"People are now expecting the same richness and ease of use in their workplace applications that they have in their daily Web experiences, but companies today are faced with strained development resources and less time to create intuitive applications," said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. "The new Adobe Flash Platform tools help solve this challenge by reducing time to market for generating compelling applications and content. Using Adobe Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst, developers and designers can now work together more productively to create rich experiences that employees, customers and partners expect."

SAP is one company that is certainly excited about the releases. "With the arrival of the ‘digital generation’ in the workplace, workers expect a new approach to the enterprise and want to consume business applications like they do with other tools on the Internet," says Herve Couturier, executive vice president, R&D NetWeaver and Business Objects, SAP.

"The adoption of the Adobe Flash Platform, particularly with the use of Adobe Flash Builder, has helped SAP create even better user interfaces and interactive content for our next-generation applications, like our new SAP BusinessObjects Explorer," he adds.

The releases definitely have some designers and developers excited. Here’s a sample of some enthusiasm on Twitter:

Resources that those interested in the releases may want to consider checking out include:

- Beta videos
- What’s new in Flash Builder
- What’s new in the SDK

The releases are available for download at Adobe Labs. If you’ve downloaded any of them, share your thoughts on them in the comments below.

Air took a baby step onto a platform that isn’t Windows or Macintosh with the rollout of its Adobe AIR for Linux Alpha release. “This prerelease of Adobe AIR for Linux is alpha-quality and is not feature complete,” the company cautioned in its announcement.

Current AIR apps that perform well on the two mainstream operating systems may not perform as well on Linux. That’s due to the missing features as listed in the release notes.

The company also provided an update to Adobe Flex Builder to support application development with Air. Open source fans should note Adobe released both the Flex framework and the BlazeDS messaging technology under various open source licenses recently.

Flash Player 9, available on Linux, is not open source, though the Tamarin virtual machine supported by Adobe and hosted by the Mozilla Foundation (Happy 10th birthday to Mozilla!) is; Tamarin forms the core of Flash Player, as Adobe noted in a statement.

Adobe’s run-up and embracing of Linux and open source took some time, to put it delicately. The company seems to have found a model that opens it to more developers while protecting its valuable revenue stream; perhaps open source projects will bring even more developers to the Adobe banner.

There are quite a few changes between the Apollo Alpha (aka "M3") and the new AIR (aka "M4") builds so you’ll have to make some source code changes to rebuild your Apollo apps. It’s not a big deal – I had my Apollo app – an administrative console for a website – up and running as an AIR app in just a few minutes. Despite the new Flex 3 SDK, my (recompiled) Flex apps and my new AIR app seem to work just fine with my existing CFMX 7 and CF 8 sites.

And tomorrow I get a whole day of training on AIR so I’ll have more to say in the next few days.

Comments

If you take a second and think about what Adobe wants to do in the market, this move has NOTHING to do with desperation. It has EVERYTHING to do with aspiration. Adobe wants everyone building browser-based rich internet apps to do so with Flex. It’s that simple.

Today, the Flex SDK is free. Free is a great way to attract developers – don’t charge them to learn your stuff. Good is an obvious necessary condition for attracting developers also. This announcement is nothing more than moving to the next level to attract even more developers.

Part of this is because of the proprietary slur against apps that run inside of the Flash player (Flash, Flex & Apollo apps). The alternative to Flex Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) is to use AJAX, and depending on the AJAX toolkit/framework you select, you’re using something that is OSS or proprietary. Here’s a list of some AJAX/RIA vendors. For the most part, you have a much larger selection of open source goodies if you start with AJAX for your RIAs. And your apps don’t need the Flash player to be installed (at the correct version level or above).

As any middleware vendor will tell you, the SDK isn’t where you make money, and that’s not what Adobe intended either. They are going to do that with the Flex Builder and the Flex Data Services product. (I’d guess some version of Flex Builder goes out the door free/OSS in a year).

Adobe is doing the right thing. Getting developers on board with the free (today) and OSS (in June) Flex SDK. When they start writing enterprise applications that need to connect to back-end data, that’s when Adobe will ask for a PO Arguably, once developers know and are productive with Flex, convincing their managers to write that PO is going to be a whole lot easier.

So, Dana, I’d very much disagree that this is a desperate move.

PS: I wish it were as I’m really not a fan of Flash (from a usability standpoint), but that’s another story

PPS: Surprised that Duane doesn’t have anything to add on his blog.

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Adobe Flex Enters Open Source

Through their shift of the Flex SDK to an open source model, Adobe has presented a compelling challenge to developers who may have considered trying Microsoft’s Silverlight platform.

Microsoft’s entry into cross-browser, rich Internet application creation just hit a big speed bump. Open source developers who inherently mistrust Microsoft on some level are likely to check out Adobe Flex for their cross-browser app construction needs.

This news also helps boost support for Adobe’s Apollo product. Apollo allows developers to take an application created for online use, and repurpose it as a desktop application running on top of the Apollo framework.

Adobe announced the release schedule for open sourcing Flex on their wiki:

The source code for the Flex framework is already available within the free distribution of the current Flex 2 SDK. By this summer, Adobe plans to put in place most of the infrastructure (public bug database and public daily builds) required to run the Flex SDK as an open source project. We expect to complete the transition to a fully open source project (source code for the compiler, infrastructure for community contributions, etc.) by the end of 2007.

Companies that wish to obtain commercial licenses for the Flex SDK will be able to do so. That applies to other Adobe products that use the Flex SDK, like Flash Player and ColdFusion.

Robert Scoble has a couple of videos taken with the Adobe Flex team. They discuss the news about open sourcing Flex, and review Flex’s architecture and components as related to the announcement.

Here is a quick tip for another method to use. It’s ugly – but effective.

Modify your onError to dump the errors and log to a file like so:

<cffunction name="onError" returnType="void" output="false">
   <cfargument name="exception" required="true">
   <cfargument name="eventname" type="string" required="true">
   <cfset var temp = "">

   <cflog file="my app" text="#arguments.exception.message#, #arguments.exception.detail#">
   <cfsavecontent variable="temp">
   <cfdump var="#arguments#">
   </cfsavecontent>
   <cffile action="write" file="c:kuler.html" output="#temp#">
   <cfdump var="#arguments#"><cfabort>
</cffunction>

I wrapped a dump of the arguments (which contain my exception) and simply save it to the C drive as an HTML file. I then have this file open in my browser.

As I debug, I can simply reload the tab in Firefox to see what the latest error was.

I find this especially useful when the exception message is a bit too vague.

With the dump I get the full trace of files where the error occurred.

Let me be absolutely clear: Do not use this code in production. It isn’t nice. It doesn’t play well with others. It runs with scissors.

You get the idea. But I thought I’d share.

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Raymond Camden, ray@camdenfamily.com
http://ray.camdenfamily.com

Raymond Camden is Vice President of Technology for roundpeg, Inc. A long
time ColdFusion user, Raymond has worked on numerous ColdFusion books
and is the creator of many of the most popular ColdFusion community web
sites. He is an Adobe Community Expert, user group manager, and the
proud father of three little bundles of joy.

Flex was using remoting to send the form information to ColdFusion. ColdFusion was doing nothing with the data.

It was just an empty method. However, every time I’d try to send the data I’d get an error.

Here is where things got weird. The first thing I tried was launching ServiceCapture so I could see the response from ColdFusion.

However – when I would send the form data, ServiceCapture would actually hang. I had to force it down.

So then I went to my ColdFusion logs. Nothing was reported in the error log but an empty string. At this point I’m really confused.

I go into my Application.cfc file’s onError and added this:

<cfsavecontent variable="temp">
<cfdump var="#arguments#">
</cfsavecontent>
<cffile action="write" file="c:foo.html" output="#temp#">

Now I get somewhere. When I look at the file, I see no message, no detail, but I do see a type for the error:

java.lang.StackOverflowError

What the heck? (Ok, I didn’t say heck.) So now I start trying random crap. First I change the method names. Doesn’t help. Finally I change my Flex code to send nothing to ColdFusion. And it works.

Um. Ok.

I restored my code and noticed something….

core.addAdminUser(username,password);

username and password were the form elements, not the values of the form elements. Somehow Flex thought this was ok. Can you really send a component over the wire? Flex could. And while it didn’t die, it was enough to freak out ServiceCapture and ColdFusion.

Changing my Flex to:

core.addAdminUser(username.text,password.text);

made everything kosher. Whew!

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Raymond Camden, ray@camdenfamily.com
http://ray.camdenfamily.com

Raymond Camden is Vice President of Technology for roundpeg, Inc. A long
time ColdFusion user, Raymond has worked on numerous ColdFusion books
and is the creator of many of the most popular ColdFusion community web
sites. He is an Adobe Community Expert, user group manager, and the
proud father of three little bundles of joy.

FlashVars are simple values passed in to the Flash movie from the HTML/JavaScript that embeds the SWF. I thought I’d follow it up with a practical example on an application I’m working on right now.

I’m building an administrator interface for a web site. This application will make use of Flash Remoting to talk to a CFC. The path to the CFC isn’t hard coded though. To make matters worse, my dev environment isn’t exactly like production. Therefore, the “dot path” location of the CFC needs to be dynamic. I decided to pass in the path via FlashVars.

I had things working on the Flex side, hard coded, so the first thing I did was to remove the source attribute from my RemoteObject tag:

<mx:RemoteObject id="core" destination="ColdFusion" showBusyCursor="true" >

My Flex code was already running code on creationComplete:

<mx:VBox xmlns:mx=”http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml” width=”100%” height=”100%” xmlns:views=”views.*” creationComplete=”init()” >

So I simply updated my init() function:

private var componentroot:String = "";

private function init():void {
   componentroot = this.parameters.componentroot;
   core.source = componentroot + "components.admin";
}

As I mentioned in the previous entry, the data from the FlashVars is available as this.parameters.name, where name is the FlashVar name.

So how do I test this? One of the cool things about FlexBuilder is that you can modify the HTML generated when you view your application. I went into the html-template folder, opened up index.template.html, and changed this line:

"flashvars",'historyUrl=history.htm%3F&lconid=' + lc_id + '',

To this:

"flashvars",'componentroot=secretproject.server.&historyUrl=
history.htm%3F&lconid='+ lc_id + '',

This isn’t the final step though. I’m deploying to a site running ColdFusion. I’ll eventually change my index.html file to an index.cfm file and use an Application variable for the component root.

So now I have a problem. The this.parameters structure only exists for the core Flex file of an application, not the children.

How can I get my children to also use the value? I’m thinking what I’ll do is pass the value from parent to child, since that is relatively easy to do.

I could make the child run code to grab it from the parent, but that is such a pain to do. (More on that later.) I don’t want to have to create a custom even just to read a simple value from the parent. (But that may just be me being lazy.

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Raymond Camden, ray@camdenfamily.com
http://ray.camdenfamily.com

Raymond Camden is Vice President of Technology for roundpeg, Inc. A long
time ColdFusion user, Raymond has worked on numerous ColdFusion books
and is the creator of many of the most popular ColdFusion community web
sites. He is an Adobe Community Expert, user group manager, and the
proud father of three little bundles of joy.

Pikeo is a photo sharing site. Upon activating the link through my email, I noticed something very familiar, most of the flash related interface are done with Flex.

Techcrunch reports that; Pikeo also has a fast uploading function that doesn’t require users to download a pesky desktop application. You can upload an entire folder directly from the site and it works in the background so that users can continue to browse photos while uploading their own. Well, we know that this is because it uses the Flash File Upload coolness.

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Brajeshwar is an ace digerati and an ardent believer of
KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), he envisions pushing the technical
envelope time and again for the betterment of commercial and
practical applications.

http://www.brajeshwar.com/

Although full screen mode can be used for any type of Flash application, Flash video applications were the primary use case Adobe focused on in this initial implementation. For this reason, there are a number of security restrictions to full screen mode which may limit its usefulness with some fully interactive Flash applications or games. Adobe plans to address these limitations in future versions of the Flash Player as they continue to develop this feature.

Developers need to understand the following end-user security-related restrictions and design content accordingly. These restrictions apply to the Flash plugin and ActiveX control, but not to the Flash standalone player or Flash projectors.

• To enable full screen, developers must add a new object and embed tag parameter – allowFullScreen’ – to their html. This parameter defaults to false, or not allowing full screen. To allow full screen, developers must set allowFullScreen to true in their object/embed tags.
• An overlay dialog will appear when the movie enters full screen mode, instructing the user how to exit and return to normal mode. The dialog appears for a few seconds, then fades out.
• The ActionScript that initiates full screen mode can only be called in response to a mouse click or key press. If it is called in other situations it will be ignored (in ActionScript 2.0) or throw an exception (in ActionScript 3.0).
• Users cannot enter text in text input fields while in full screen mode. All keyboard input and key-related ActionScript is disabled while in full screen mode, with the exception of the keyboard shortcuts that take the viewer out of fullscreen mode.

Another enhancement that was added based on developer feedback is the ADDED_TO_STAGE and REMOVED_FROM_STAGE events to allow a DisplayObject to monitor and know when it can or cannot access its stage property. The ADDED_TO_STAGE event is dispatched to a DisplayObject when it (or the tree in which it is contained) is added to the stage. The REMOVED_FROM_STAGE event is dispatched to a DisplayObject when it (or the tree in which it is contained) is removed from the stage.

The list of reported issues that have been fixed in Update 1. (The numbers in brackets indicate the reported bug number)

• MovieClip.currentLabel behavior inconsistent with MovieClip.currentLabels. Returns null, but correct label name is expected. (169127)
• Setting stage.mouseChildren or stage.tabChildren to false does not disable mouse interaction for the stage’s children. (175090)
• Method closures do not work as keys in a Dictionary. (177261)
• Pixel-snapped FlashType has incorrect spacing when scaled as compared to changing the point size of the font. (174530)
• Non-integer letter-spacing values in CSS corrupts text field rendering. Floating point values for letter-spacing in CSS are now supported. Previously, non-integer values were not handled correctly and text would not draw as expected. (182482)
• When the hitTestState of a SimpleButton is the same as any of the visible states, moving the SimpleButton instance will result in screen artifacts. Workaround: use a different shape instance for the hitTestState. (172822)
• When calling out to ExternalInteface for FSCommand various timer related events, such as “enter frame,” no longer trigger. (178286)
• Pixel-based grid fitting does not work for Flash Player 9.0.20.0 for PowerPC or Intel-based Macintosh computers in Rosetta mode. Pixel-based grid fitting works in native mode on Intel-based Macs. Designers and developers that are using pixel-based grid fitting for Flash Type should use native mode on Intel-based Macs or the PowerPC version 9.0.16.0 if developing and viewing content on a PowerPC system. (180560)
• Crash in ActiveX control related to onSoundCompletion handling.(177131)

References

• Download the latest Flash Player 9
• Emmy Huang detailed article on Introducing Adobe Flash Player 9
• Flash Player 9 Release Notes.

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