December | 2007 | Alessandro Crugnola

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?

Thanks to Chad Upton who sent me some suggestions on how to improve FlashTracer I recently updated this extension adding some new features beside those already installed.
Now it is possible to define rules ( using the options panel ), which allow you to style the output messages (defining font-weight, font-style, color and text underline); they can work also like a filter to discard all the messages which don’t match the rules.

Here a screenshot of the new rules panel:

I also took advantage of this update to write the extension from scratch. It was my first extension and so the code wasn’t so clear, moreover I learnt how to use xul commands and observers.
I tested this extension on Vista, Ubuntu 7.10 and OSX 10.4. Here some screenshots of the running extension on those different OS:

Note. In some case you should first remove the mm.cfg file first. In Windows and linux it is placed into the user folder, in OSX you can find it under “/Library/Application Support/Macromedia”

Install now
P.S. Remember that you need the flash player debug.

UPDATE: A new flash tracer called fbtracer has been released. This new extension is integrated into Firebug. Read more here