Archive: February, 2008
How to Develop with Adobe Flex/Air?
The current Flex version in the streets is Adobe Flex 2. Adobe Flex 3 is almost out, though. In Flex Camp they talked about Adobe Flex 3. But the brochure that was given to the audience talked about version 2. 
There is a beta version of the Flex SDK on Adobe Labs. Altough you can do a terrific job programming Flex applications using notepad, maybe it is not such a good idea. Al least concerning to productivity.
Flex Buider is the IDE meant to help developers while programming in Flex. It is based in Eclipse, so It is familiar to many developers. I was glad to know that Adobe gives free licenses on Flex Builder to educational purposes. So, students and teachers, go for it!
While working with Flex you will need to program in ActionScript 3.0. From what I’ve heard it is pretty nice, since it is objected-oriented. Now you can develop using your favorite best-practices and design patterns based on this paradigm.
Some of the functionalities are Scaffolding (generating a basic data management application based on a database schema), component theming (eg. text input, radio buttons, buttons, drop-down lists, etc) using some tools like Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks. It has some nice wizards what allow you to easily do things such as connecting to a web service, and generate an wrapper based on the WSDL definition.
Flex Builder has some Profiling functionality that allows you to track down and correct performance issues.
While demonstrating Flex Builder the speaker gave some tips about decreasing the overall size of the swf files generated by Flex. In Flex Builder you can create several modules that correspond to different swf files. This way you can re-use these component and light-weight the main swf file. When you create a Flex application it is compiled including the Flex runtime library. You can choose to load the runtime from an external swf. This way you can use caching of swf to optimize traffic usage.
Flash and Flex are meant to complement each other. Adobe Flash CS3 has the capability to export your Flash animations to the MXML format that is used by Flex. This way you can use Flash elements in your Flex applications, and even access these elements via Action Script to manipulate them. These Flash elements can have a code-behind file. This way you have a class that represents that element, where you can add meta-data and behavior (just like while developing in .NET using Visual Studio).
It is also possible to have embed Flex applications in your Flash animations. This allows you to easily integrate a form in your flash-based website, for instance. In Flex Camp one of the speakers showed some demos to show us that Flex can be used along with different flash movies that are compiled to different versions of Flash Player, and even communicate with those legacy applications/movies.
In the next (and last) post about Flex Camp @ Lisboa I will talk about server side (back-end) technologies working with Flex. Including web services, Flash Remoting and integrating Flex with PHP. Later tonight!
“Flex Camp is a series of conferences designed to help you understand more about Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR.”
And it was a really good conference. I have a whole new perspective at this emerging Adobe technology. This event in Lisbon (ISCTE University) was an initiative of RIApt (Portuguese Community of Rich Internet Applications)
It all starts with a simple question.
What is RIA?
Rich Internet Applications are part of the evolution of the world wide web. It started with Text-based UI and Mainframes, evolved to Integrated Media UI and client/server architectures, and now we are daily dealing with RIA in web applications.
People expect a great user experience while navigating over the web and using distributed applications that are part of a networked and global world.
What is Flex?
Flex is an open-source cross-platform/browser framework brought to the world by Adobe to produce RIA. The output applications donw with Flex are .swf files which can be viewed in any browser with a Flash Player up-to-date plugin. It is based in XML (the format is called MXML. It is pretty similar to XAML used by Microsoft (or the other way around 
)
Flex allows you to use SOAP, HTTP/S, REST among other technologies/protocols. A great advantage of this technology when compared, for instance, to Silverlight (to what else could I compare it?…) it is the fact that a lot of people already support flash-based websites in their browsers. And it is already completely cross-platform (I’m still waiting for Moonlight to say the same about Silverlight).
There were a lot of demonstrations of some Flex applications. Some of them pretty great.
http://www.picnik.com - Online Photo editor. Nice, but I prefer Splashup.
http://www.buzzword.com - A reaaaaally amazing online document processor. Are you thinking about Google Docs? Just forget about it. This one has a real interface. RIA style 
. Astonishing! You can even save your files as Word 2007 documents (or as an usual .doc file). Give it a try.
http://sliderocket.com - Online slide show presentation composer (an online Powerpoint, lol). It is nice, but I don’t think that is as useful as buzzword. When I create a presentation I often use a lot of images and sometimes large pictures. Uploading them to a web server to use them in the presentation takes a lot of time. The waiting time for uploading and downloading the presentation for editing is not very effective. I think that in text processing this kind of issue is not such a problem. A presentation typically is more visual and occupies much more space.
http://remix.mtv.com - an online video editing tool. Pretty nice, I wasn’t paying that much attention during this demo. Sorry…
What is Air?
Air is a platform for Desktop RIA. This means that you can have an application based on Flex/Flash running as a desktop application. It can give you a great user experience. It is also cross-platform. Since it runs as a local application, it can do much more that an web-based application. A lot of the security issues that can be problematic when talking about a web-browser environment are dropped.
Air has an API that allows you to work with I/O, Networking, Clipboard actions, integrate with other typical operating systems features, etc. All you can do with a regular desktop application can be done with Air (or so they say).
Some sample applications:
Adobe Media Player - just another media player…. It was used to show us the HD support of Flex during this conference.
Google Analytics Suite - Google Analytics shaped in a fancy Air application. It can generate PDF reports!
Twhirl - this one was not presented during Flex Camp, but I use it a lot. It is a Twitter client.
This post was about what were these technologies and some examples of real life applications.
Next post will be about development with Flex/Air. Stay tuned. 
Adobe has a web-based service in Beta stage that allows you to share documents. It is based on Flex technology. You upload your files, choose with whom you what to share them, and if you want them to be public (to everyone you give the direct URL).
Your files will be available in your library. You can preview your files, download them, share them or delete them.
If you want you can share your public files by adding a link to the URL or by embedding the given code into your webpages (which shows a flash-enabled preview of the shared file).
The preview pane only works with images and PDF documents.
I just love the User Interface. It has the usual Adobe clean look&feel. According to this webpage the maximum space available to each user is 1Gb. A REST-based API is also available.
The current file formats which are supported are:
- Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 formats, Rich Text Format (RTF), Open Office formats, text, and PDF.
- HTML
- Adobe supported image formats: GIF, JPEG, BMP, PNG
- Creative Suite file formats
- SWF and Captivate formats
- ZIP
Formats which were banned are:
- Media: MP3, AAC, MOV, WMV, OGG, FLV, XVID, DIVX.
- Fonts: TTF, DFONT, OTF
- Archive: TGZ, 7Z, SIT
- Executable files or script code: EXE, DLL, JAR, WAR, CAB, JS, VB
Nowadays we are used to customize a lot of the software we use by applying theming and skinning along with other settings. This kind of customization is present in the operating systems, messaging applications, web applications, etc.
Well, when it comes to development environments it is also possible to do that, and many people do.
Take a look at this blog where you can find several color schemes that can be used in Visual Studio. Just code with the colors that make you comfortable, or as your boss would demand: productive.
These kind of setting can be imported/exported in the Tools menu in both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008.
Um dos elementos que pode ser utilizado nos sites criados no Windows Sharepoint Services é o calendário. Podem-se criar diversos calendários para diferentes fins.
Para os criar é necessário clicar no menu Site Actions que se encontra no canto superior direito da página, abaixo da pesquisa. Dentro deste menu clica-se na opção Create.
A página que é aberta permite criar diversos tipos conteúdo para o site. Neste exemplo em concreto o que interessa é o elemento Calendar que se encontra dentro da secção Tracking.
O formulário de criação do calendário é bastante simples. É necessário um nome, pode-se escrever uma descrição do objectivo do calendário a criar, e escolher se deve ser adicionado um link para o calendário no menu lateral (Quick Launch) do site.
Após a criação do calendário este é exibido. Tem uma interface muito agradável, que dá a sensação de estarmos na presença do própro Calendário do Outlook. Existem 3 vistas principais dentro do formato de calendário: vista por dia, por semana e por mês. É possível ainda ver a lista de compromissos sem toda a riqueza gráfica do calendário (e sem o possivelmente mais elevado tempo de carregamento).
Podem ser ainda criadas vistas personalizadas, tal como a lista dos compromissos num dado sítio, ou os compromissos do utilizador, etc. Estas vistas são construídas pelo utilizador/administrador, sendo bastante flexíveis. Futuramente falarei da personalização de vistas (não só de calendários mas de qualquer tipo de lista).
O botão New no topo do calendário permite adicionar um compromisso ao calendário. É apresentado um formulário típico para este género de elementos. Título, local, data/hora, se é um evento para todo o dia, se é recorrente, etc.
Tal como em todas as listas criadas no Sharepoint, pode-se personalizar este formulário acrescentando campos que façam sentido para a marcação dos compromissos, como por exemplo a informação do responsável, ou um ficheiro anexo, etc. Vou novamente deixar este tópico de personalização de listas para próximos posts. Aliás, será o próximo sobre WSS 3.0.
Uma vez inserido o compromisso este passa a aparecer no calendário. Uma funcionalidade porreira é a possibilidade de sincronizar o calendário com o Outlook. Desta forma este calendário pode ser partilhado entre diversas pessoas, que ficam com a informação dos compromissos mesmo off-line. Encontra-se também disponível a subscrição como RSS feed, a exportação para Excel e ainda a subscrição de alertas de que já falei anteriormente.
Há uns tempos atrás falei do evento Scrum para Managers com o Mitch lacey. Recebi hoje mais um número da newsletter TechNet Flash, onde indicavam que os slides do evento já estão disponíveis para download.
Volto a frizar que o evento será repetido em Abril.
