Flex

This past weekend I spent an hour optimizing the Flex 4 scrolling demo that I posted last week. The original demo was intended to show how to hook up touch events to the Flex 4 List / DataGroup controls. This new version adds some optimizations for the touch event handling and adds the kinetic flick behavior. Check it out and let me know what you think:

I’ve posted the code for this second version of the touch scrolling demo. It was pretty trivial to optimize it this far. With a little more work it’ll be as smooth as silk and as fast as Apolo Ohno. :)

UPDATE 1: The first version of this demo was intended to show how to hook up touch events to the Flex 4 List / DataGroup controls. I’ve posted a new version that adds some optimizations for the touch event handling and adds the kinetic flick behavior.

One of the challenges of running existing web content on mobile devices is that user interactions differ between mediums. For instance, on a normal computer with a mouse, scrolling though lists is often done by clicking on scroll bars or mouse wheels. On mobile devices that lack a pointing device this is not the best interaction paradigm. On devices with touch screens the paradigm for scrolling is usually a swipe gesture.

This week at Mobile World Congress Adobe has been showing off Flash Player 10.1 on a variety of mobile devices. Last week I received Google’s Nexus One device with an early version of Flash Player 10.1 on it. Here is a video I shot today showing how Flex applications can run on mobile devices with Flash Player 10.1 and how existing applications can be tweaked for the size constraints of these devices. Let me know what you think.

This week in Denver is going to be a total geek fest! I’m pretty excited about three great events:

• Monday Feb 15: Jason Huggins on Web-application testing with Selenium
• Tuesday Feb 16: Denver Tech Meetup
• Thursday Feb 18: Flex and The Cloud (I’m presenting at this one.)

There is a rumor that we might record a Drunk on Software episode after the event on Thursday. Apparently there are some people who disagree with my definition of “Flex app”. This could be the episode where we move from an Oprah style show to a Jerry Springer style of show. Sounds like fun to me. :)

If you are using a Flex SDK before 3.5a then it’s probably time to update. Flex SDKs before 3.4 have a security vulnerability. I believe the problem is actually in the HTML template, so when you update make sure that you also update the HTML templates that you are using. The Flex SDK 3.4 had the double responder bug. And the initial release of Flex SDK 3.5 had a bug with AIR’s ApplicationUpdaterUI. If you overlay your own AIR SDK on top of the Flex SDK then be aware that you will actually be overwriting the ApplicationUpdaterUI fix (comments in the bug report discuss how to deal with that).

Tomorrow night, Wednesday Feburary 10 2010, I’ll be speaking to the London Java Community about RIAs with Java, Spring, Hibernate, BlazeDS, and Flex. I hope to see you there!

A little over a year ago Bruce Eckel and I published First Steps in Flex. So far we’ve had great feedback on the book. The concise examples seem to resonate with how developers learn new technologies. Another way that developers learn is through seeing technologies firsthand. To better support that model of learning Bruce and I decided to create screencasts for each chapter of the book.

<img src=“http://www.jamesward.com/wp/uploads/2010/01/Screenshot-1.png” alt=“First Steps in Flex Screencasts” title=“First Steps in Flex Screencasts” width=“711” height=“521” class=“alignnone size-full wp-image-1521"style=“border:1px solid black” srcset=“https://www.jamesward.com/uploads/2010/01/Screenshot-1.png 711w, https://www.jamesward.com/uploads/2010/01/Screenshot-1-300x219.png 300w” sizes="(max-width: 711px) 100vw, 711px” />

Adobe’s Enterprise Evangelism team including Greg Wilson, Christophe Coenraets, and myself are in Tampa, FL this week. On Thursday night we are rounding up the local geeks at Taverna Opa for free beers and drunken confabulation about Flex, The Flash Platform, and other topics that bore most normal people. Hope to see you there!

The combination of Flex and The Cloud is quickly becoming an IT and paradigm changing combination. Here are a number of recently published resources for learning more about this :

• An article I wrote has been published on the online Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine: Flex and The Cloud: Is this really just Client/Server 2.0?
• I’ll be speaking on Thursday, February 18 2010 at the Denver Flex User Group about Flex and The Cloud
• The recording of a webinar I co-hosted on the new Salesforce.com Cloud platform for developers has been posted
• Jeff Douglas has posted a video walk through showing how to use the new Salesforce.com Flash Builder 4 extension for Flex + Cloud apps

Exciting stuff! Let me know what you think!

UPDATE 1: Flash Builder 4, BlazeDS 4, and Spring 1.0.3 have all been release so you no longer have to use beta or nightly builds of these products. Use the production versions!

UPDATE 2: A Refcard on Integrating Spring 3 and Flex 4, which I co-authored, is now available! It provides a step-by-step tutorial for setting up everything I show in the video below.

Last week I posted a screencast that walks through the basics of connecting a Flex 4 application to a Java / Spring back-end with the new Data Wizards in Flash Builder 4. Here is a new video that extends beyond just simple RPC method calls and adds Hibernate for persistence. Let me know what you think.