flex

Releases: BlazeDS & Flex Builder 3 Beta 3

Alessandro Crugnola actionscript, flex ,

Today is a good day for announcements!
I’ve just read the Adobe plans to release, as opensource (LGPL 3?), on labs its Remoting and Messages technologies under the codename BlazeDS.
Moreover Adobe published AMF binary data protocol specifications ( the technology on which the BlazeDS remoting implementation is based).
The source code will be available for download in early 2008

Second announcement is the release on labs of Adobe Flex Builder 3 Beta 3 (M4). Cool, I’m working almost all the time with flex!.. but why only mac and pc downloads are available? The Linux version is still the alpha released on 12 October!

Actually I almost switched to ubuntu, moreover the fact that there is Flex Builder also for Linux allowed me to spend more and more time on my ubuntu partition and I really feel satisfied. Flex Builder for linux is more and more stable than all the other Flex betas for Windows or Mac ( even if the more I use eclipse and the more I hate it… ), so why give us only that candy?

Flex Canvas bug when it is zoomed in and “horizontalCenter = 0”

Alessandro Crugnola flex ,

Recently I came across a Flex bug when working on canvas. If you have a canvas with an object centered inside ( horizontal or vertical, it’s the same ) and scale this object the result is that the canvas will clip left and top its contents!
To understand what I mean see this example and try to scale the image:

[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”static” fversion=”10.0.22″ movie=”http://blog.sephiroth.it/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/canvas_bug.swf” width=”250″ height=”290″ targetclass=”flashmovie”]

Get Adobe Flash player

[/kml_flashembed]

And this is the code used:


< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

1









As you can see once the image is scaled and it’s bigger that its parent, you wont be able to see it top left corner anymore. This is an annoying bug for me!

Later I found that someone opened a ticket in the Flex bug management system here: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-13009
A couple of days ago I received a notification that the bug has been closed… and incredible they closed it as NOT A BUG!
I can understand that finding the bug in a file with 5000 and more lines of code it’s not easy and can cause horrible headache, but the reason they gave it’s nosense! It’s completely a different thing that the reason of this bug.

Moreover what’s the connection between flash and html?

Flex have been designed since the 1.0 version as a framework for building RIA (Rich Internet Applications).
A RIA have to behave as a desktop application that runs using the web browser. One of the advantages of Flex agains Ajax is that the first technology provide to the user a behaviour which is much more similar to desktop applications that the one provided using HTML+Javascript. And so my questions is: why should Flex behave like HTML when one of its most important features is to be different from HTML ?
Flex behaves like other SDKs used to develop desktop apps in many situations which are much less important than the one hilighted above. So why close this bug (yes. it is a bug) providing as explanation that it is correct because it behaves like HTML ?

Flex Frameworks

Alessandro Crugnola actionscript, flex , , , ,

Luke Bayes and Ali Mills of PatternPark made a presentation for the Silicon Valley Flex Users Group (SilvaFUG) of 9 different frameworks and toolkits for creating Flex applications: Cairngorm, PureMVC, ARP, MVCS, Flest, Model-Glue: Flex, ServerBox Foundry, Guasax, and Slide.

Watch the presentation: http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/p12266504/
See the slides: http://www.asserttrue.com/files/ApplicationFrameworks/index.html

Their Conclusion?
“PureMVC by Cliff Hall beats out the alternatives“.

  • Composition over inheritence
  • Liberal use of Interfaces
  • Indirection is used but not overwhelming
  • Instance members hide singleton references from application code
  • MXML views can be extremely thin
  • Benefits of Cairngorm, with few of the disadvantages.

I must admit I never used PureMVC, the only framework I’m currently using is Cairngorm, even if I bookmarked the pureMVC page long time ago promising myself to watch it more in deep. Now it’s time to keep the promise.

Flex Camp, Milan 19th October 2007

Alessandro Crugnola flex , ,

“Flex Camp is a series of conferences designed to help you understand more about Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR“, first started by flex.org.

This is the first flex Camp conference in Italy, scheduled on 19th October 2007 in Milan.

– Actionscript 2 to Actionscript 3 migration
– Flex and Flash CS3 integration
– Flex Builder 3. A first look
– Flex and AIR

For more details and to participate please visit:  http://flex.actionscript.it…/title=Pagina_principale

FontReader, convert TrueType fonts in graphics with Flex

Alessandro Crugnola actionscript, flex , , , , , ,

In the last period I was trying to find a way to convert a TrueType font character into graphics for a new Flex project.
First I found a way using TTX which can convert a font file into an XML with all the Glyph informations needed to recreate the font outline.

But this process requires that all the .ttf files should be converted using TTX before thay can be used in Flash.
So I investigated a bit more and I found a really useful and really well done java project: TypeCast.
What I’ve done next was just to do a porting of the available java code into Actionscript 3 and it works like a charm! It can read a .ttf file and extracts all the font informations, including all the glyph outlines.

See a demonstration of thie Flex application.

Here you can download the source code:
[attachments docid=1026 force_saveas=”1″ logged_users=”0″]

New Flash player 9,0,45 & Flex patch

Alessandro Crugnola actionscript, flex , , , , ,

If you’re a Flex 2 developer you should download the newly released Flash player 9.0.r45 debug version.

Once installed the new player remember to apply also this patch to Flex builder 2, otherwise it will throw you an error every time debugging an app (expecially if you’re using Firefox).
This patch also does the following:

“This patch allows the Flex SDK and Flex Builder to use SWFs and SWCs created by Flash CS3 Professional. After applying the patch you should be able to take classes and symbols compiled with Flash CS3 Professional and compile them into a Flex application. You should also be able to take classes and libraries compiled with Flex and use them in a Flash CS3 Professional project.

In addition, this patch allows the Flex debugger (fdb) to function correctly with Flash Player 9 (9.0.45.0) in the Mozilla browser.”

Flex 2.0.1 SDK Hotfix 1 (bug fix)

Alessandro Crugnola flex , , ,

Adobe just released an update for Flex 2.0.1 SDK, download it from http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=kb401224

Flex 2.0.1 SDK hotfix 1 (build 159086) is a collection of bug fixes that have been completed since the Flex 2.0.1 release on January 5, 2007. This hotfix release is being made available to Flex customers who are experiencing any of the issues described in this document and require the provided bug fixes. Installation of this hotfix release is not recommended for customers who are not experiencing one of the described issues.

Cell Renderers
192854 itemEditors on DataGrid don’t correctly commit data when dragEnable=true
192558 Combo renderer in a DataGrid causes problems on the DataGrid scroll
DataGrid
193316 DataGrid with headerRenderer and selectedIndices becomes uneditable
194284 DataGrid incorrectly focuses hScrollbar
194311 After clearing data from DataGrid, RTE occurs
183325 When set verticalScrollPolicy=”off” in datagrid, can’t move up/down to show more rows
192117 DataGrid whose width depends on the size change of Browser gets RTE
196149 DataGrid with lockedColumnCount incorrectly displays using vScrollbar
193106 Horizontal scrolling DataGrid cannot display the updated width
194972 DataGridColumn visibility=false doesn’t work (when set in mxml)
192466 The width of the last 2 columns is displayed narrower after horizontal scrolling
193641 If you resize the player window with a DataGrid with width=100%, the DataGrid’s last column continues to grow rather than showing more columns
192695 After horizontal scrolling, changing the width of DG updates the width of incorrect column
192694 Changing the width of DataGrid that is disappeared gets error (RTE)
192728 Using an itemRenderer as an editor may not update the dataProvider
195589 DataGrid with horizontalScrollPolicy cell and width behavior changed
193319 Change event doesn’t occur when moving the line using Enter and Tab key on DataGrid
195389 Tab key is functional even if scrollbar is focused
Debugging (Macintosh only)
193086 Once RTE is thrown and debug session is selected to be terminated, closing browser window does not let FB release debug session
Other
193354 CollectionChangeEventKind in CollectEvent.COLLECTION_CHANGE incorrect
192765 If you use MenuBar.dataDescriptor.setEnabled(…) on a top level item of a MenuBar, the item is not changed
126610 Binding to a static variable gives warning Unable to detect changes to ‘var’ and does not show changes
193102 Parent window becomes available after close grandchild Popup
194872 Update PhotoViewer sample README.html file with the additional compiler arguments needed to compile
Tree
192365 Selecting a node then collapsing its grandparent doesn’t move selection up to the grandparent
192347 RTE when tweening occurred while opening nodes in Tree (in Flex Explorer sample)

BTW, it seems they haven’t fixed the Nullpointer exception caused by invalid xmllists..