This morning I had the opportunity to present at the WidgetsLive! Conference about Flex and widgets. I showed a few examples using Ely Greenfield’s DisplayShelf component. One example pulled in images from Flickr. Check out the demo and the code. I also was thinking it would be cool to throw some YouTube videos into the DisplayShelf component. After a few minutes I was able to make it work with the exception that I couldn’t get the reflection to not flicker during video playback.
Last week while many of us were gallivanting around Vegas at MAX, Oracle was holding their OpenWorld conference in San Francicso. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to be in two places at once, so I didn’t attend OpenWorld. But I did have the opportunity of building a Flex demo for one of the Oracle keynotes. I really just took a few of our sample applications and portalized them. You can see the end result on Oracle’s Portlet Testing Site.
UPDATE - I’ve created a new version of Flex Paint which doesn’t require the server roundtrip.
Flex allows you to easily create beautiful UIs. But what if you want to take a piece of the UI and save it as an image? Well, using Tinic’s AS3 PNG Encoder, Remote Object, and Flash’s BitmapData and ByteArray API it’s very easy. To show how this is done, I created a simple application called Flex Paint.
I recently conducted an eSeminar on building enterprise applications with Flex Builder and Flex Data Services. You can view the recording of that presentation at: http://seminars.breezecentral.com/p24622178/
In my session I promised that I would formally document the process for debugging Flex & Java together in Flex Builder. So finally, here is that documentation.
I just finished the first beta release of WeBudget based on Flex 1.5, Cairngorm 0.99, and EJB 3. My wife and I use WeBudget to manage our personal budget. This version was an attempt to learn Cairngorm and EJB 3. Cairngorm really helped to organize the Flex code like a typical J2EE project which makes the code easier to debug and maintain. EJB 3 makes writing backend Java code brainless. The combination of Flex, Cairngorm, and EJB 3 is a very compelling platform for RIAs.
Last night I created a simple WYSIWYG tool based on Flex, inspired in part by the Zamples idea of Live Code Examples. The goal is to do on-the-fly conversion of simple markup to Flash objects. This code is particularly useful for environments where content management is seperate from the web application. This is pretty basic and there may be better ways to do this, but I hadn’t seen this done before so I took a stab at it.
Ever since I got into Macromedia Flex I have not been able to view .mxml applications in any Mozilla based browser on Linux. Mozilla for some reason cuts off the Flash at around 240 pixels in width. I have searched the web and Mozilla’s Bugzilla trying to find others who have also experienced this problem. I haven’t found much. A few Mozilla bugs seem to indicate others had this same problem.
For the past six months I have been building one of the first ever Rich Internet Application (RIA) portals. The project has been incredibly fun and wrought with many challenges. Since the inception of our crazy idea to build a RIA portal I have learned a great deal about where the web is going. My RIA adventure started when I first encountered Macromedia ‘s Flex Explorer. I saw the very elegant components, and I was awed. Then I saw examples of the code I would soon be writing, and I was hooked. I couldn’t believe that a terrible UI developer like me could so easily create a beautiful RIA. I dove right in and quickly built a prototype of our soon-to-be portal complete with DataGrids and RemoteObjects, which were written in Java and exposed via AMF to the Flash-based front end. After a short time developing in Flex I realized I could never again enjoy building a Struts / JSP / HTML web application. They are too cumbersome and tedious for me after seeing how easy it is to build web applications in Flex.
The second version of the TreeGrid component is done. It is working much better thanks to comments from Matt and Jose. I was able to resolve all of the issues I was aware of except the hard coded reference to “product”. I was even able to get recursion working. I think I may have to eventually extend DataGrid so that I can add column sorting. Here are the changes I would still like to make to it:
For a while I have been wanting to create a TreeGrid component for Flex. The
basic idea is to allow a user to navigate a Tree like object within a
DataGrid. Well, I just finished a very hacky version 1:
Here are some problems with the current implementation:
I get strange flicker when mousing over the cells. Don’t know why. If I resize the right column to cover part of the Title, the title doesn’t get clipped.