Gearin' up for 360

360|Flex San Jose is just around the corner, and I've been totally dedicated to delivering a quality talk. It's my hope that attendees will take away a better understanding of the experiences of someone trying to learn Flex. Our talk could prove to be useful to experienced developers if they feel they may need to mentor other people into the world of Flex sometime soon. I've also arranged for some exotic dancers to join me on stage, so if the talk sucks, at least you won't be too bored.

LFFS - 13: Flex Builder Part 3 - Introduction To Debugging

The Learning Flex From Scratch series has a new installment on InsideRIA. This time we're talking about introductory debugging techniques using Flex Builder. Head on over, check out the source code and give debugging a shot!

Merapi Has Gone Live!

My friend and mentor, Adam Flater, has announced that the Merapi framework, which allows for a bridge between Java and Adobe AIR, has gone live as of Monday, July 14. This project has been a long time in the making for Adam and his collaborator, David Meeker of Roundarch in Chicago.

More and more as I continue to study Flex, I see experts in the field tout the importance of learning the framework. This may or may not seem obvious, but the fact remains that a beginning coder, (or a more experienced one at that) can end up coding themselves into a corner, so to speak, if they don't have a thorough understanding of the framework they're working with, be it Flex, Merapi, Cairngorm, or anything else.

For a nice presentation on the importance of understanding frameworks, check out David and Rhazes Spell's talk at the Chicago Flex and Adobe AIR User's Group in early June.

I'm going to be at 360|Flex San Jose 2008, In August. You should be too!

I'll be speaking at 360|Flex! You should be attending so we can hang out! Tom and John are cool too! Register now!

Adam Flater and I will be speaking about our experiences with the Learning Flex From Scratch series on InsideRIA. We're going to be focusing on the various aspects of mentorship, giving you each of our perspectives as mentor and mentoree, respectively.

I'm really looking forward to attending several of the sessions, meeting lots of people, and discovering what lies ahead after getting all this new knowlege! Hope to see you there.

Some Interesting Blog Material From John...

360Flex on the Switchboard, we'll connect you!

If you haven't heard about Switchboard, you should take a look. It's a cool little utility that let's your AIR apps become first class citizens to CS3 apps. Do you feel there is a piece of the Designer and/or Developer workflow that has been missing? Well, now you can build it. Tom and I are really happy to have Bernd Paradies with us in San Jose to talk about the cool stuff you can do with Patch Panel and Switchboard.

There's a forum for asking questions and posting your cool switchboards.

(This is from our eProgram Guide)
PatchPanel is a Flex library called cs3.swc, which allows Flex developers to access the ExtendScript DOM of the host application through ActionScript objects. SwitchBoard makes it possible for AIR stand-alone applications to work with Creative Suite applications. The SwitchBoard installer will install two services onto your machine: SwitchBoard Service forwards messages between AIR and CS applications; and the SwitchBoardLauncher launches target applications when necessary. AIR developers only need to include a Flex library called SwitchBoard.swc to their projects in order to send and receive scripts to/from other CS applications. SwitchBoard is available on labs now and PatchPanel will be posted on Adobe Labs this year.

Want to learn to make the most of Switchboard? Have you always to make that killer feature for a CS3 app? You won't want to miss out on what Bernd has to say. Register now!

LFFS - 12: Flex Builder Part 2 - Getting Acquainted With The Workbench

The Learning Flex From Scratch series on InsideRIA has a new installment. We've been dedicating some posts to using the Flex Builder IDE. Previously, we covered the installation of Flex Builder, both as a standalone IDE, and as a plugin with Eclipse. We're taking it to the next step this time by exploring the workbench layout as we import the calculator application we've covered before.

Flex Calculator Beta

The last two installments in the Learning Flex From Scratch series on InsideRIA have focused on the programming of a calculator built in Flex. Adam created a non-functioning calculator, and as an assignment, I was to code the logic into it so it would work.

I got it to work, sort of, but there are a few bugs. Here is the version I came up with:

View Source - Download Source

And here is the version that Adam came up with after doing a code review and applying the principles of best practices:

View Source - Download Source

We'll post an updated version when we get the bugs fixed, so please be patient!

Cheers!