Adrian Parr’s Blog

On Thursday 24th January I went along to the Flex London User Group meeting at Shoreditch Town Hall. This month’s meeting coincided with an official Adobe event, and therefore there was a huge turnout. Normally we get around 30 people turning up, this month there was approx. 250 people (requiring a change of venue). The speakers were Serge Jespers and James Ward.

Here is a summary of what they covered …

Serge Jespers

• Flash Player update to “Moviestar”
• H.264 codec
• Adobe services such as Scene7, Share, Pacifica (VOIP), Cocomo (collaberation app)
• Thermo (PSD > MXML)
• Flash Player 9 installation stats
  • 3.4 billion installs worldwide
  • 94.3% of European users have FP9
• Flex job trends (www.indeed.com)
• Examples of Flex Apps (Buzzword, SlideRocket, Picnik)
• Flex.org showcase
• Desktop RIA’s using Adobe AIR
• AIR example Digimix
• Flex Builder 3 Overview
  • Skinning a button using Photoshop and slicing
    • Name the slices (Button_upSkin, Button_overSkin, Button_downSkin)
    • Save out as PNGs
    • Import Artwork in to Flex
    • Flex will then create a CSS file
• Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3
  • Select MovieClip
  • Commands >> Convert symbol to Flex Component
  • Creates a component (SWC)
  • Add it to Flex build path
  • It then becomes part of your framework. It even has code hinting.
• Create MXML Module.
  • Can be used as an external asset like LoadMovie
• bin-debug <– only for testing
• bin-release <– put this online
• Reduce Flex app filesize by using Runtime Shared Library
  • Framework will then try and load from cached version on client’s computer.

James Ward

• Flex 3 Charting Components - ILOG Elixir
• Flex 3 SDK is Open Source (stlab.adobe.com)
• Open Source BlazeDS
  • Remoting and HTTP-based messaging technology
  • Opened up the AMF format (Action Message Format - AMF3)
  • Demo of BlazeBench
    • Comparison between AMF, Dojo, SOAP, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)
    • AMF is quicker
    • Parsing of data is very, very quick
    • AMF has compression built in to the protocol (no need to use GZip)
  • BlazeDS comes from Adobe LiveCycle
    • LiveCcycle Data Services ES uses RTMP to stream data to the client (this is not available in BlazeDS).
    • Check out Flex MXML Producer and Consumer
• Flex-AJAX Bridge