From the Blogosphere

Post "Real-World Flex" One-Day Seminar
by Jesse Randall Warden
www.jessewarden.com
I gotta say, I had a lot of fun at the Real-World Flex Seminar SYS-CON put together. Things went, for me, really smoothly. Registration, getting Internet at the booth, and hooking up with my team. Free coffee was readily available, so I was set. It's always great because at every conference, I always get to put faces to people I've known online & collaborated with for years. I also get to meet new people and hopefully leak some of my passion to them and hopefully inspire them to want to create cool apps with Flex. I also got to rant via an interview; any excuse to talk about technology is fun.

Unfortunately, I had no idea I was in Manhattan. Things move so fast lately I just assumed I was going to some hotel in New York. I had no clue I was like... in THE Manhattan. What an idiot.

To spare the details, I basically had to go through 3 laptops in 15 minutes to get my presentation started. Since the laptop didn't have the apps I needed on it setup, I just breezed through an abbreviated version of my slides in 30 minutes. Thanks Jeremy Geelan & Dave Wolfe for the laptops. My test run with the Atlanta Adobe User's Group went to about an hour and a half, so naturally I talked at Mach-2, and skipped some of the lower level Flash SWF integration slides. I'll upload my full PowerPoint later this week for those who didn't get to the see the main six I removed.

Really great answering questions, really great meeting new people, and cool to talk albeit briefly about what people are working on; it's always fun. Thanks a lot SYS-CON, it was a great seminar! Hopefully your audience is inspired to at least investigate what it would take to get an information architect/designer on some of their existing software engineering teams if they don't already have one.

I'm working on getting the design rights to the design I'm using to build my real-time YouTube clone, so hopefully I can not only share the source this October, but also some of the nitty gritty FLAs and SWFs that I used to integrate such a complicated, traditional Flash design, into Flex.

Thanks to those who came, and again, thanks SYS-CON for the invite to speak, much appreciated.

Flickr Changes Bust Flexamp and other Flash Apps
by Code Zen
www.arpitonline.com/blog/
Flickr changed the crossdomain file on their servers a few days back breaking Flash applications across the www. The flickr crossdomain file at www.flickr.com has been removed and Flash developers have been asked to point their applications to api.flickr.com.

Unfortunately I missed the news and so far the last few days, related media has not been working. Hopefully I'll get down to recompiling it soon. I looked around the many Flex apps using Flickr and most haven't updated their apps.

In other news I have also started a new page to point to Flex links I have found on the web. I keep jumping from computer to computer and am not completely in love with del.icio.us (mostly because of the UI .... I wish it looked more like popurls basically one big page of links) so it seemed like a good idea.

Large Applications for Impatient Developers
by Anatole Tartakovsky & Yakov Fain
http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/
Half year ago I made few comments regarding tricks I like to use when developing large Flex 2 applications. Since then I have been receiving steady stream of emails - once every week in the beginning, up to few per days lately. They are asking for information from the upcoming RIA Book we are writing (http://www.riabook.com). Apparently, there are quite a few developers that a) become impatient if the build takes more then 5 seconds and b) are concerned that their application will be delivered to users with a similar attention span who could walk away in 10 seconds or less - regardless of artwork in the progress meter.

That pretty much forces developers to break the applications in the manner similar to the current generation of loosely coupled applications:

• The application has to use RSL methodology to speed up development and minimize linkage time
• The bootstrap application has to be kept to bare minimum - just initialize global managers and list common runtime libraries - to keep "rebuild" time low and initial load fast
• Optimized runtime libraries - while it is tempting to load complete framework SWC with every application, it would amount to extra 500-600KB on the initial download - better managememt via automatic extract to shared RSL is required
• The application should make use of automatic download of "pages" - essentially parts of application that are either optional or independent or can be customized/added due to subscription /security.

Given those requirements, the book talks about static linkage of Flex applications (unlike classical environments that compile everything and then link object modules Flex starts from the "application" and pools necessary resources via sophisticated linker/preprocessor/compiler/optimizer/packager workflow). The book describes the differences between MXML and ActionScript applications, differences between compile-time and run-time linkafe, class loading, self-initialization of dynamically loaded SWFs, and other small details that you only need to know when your application grows over 10-15 screens /1MB of statically linked SWF.

Flex-AJAX Bridge and the Unsupported setAttribute() method By IE
By Marco Casario
http://casario.blogs.com/
I'm testing the Flex AJAX bridge and I spent some time to solve this unsupported tag by Internet Explorer myDiv.setAttribute("onblur", u_onblur).

In Firefox and Mozilla all worked but in order to make it works in IE I had to change the JavaScript code into :

i_elemento.onblur = u_onblur;

where u_onblur is the second parameter passed as argument to my function :

changeTag("username",checkUsername,"username_check","[betweeen 5 and 20 characters]");

Here's my function:

function changeTag(id_elemento, u_onblur, id_span, testo_span)
{
    var l_elemento = getByID(id_elemento);
    var parentDiv = l_elemento.parentNode;
    i_elemento=document.createElement("input");
    i_elemento.setAttribute("id", id_elemento);
    i_elemento.setAttribute("value",
    Trim(getByID(id_elemento).innerHTML));
    i_elemento.setAttribute("maxlength", "20");
    i_elemento.setAttribute("size", "30");
    i_elemento.setAttribute("name", id_elemento);
    i_elemento.setAttribute("type", "text");
    // it does not work on IE
    //i_password.setAttribute("onblur", u_onblur);
    i_elemento.onblur = u_onblur;
    parentDiv.replaceChild(i_elemento, l_elemento);

    s_elemento=document.createElement("span");
    s_elemento.setAttribute("id", id_span);
    var s_elemento_content = document.createTextNode(testo_span);
    s_elemento.appendChild(s_elemento_content);
    var sp2 = document.getElementById("labelpassword");
    var parentDiv = i_elemento.parentNode;
    parentDiv.insertBefore(s_elemento, sp2);
}