Last night’s FlashInTO’s meet was great. Saw Matt Fabb speak on HTML5 and how slow it’s coming along. Dayton Pereira and Cam Warnock presented on what looks like a pretty solid iPhone app. The discussion panel on Apple vs. Adobe was both entertaining and informative.

From Matt’s research., we learned HTML 5 is not going to be a Flash killer. To be honest, I don’t know too much about HTML 5 because there is so much innovation elsewhere in the Flash world. Some take away points I learned were how the Video tags expose the file location of movie. The advantage in a crafted swf is that the swf app can be cognizant of the file location and download the movie from within the app from a URL it only knows. Firefox, Chrome and Opera are very HTML5 friendly. IE is not. It might be in IE9. Full-screen video is delegated to the HTML5 browser implementation and there is no JavaScript interaction with the movie.

Dayton and Cam from the sidelines presented their company’s latest project for the Olympics and CTV. I don’t own an iPhone but the application looked great. Their company has been known to create some pretty compelling Flash stuff. What made it an interesting presentation is how they were able to leverage core client-side development skills and apply it to iPhone app development. I thought it was great to learn about the trials and tribulations from the perspective of long-time Flash designers/developers. Learned about some of the obstacles they faced while working with Apple’s tools and how they over came them.

The final session of the night was a round table of developers arguing over Apple vs Flash. The idea was to pit the two in conflict and see what kind of rants would come of it. Some take away points were quite a bit of mobile surfing is done on the iPhone however surfing on mobile only makes up like 1% of the world’s traffic (or some other insignificant number). Apple should lose it’s mobile momentum when Flash-friendly devices start to put a good fight for eyeballs. There is nothing certain about this industry in that will be doing Flash or ObjectiveC 10 years from now. If history is any indicator, they’ll likely be some innovation that developers will flock to when it becomes the hottest technology to learn. Clearly, at the moment, there is no winner.

Trying to run through Elad’s tutorial “Test Driven Development using Flash Builder 4 beta and FlexUnit” and I couldn’t run the most basic fail test because of the following error:

Error #2010: Local-with-filesystem SWF files are not permitted to use sockets.

My project properties have compilation arguments for -use-network=false. Turns out the solution is to configure your Flash Player to trust the swfs in the project’s /bin-debug directory

1) Goto http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager04.html
2) Under “Always trust files in these location”, add your project’s /bin-debug folder
3) Run tests again

The following is a short summary of what (little) I know of Adobe’s commitment to the cloud from the perspective of a developer.

2007 - AIR Bus Tour Toronto
I first learned about the cloud from a presentation on the Salesforce AIR toolkit. The audience was presented with a demo of an AIR application that did CRUD operations against the Contact table on Salesforce. Nothing special … until he pulled the network plug out of the laptop and performed CRUD ops without being connected. When he reconnected, the data that he manipulated locally was then syncronzed to the Salesforce cloud. No tweening balls here.

The next month, I had joined a company that did Salesforce customization. Little did I know the next few years I would be dealing with configuring an environment with the ease of not having having to deploy one.

The toolkit used in the demo is alive and well today:

http://developer.force.com/flextoolkit

We didn’t end up using it because of the amount of SOQL that had to exist on the client-side. Instead, we rolled out our own.

2009 - Flash Builder for the Force.com
Adobe hacks up a beta of Flash Builder to support an integrated development experience. Developers can take advantage of the Data Services tab and drag and drop webservices on to abused controls like the data grid. Pretty cool stuff. I ran through the demo but did not have an imediate need or a new project to apply this on.

2009 - Adobe MAX/RIA Unleashed Boston
Kevin Hoyt announces Adobe Flash Collaboration Services which would go on to be renamed as Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Services. It was Flash Media Server with a hosted managed solution so that businesses did not have to worry about setting up supporting infrastructure.

Developers could sign up for a free account that allowed 15 minutes of real time collaboration.

I wish this existed 5 yrs ago when Java engineers we were working with were trying to push the limits of messaging for the in-game chat.

2010 - LCDS Managed!
This is awesome news. But what would be better news is if they made it cheaper. Last I checked, they made it even more expensive. Anyways, businesses now have an additional option of leveraging an Amazon cloud instances to run pre-configured LCDS instances.

I wanted to jump right into this today. The entry point is through Adobe LiveCycle Developer Express. Here’s an excerpt from the FAQ:

Q: How is a LiveCycle Managed Services deployment different than LiveCycle Developer Express?

A: LiveCycle Developer Express can be considered as a “sandbox in the cloud” for developers that want to develop their LiveCycle applications in the cloud rather than incur the costs of setting up a development environment on-premise. LiveCycle Developer Express is not intended for deployment of applications in production. In contrast, a LiveCycle Managed Services is intended for LiveCycle applications to be deployed in production in the cloud.

So I try to get my hands on something like an LCDS SDK and I run into this major obstacle that you have to be a paid member of AEDP, the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program. This is a problem. A $1500USD problem!

This really blows. At least on Force.com, you can get a Developer account for like $0.00. They give you a pretty fair amount of liberties to play with. The only pitfall is that your app can be used like 10minutes a day at most.

Anyways here’s the links on today’s big news with LCDS and the cloud.

Deployment Info:
http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/cloud

Development Info:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/aedp/dev_exp/

This is probably old news but I just discovered it now. I wish I had this URL all those times I received a bug from the field and we could not reproduce it in house. We would ask the client or the support person on the client side to right click on our applcation and select About Flash Player 10.

I am a senior level Flex/ActionScript developer looking to take on new and interesting projects. Please review my LinkedIn profile to learn more about my work in the Financial CRM and Online Gaming industries. Whether you are hiring or not, please do not hesitate to add me on LinkedIn. I would be more than happy to refer you to a candidate or discuss an opportunity down the road.

My Resume

The title of this post may not be the most aptly named but the internet has “saved that spot of hair on my head to be pulled out another day”. As I’ve learned, other people have already gone through these obstacles and I am glad they’ve published their experiences. The following is a summary of my own experience.

Getting Started
Problem: Baby steps; Automating HelloWorld.swf; New to build automation
Solution: Learn to install integrated Ant for point and click building; Write a script to automate Hello World
Resources: Installing Ant - http://flex.gunua.com/?p=78; First Script - http://flex.gunua.com/?p=79

Script is too simple and the project is really complicated
Problem: The project that is meant to be automated requires a script more elaborate than compile Hello World.
Solution: Take something that has worked for someone else and make it work for you. Then tweak it.
Resource: http://java-aap.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html

Script blows up; Java Heap space error
Problem: [mxmlc] Error: Java heap space
Solution: Allocate more memory for Ant
Resource: http://soenkerohde.com/2008/06/change-eclipse-ant-settings-when-you-run-out-of-memory/

mxlmc barks about Embed
Problem: [mxmlc] C:\..\blah..\MyControl.mxml( Line 64 ): Error: unable to resolve ‘assets/icons/icon_alert.png’ for transcoding
Solution: Simplify by commenting out any CSS style tags to expose just the embeds in use. Remember to restore it back afterwards. Use the root ‘/’ operator as the start point of a reference for non-code assets; mxmlc compiler uses the project root as context for the base dir.
Resources:
http://www.webappsolution.com/wordpress/2009/04/22/dealing-with-embed-tags-ant-builds-and-paths-to-resources/

mxmlc barks about Locale
Problem: Error: Unable to resolve resource bundle
Solution: Incorporate locale/{locale} into the ant script
Resources:
http://flexonjava.blogspot.com/2008/12/flex-3-unable-to-resolve-resource.html

For less than the price of a 360|Flex 2010 ticket, I can hit 3 days worth of events, cover transportation, and accommodations in both Boston and NYC. Early 2009 was an ugly time for the economy. The low-price barrier of the events recognizes this. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to an RIA event/conference. I am on a super tight budget since I learned weddings and homes are expensive.

I’m pretty stoked about learning what other developers are doing with the technology, meeting people, and exchanging ideas. Ask me anything about Salesforce and Flex and I’ll try to answer as best I can. I’ve been working with a team the last 2 years with integrating the two.

November 13 - “RIA Unleashed : Boston” is a 1 day 3 track event covering Flex, AIR, ColdFusion and related technologies and disciplines. Our three tracks are designed to allow you to focus on the technologies you are interested in. You’ll be able to pick and choose a variety of topics from top notch speakers.

http://riaunleashed.com/page.cfm/topics

November 16 &17 - “Flex Camp Wall Street” is a unique event that will provide practical tips, techniques and actionable advise for adoption of Flex and AIR based RIA within banks, brokerages, fund management companies, insurance firms and other financial services institutions.

http://www.flexcampwallstreet.com/sessions.html

The Budget
$30 RIA Unleashed Boston
$49 Flex Camp Wall Street NYC

$43 x 2 nights @ Priceline 3-star hotel in Waltham, MA
$51 x 3 nights @ Clean private room in Central Park, Manhattan
$100 x Roundtrip MegaBus TOR/NYC
$30 x Roundtrip MegaBus NYC/BOS

Checking my inbox for the usual bulk emails and decided to click through one. I must say I was very impressed with the relevance of the campaign experience. Dreamforce is a conference for Salesforce devs. The event carries a high price tag. When you click through to the website to learn more about the event, there is a dedicated section on how to “Justify Your Trip”.

The “General Dreamforce ROI letter” link available on http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF09/site/register/roi.jsp is such a cool idea. Haven’t seen something like this before and it definitely is in line with my personal dev philosophy that a conference should have a ROI.

Great place to get started @ http://blogs.adobe.com/flexdoc/2009/06/documentation_for_the_flex_4_a.html

Experience so far: Installed it and compiled 3.1 projects…a bit slower than usual…maybe a lot slower. Disappointed that the network monitor stuff only works for new 4.0 projects. There is a lot of developer features to take in. I haven’t been this excited since Flex 2 Beta 2.

Ben Forta has said: “The project is currently on hold. There is not enough requisition for the product to continue its development”

(Taken from Tom Chiverton’s site)

Make you’re voice heard and vote for a comeback http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-19053