It was really fun to be able to sit down and record an episode with Ben and Dion. They are great guys who are at the center of the tech industry. Let me know what you think of the episode.

I’ll be in Florida next week for a few great Flex and Java events:

• Tuesday August 25 - Flex Jam in Winter Park, FL - This is a bring your own laptop, self-paced learning event. Anyone, at any level of Flex knowledge is welcome.
• Wednesday August 26 - Flex and Java at the GatorJUG
• Thursday August 27 - Flex and Java at the Orlando JUG

If you live in Florida then I hope to see you at these events!

If you have a technical question that is unrelated to one of my blog posts, then here is what to do… If that question is specific to you and no one else in the developer community, then email me at jaward at adobe dot com (obfuscated to avoid spam). I will respond to your email but response times can greatly fluctuate. If you have a more general technical question that pertains to the broader developer community then do the following (this option will usually yield a response within hours):

Device font rendering in Flash content has always had some limitations, including the inability for text to be correctly scaled, rotated, and faded. Due to these limitations many developers using Flex resort to embedding fonts. But this can really bloat the size of applications - especially when working with non-English languages. Luckily Flash Player 10 / AIR 1.5 added a new font engine! To make using the new engine easy Adobe also created an open source library called the Text Layout Framework, which wraps Flash Player’s low level text APIs. Flex 4 Spark components use the Text Layout Framework for all text rendering. The end result is much better device font support in Flex applications. Here’s a quick example (view source):

I’ll be presenting about Flex and Java at some Java User Groups over the next few weeks. Here’s the lineup:

• Sacramento - August 11
• San Diego - August 18
• Detroit - August 19
• Salt Lake City - August 20

Hope to see you at one of these JUGs!

In this episode of Drunk on Software, Jon Rose and I catch up with Tom Link, Brandon Purcell, and Doug McCune from Universal Mind. We chat about SpatialKey, one of the most impressive Flex applications I’ve seen. So grab your favorite beverage, sit back, relax, and get Drunk on Software. :)

On August 27 I’ll be co-presenting a webinar - Developing Rich User Interfaces on Force.com Using Adobe Flex. This will be a great opportunity to learn more about combining Cloud and RIA to create software that works well for end users and significantly reduces IT costs. If this interests you then go sign-up now. Hope to “see” you on August 27th.

UPDATE: BlazeDS 4 and LCDS 3.1 now have built-in support to disallow subscriptions to wildcard subtopics. Just set the following parameter on the messaging destination’s server properties:

<disallow-wildcard-subtopics>false</disallow-wildcard-subtopics>

You no longer need to use the ProtectedMessagingAdapter from the code examples below in order to protect your messages.

One of the great things about Flex is how easy it is to set up publish and subscribe messaging using BlazeDS, LCDS, or other various server technologies. Basically a Flex application can be either a Consumer of messages from the server, a Producer of messages to the server, or both. The channels that are used for the actual transport can vary dramatically depending on the needs. Here is a great blog that explains the different transports. No matter what transport / channel is used the API in Flex is the same. If you'd like to see how to use those APIs check out this video I recorded.

Lately I’ve been playing with the Flex 4 Beta to better understand the new Spark component set. Halo is the name being used to describe the Flex 2 and Flex 3 component set. In Flex 4 you can choose to either use only Halo or use both Spark and Halo together. Since Spark has some great features like improved skinning and FXG (declarative vector drawing) support it is a great option for creating pixel perfect UIs. But sometimes you might need to stick with the Halo components. Luckily it seems that you can use the Spark skinning classes on Halo components. Here’s an example of this technique based on an earlier demo I built which used only Spark:

To celebrate the launch of FlexMonkey 1.0, Drunk on Software went to Cartman’s most favorite place in the whole world - Casa Bonita. And there at Casa Bonita amongst happy children and cliff divers, Episode 14 came to be. I’m not sure if it was the margaritas, my pink feather boa, or the ambiance of Casa Bonita but this one was really fun. So grab a marg, sit back, and drift to that happy place - it’s Drunk on Software at Casa Bonita!