Emak Mafu Labs Blog

We are giving a hand running Flex Camp London 08, check it out:

Flex Camp London 08 is a FREE, community-run event for everyone interested in Adobe Flex! Whether you’re just getting started with Flex or you’re an expert, Flex Camp aims to provide something for you.

This is a FREE event, but you must be registered to attend and names will be taken at the door.

See you there!

Recently here at emak mafu we’ve been building an internal framework to help quickly get some of sites up and running, and have been taking our queues from the Flex framework, asWing and the CS3 components. The best part about this is you get to dive into many peoples code to see their best practices and how they approach the problem (and sometimes shamelessly imitate it). Sometimes you will see a little to-do here, or a quirky comment from a developer as they implement a little hack, but sometimes you begin to get a whiff of a coding smell. This is not to say these frameworks are far in advance of our own, but I’d like to share one whiff that is too pungent to ignore.
The culprit is one mx.controls.listClasses.ListBase, in particular the method collectionChangeHandler(). The first thing to mention is that this class is nearly 10,000 lines long, which is an issue in itself although with the asDoc comments it is easy to forgive this. The method collectionChangeHandler is a method which is 395 lines long, which anyone who has read Refactoring will tell you is suffering from a bad case of long method, which is recommends a method be no longer then 10 - 20 lines.
Now to totally geek out, I started to count the number of if, try.. catch, and for.. loops so I could make a better point of why the method needs refactoring, but after 36th if.. else, 3rd try.. catch and 5th for.. loop I gave up. It is impossible to decipher the functionality without chatting to the author, and in such an important base class as well, where any of this behavior may need to be overriden. Anybody else out there found any blunders?

We have all been using for them for ages, but Adobe has finally released Flex 3 and Air. This is a huge release for the company, and solidifies their position at the forefront of the ever changing RIA landscape. Get them now!!!

I think every flex developer has the same doubt: Should I move my application to Cairngorm? Should I start using Cairngorm? Should I learn how to use Cairngorm? The answer for all this questions and any other questions that you can imagine is YES.

If you have never heard about Design Patterns, this could be a really good moment to start thinking and looking for some information about it. In fact, I think you cannot be a good developer if you don’t know Design Patterns in a strong way.

If you still don’t know what are Design patterns, have a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern_%28computer_science%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architectural_pattern_%28software_engineering%29

In case you feel familiar with all this terms, and you still don’t know Cairngorm, it should be now a good moment to have a look at this:

http://www.cairngormdocs.org/

It’s a good repository, probably the best one, about Cairngorm. There you can find examples, documentation, tutorials, diagrams and everything related with Cairngorm.

Cairngorm provides you an easy, scalable, and reusable way to develop your applications, allowing your application to grow and grow without worrying about the future. If other developers join you on the development of your application, and they know Cairngorm, it will be extremely easy to have them working at their best straight away. If you don’t use Cairngorm, probably your poor new developer will be trying for weeks to understand your roller coaster application that you developed.

I insist: When you start with Cairngorm you will feel a little bit …..weird? A lot of stuff to learn, a lot of models, controllers, event dispatchers and delegates Business, but when you get inside it completely, you will never wanted to leave it.

Long live Cairngorm.

Check out a realy cool diagram explaining it here
and the application it talks of here

Soon there will be no need for developers in the world of multimedia content for the web as Sprout Builder is soon to be released some time (the home age doesn’t give a date but I’m sure its some time in the future)

The site says that the builder allows novice and advanced users the “quick and easy creation of sophisticated multimedia content” there is also a video giving a quick overview of it’s features, it looks like there are some nice sharing and managing features.

I think it’s either created in flash or more likely Flex but the site doesn’t say.

On the other side I don’t think this will replace developers for of multimedia content for the web completely as I’m sure it’s limited and will provide a tool for people with very little knowledge to produce absolute rubbish, designers might be able to make some decent content or just prototypes.

Long live developers!

I’ve been using Google Analytics for a while now and it’s really useful, I have used a dashboard widget to view some small amount of stats but it doesn’t have much functionality.

But now there is the Google Analytics AIR application built by Nicolas Lierman at Boulevart using Flex.

This 8min video I found via Serge Jespers blog has an interview with the team behind the application and it has some amazing features for the new version being released in March 2008, if you’re interested in Google Analytics it’s worth a watch or if your interested in a nicely skinned Flex application

Watch the video here: http://kitchencast.blip.tv/#606590

Firstly a big thankyou to everyone involved, especially Adobe for helping with the venue and the free beer! The event went down really well, we got just under 200 people coming along, a lot of them from other platforms. The best question of the night in the Q&A was “How do I convince my clients to use Flex and not Ajax?”. Looks like it is all going in the right direction. The next big event like this will be in April, but there will be 2 smaller events between now and then.

Involved in my work of Mafunet (a generic cms done in Flex), I found a big problem: when a user uploads an image to a website and this image has to have standard size, he needs to crop the image before uploading it with Photoshop or Gimp, or we have to automate the scaling of the image, losing some details and functionality. I have developed this component, that allows the user to load an image on the server, crop it on the client side, and save it again on the server with the name that I choose.

For the masking, I have changed the blend mode of the different layers. But I’m still having problems when you drag the image, it takes a little bit of time to understand the layout.

The steps…

1. I crop the image with the function of BitMapData copyPixels(bitmap data, rectangle, point).
2. Then, I encode the crop image with JPEGEncoder.
3. Once I have encoded the image, I create a post call, with the file and the name of the file that I want.
4. Once done, I download the file to see how it looks.

The example, here.

And that’s all, if someone needs source code, e-mail us.

A big thakyou to everyone involved in the meeting at Poke last week. We have had some really good feedback over the last few days. We’ll get some photos up soon, you can read a review here from Marc Hibbins.

Yesterday 1 October, adobe has released the new version of Flex Builder. I’ve download the last version from the website of adobe, and what a surprise, it’s impossible to me to set up correctly the Weborb. In theory, when you create a project you need to select Live DataServices, but I cannot select it in the new version if it’s not under J2EE Data Services, and I “suppose” Weborb it’s php. In fact, I have tried all the possible configurations in Flex Builder 3.

Anyone knows something about this stuff?

UPDATED:

HELP 1 (by Jurgen):

You’ll have to set it up as a PHP project and then manually add the -services “//weborb/Weborb/WEB-INF/flex/services-config.xml” to the compiler arguments. Works like a charm.

HELP 2 (by Soknet):

http://www.websector.de/blog/2007/08/08/weborb-for-php-login-example-using-flex-3-and-caingorm-221/

Thanks everybody.