I guess many people are going to write or have already written blog posts with a similar title. But hey, this is a big event for me. I’m so happy my company offered me this reward, really. I know it can seem hard to understand how one can be so excited about attending technical conferences all day. But discovering and learning new technologies is so central to why I love software development, and Adobe stuff has become so important in my “artistic” evolution lately, that I really can’t wait.
Amongst others, I hope to learn more about Flex 4, Thermo now known as Catalyst, Flash 10 and its possibilities, Adobe AIR, but more importantly I have a few questions for Adobe guys, especially:
- Open Source is not just about a license and a Subversion repository, it’s also about community and listening to it. And when I see some of the highest voted bugs in JIRA deferred and deferred again, I would love to understand what is their policy regarding community feedback.
- Portability is obviously a big argument in favor of Flex, but I still wonder why things like mouse wheel are not natively supported on the Mac. Fortunately there is a workaround but it’s still a pain.
- How about backward compatibility? A year back, I wanted to propose Flex as an implementation technique for the UI of the operational monitoring application at Thalys, but we argued with a colleague about the governance problem: contrary to Sun Microsystems with Java, Adobe has never clearly committed to maintain backward compatibility. Of course, let’s not forget that some people are still migrating their JDK 1.4 to Java 5 because they had variables called “enum”… Joke aside, I was kind of disappointed to see that the application I’m working on right now worked with Flash 9 but has a bug with Flash 10 because of the changes they made with FileReference API. Hopefully, this will be fixed with Flex 4, but in the meantime we’re still struggling.
Over all, it’s the first technical conference I attend outside of Belgium and Javapolis (now Devoxx), and I hope that the organization will at least match the one of the BeJUG.
The 2 weeks to come are going to be legen… wait for it… DAAAAARRYYYYYY!
Geek Culture, Rich Internet Applications
Adobe, AIR, Flex, MAX2008, Milan
OK, obviously there are 2 problems in my article on Adobe Developer Connection and I finally found the time to look into it:
First of all, there was a big error in one of the POMs in todolist3.zip. In todolist-web/pom.xml, if the first dependency looks like this:
<dependency>
<groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>
<artifactId>todolist-common</artifactId>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>
Then replace it with this:
<dependency>
<groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>
<artifactId>todolist-config</artifactId>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
<classifier>resources</classifier>
<type>zip</type>
<scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>
And it should work fine.
The second error is in the article itself: of course, all of the namespace declarations should be xmlns:mx=”http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml” instead of xmlns:mx=”/2006/mxml” .
I’ll try to reach ADC editor so that they can fix those mistakes. Thanks for the feedback.
Rich Internet Applications
blazeds, Flex, Spring
The last part of the reedition of my article series about Flex and Spring has been published on the Adobe Developer Connection. This episode is the last one in this improved series so if you haven’t read it yet on my blog, I think the version I gave to ADC is better.
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Enjoy!
Rich Internet Applications
Adobe, blazeds, Flex, hibernate, java, Spring
3 months ago, the day SpringSource announced their acquisition of Covalent, the company behind Tomcat, I knew they were up to something. I even talked about it with Andrew Glover for JavaWorld. And now it’s real: SpringSource has just announced SpringSource Application Platform.
First off, a few links around this announcement:
Now this is very exciting. That’s the kind of inspiring technologies that make me think of tens of ideas for new projects, new tools that were just impossible before and that could now become reality. Adobe Flex had the same effect of unleashing my software artist imagination. Now I’m starting to think about combining the user experience of Flex applications on top of the ease of management, deployment and extensibility of OSGi with SSAP. Jeez, we’re living an incredible period!
OSGi
Flex, java, OSGi, Spring
Thanks to Brian E. Fox, I managed to avoid duplication of Flex remoting configuration files in this project. It requires a bit of additional configuration and I hope that Maven will soon provide a simpler way to do this simple resource inheritance thing. But in the meantime, this one will work.
I’m going to update my four-article series to include those modifications, but for those of you who have already gone through it before the update, here are the exact modifications you need to make to the project you got at the end of Part 4.
Read more…
Rich Internet Applications
blazeds, Flex, java, maven, Spring
[UPDATE] This article series has been reedited on the Adobe Developer Connection. For more information, see this post.
In the previous articles in this series, we did the boring stuff of setting up Spring, Hibernate and MySQL on a sample todo list server on one side, and we wrote a small useless Flex UI on the other side. In this article, we’re going to write the final UI and connect it with the Spring backend using BlazeDS. Let’s go!
Read more…
Rich Internet Applications
blazeds, Flex, hibernate, java, maven, ria, Spring
For those of you looking for alternatives, it appears that the main diffuculty I had with Israfil’s maven-flex2-plugin, that is how to specify the contextRoot compiler argument, is not really a difficulty after all. I don’t know if it works with BlazeDS, but the guys behind Igenko apparently made it work with GraniteDS. I have to thank Tim O’Brien for pointing that out.
Their solution to the configuration file duplication is at least as ugly as mine, but if you’re looking for the right configuration for israfil, you can try that:
<plugin>
<groupId>net.israfil.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-flex2-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.3</version>
<extensions>true</extensions>
<configuration>
<flexHome>${flex.home}</flexHome>
<dataServicesConfig>../igenko-backoffice-server/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/flex/services-config.xml</dataServicesConfig>
<main>Index.mxml</main>
<useNetwork>true</useNetwork>
<debug>true</debug>
<extraParameters>
<parameter>
<name>compiler.context-root</name>
<values><value>igenko-bo</value></values>
</parameter>
</extraParameters>
</configuration>
</plugin>
Maybe I’ll give it a shot after I finish my series. But anyways, Adobe if you can hear me, it becomes urgent for you to propose an official and well-documented Maven support for Flex 3.
Rich Internet Applications
blazeds, Flex, graniteds, java, maven
[UPDATE] This article series has been reedited on the Adobe Developer Connection. For more information, see this post.
In the previous article in this series, I described the creation and configuration of a classic standalone Flex module built with flex-compiler-mojo. In this article I’m going to describe the creation of our back-end module, made up with Spring, Hibernate and MySQL. I’ll keep the most interesting part for the fourth and last episode, that is how to connect the frontend with the backend using BlazeDS.
Read more…
Rich Internet Applications
Flex, hibernate, java, maven, mysql, ria, Spring
[UPDATE] This article series has been reedited on the Adobe Developer Connection. For more information, see this post.
In the previous article of this series, I laid the ground for what will be a step-by-step tutorial about creating a Flex/BlazeDS/Spring/Hibernate project. In this article, I will go into more detail about the creation of the Flex UI for our Todo List application.
Read more…
Rich Internet Applications
blazeds, Flex, hibernate, java, maven, Spring
[UPDATE] This article series has been reedited on the Adobe Developer Connection. For more information, see this post.
In this article series, I’ll try to give you a step-by-step process to create an application with Flex/BlazeDS/Spring/Hibernate/MySQL architecture, all of that built with Maven. I’ve been looking for such a tutorial for a long time, but you know what Gandhi said about the change you wish to see in the world, right? So I finally put all the parts together, and with a little help from a Brazilian friend, tadaaaa! Here it comes!
But before we dive in to the hard stuff, just a few words of caution:
- The project that we are going to build in this tutorial is by no means perfect, especially in terms of Maven configuration. So if you have suggestions to improve it, they’ll be warmly welcome.
- One of the main ingredients of this project, one without which nothing would have been possible, is the flex-compiler-mojo from Velo. There are other Flex building Maven plugins out there, but at the time of this writing, none of them offers enough configuration options to build this project. On the other hand, Velo’s plugin is still in alpha, so… Anyway, if like me you are convinced that Adobe’s official Maven support is necessary, feel free to vote for this issue.
Enough blah-blah, let’s move on to the real thing. Ready to get nasty?
Read more…
Rich Internet Applications
blazeds, Flex, hibernate, java, maven, Spring
