and new features I am not allowed to mention yet. And I also met up with some of the people we do business with in India.
I managed to get a proof of concept AIR client for the Adobe forums running. It can log in, browse communities, threads, and messages and can even reply. But since it doesn’t do much with local storage yet it doesn’t remember which messages are already read. I’ll post some more on the hacks to log in to the forums soon, but for now I have screenshots.
ForumClient Screenshot
ForumClient screenshot