The Space For App Developers

I’m very pleased to announce the release of as3term 2.0.0. For those who don’t know it, as3term is a terminal-like application that lets you compile and execute simple snippets of AS3 code. It was built with Flex/AIR 2.0 and it uses the NativeProcess API to launch the fcsh compiler, which is part of the Flex SDK. You can check out one of my previous post with the screen cast showing it in action.

This release includes several important changes and improvements:

• AS3 syntax coloring based on AS3TextArea (another open source project that I released recently)
• Using the fcsh.jar compiler from the Flex SDK instead of mxmlc, which provides an enormous improvement in compilation time.
• Added window resize gripper
• Window centering
• Updated Swiz to version 1.0 RC2

You can download as3term from here. If you have it already installed you just need to run it and it should update itself using the NativeApplicationUpdater.

With this post I wanted to do a preview of a new AIR application that I was involved building. It is called Tetrapod and its main purpose is assisting in PDF/Flash forms submission and response management. When building it some inspirations were taken from e-Deklaracje application that was released by Polish Ministry of Finance back in 2009. I think this is really cool demo app itself and also a cool demo of its powering technologies, which include Adobe AIR/Flex, Adobe LiveCycle Content Services and Adobe LiveCycle Process Management.

Go ahead and checkout the video below demonstrating Tetrapod in action. Also you can find more information about it here & here.

The part that you can’t see well in the video above is the logic on the server side. First of all documents that are displayed in the “Forms directory” are downloaded from LiveCycle Content Services when the application starts. This ensures that the user always has the latest version of the forms.

Next when the form is submitted, it is processed by the LiveCycle Process Management component. Of course in the video above processing is done automatically, but in a real-world scenario this could require human interaction and use of LiveCycle Workspace, for example.
Here is a video with a simple animation that demonstrates the server side processes a bit better:

UPDATE 28.09.2010 Below I included a video recorded by Tadeusz Chełkowski with more detailed Tetrapod overview:

Today I’m releasing to the world my new open source project called as3term, a simple terminal-like application that lets you compile and execute ActionScript code. It’s very handy when you want to check some AS3 constructs without launching your IDE and creating new project.

It was built with Flex/AIR 2.0 and it uses the NativeProcess API to launch mxmlc compiler, which is part of the Flex SDK. The primary reason that I have built it was that I needed a simple app that I could code in few hours and that would serve me as a test and a showcase for my other open source project called NativeApplicationUpdater. You can download the installers for different OSs from its Google Code site as well as source code from SVN. In the video below you can also see it in action:

I just released on Google Code a new project called NativeApplicationUpdater. Basically the name explains its purpose but for those that don’t know, AIR 2.0 brings new capability of packaging applications with native installers. This is necessary when you want to use the new NativeProcess APIs. Unfortunately Update Framework that comes with AIR 2.0 SDK doesn’t bring yet capability of updating this type of applications. That is why I decided to build it myself and publish it as open source library.

Here is a video explaining how it works:

Very recently I was speaking at a press conference of a new culinary service called Cooklet.com. Okay, you may be wondering what my role at that event. So first of all, the Cooklet team is located out of Wroclaw/Poland, but this obviously isn’t the primary reason What really brought me there is the fact that Cooklet is using a lot of Adobe technology, specifically our Platform technologies. Cooklet.com itself is a standard HTML based website but at the same time it has a desktop version that runs with Adobe AIR. There is also Cooklet Mobile built with Flash Lite and hosted as an application in the Nokia OVI store. Another very important fact is that this project was funded by the Open Screen Project initiative; you can find more details here as well a registration form to apply yourself.

The service itself has some unique and interesting features. What I really like is in-browser drag-and-drop capability that you can use to add new recipes to your cookbook or shopping list. The really cool thing here is that when you drag the recipe to the cooking list you instantly get access to it from your mobile phone. Another really cool thing is that the recipes get automatically translated into different languages. In the future this may give its users access to really tasty recipes from different cuisine.

Additionally the desktop version gives you offline access to your recipes that you may need in your kitchen. Also it has a great user experience and interactions that mimic reading real printed version of a cookbook.

Obviously Cooklet.com has much more interesting features and I encourage you to give it a try.

Check out the Cooklet Lite demo video below. Now I’m just waiting for the Cooklet team to provide an AIR for Mobile version that I can run on my Nexus One phone ;)

I’m proud to announce Flerry 1.2.0, which brings following new features and changes:

• Java discovery process has been completely rewritten. Now it looks into default location on given operating system:
  • Windows – c:\Windows\System32\javaw.exe (starting from version 6 this is the default Java location)
  • Mac – /usr/bin/java if that doesn’t exist it checks /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/Current/Commands/java
  • Linux – /usr/bin/java if that doesn’t exist it checks /etc/alternatives/java
  • In case any of these default locations fail it tries fallback mechanism, on Windows it is a native code compiled into FindJava.exe utility. This utility checks the registry on users machine and returns path to the location where java is installed. This was contributed by my colleague Serge Jespers; he used it for his Package Assistant Pro application. In case of Mac and Linux it uses native „/usr/bin/whereis java“ command to discover where Java is installed.
• The default location where to place jar files has been renamed to libs as it no longer contains only jar files. Now it also contains FindJava.exe utility. It can be customized by setting libsDirectory property on NativeObject class.
• Adding all jars under libsDirectory folder into the classpath automatically. Specifying it explicitly is no longer required.
• Compiled java code can be placed under classes folder. It is not required to package it into a jar anymore. This makes debugging and testing the application much easier.
• Out-of-the-box support for java code debugging. Flerry Getting Started (part 2) video tutorial covers how this can be used.
• Improved communication from AIR to Java, now it can support large objects transfer. This is due to object splitting into 256 bytes chunks.
• Added basic set of FlexUnit tests.
• Added Ant build script.
• Updated AMF serialization jars from BlazeDS 4.0.
• Removed reference between flerry and flerry-demo projects. Now flerry-demo is a standalone project referenced by flerry.swc.

This time kudos go to Jhonny Everson, Serge Jespers and Erko Bridee for their contributions and support.

Watch getting started video tutorials to get up to speed with Flerry.

I just released a new version of Flerry that fixes a problem with transferring large object structures from Java to Flex. This release is thanks to Mohammed Abbas who contributed the patch. Again I’m really happy that this project is evolving and the community is contributing to it actively.

To start working with Flerry go ahead and download the flerry and flerry-demo projects. You may also find my previous posts (Post 1 | Post 2) helpful.

I would like to proudly announce that Flerry 1.1.0 was released! For those of you that don’t know what is Flerry, it’s a Flex-Java bridge for Adobe AIR 2.0. This new release brings possibility to call/initiate communication from Java to Flex/AS3 code. This functionality was solely developed by Jhonny Everson, big kudos to Jhonny!!! I love when open source really works and community contributes their work, with that said I encourage any of you that use Flerry to commit to the project

You can grab latest FB4 project with Flerry and demo app from here.

Usage is really simple:

First create instance of NativeObject either in MXML or AS3 (binPath is path to jar file with compiled Java source classes):

<flerry:NativeObject id="nativeObject" singleton="true" 
binPath="./jars/flerry-demo.jar"  source="net.riaspace.flerrydemo.MyJavaObject" />

Next subscribe to messages sent from Java side, “sendMsg” parameter defines message identifier:

// Subscribe to receive remote messages.
nativeObject.subscribe("sendMsg", messageHandler);

On the Java side you have static method sendMessage on NativeObject class with message parameter and again message identifier:

NativeObject.sendMessage(map, "sendMsg");

Below you will find links to my e-seminar recording, presentation slides and projects with source code of demo applications:

• Recording on Adobe Connect:
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p84912063/
• Presentation on SlideShare:
  http://www.slideshare.net/pwalczyszyn/multitouch-with-flash-and-flex
• Gesture events demo application source code (Flex/AIR):
  http://www.riaspace.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/GesturesFlexDemo.zip
• Touch events demo application source code (Flash/AIR/Apple Phone):
  http://www.riaspace.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/TouchFlashDemo.zip

In the video below I present my new demo of real-time connectivity between applications running on different devices like Apple phone, Nexus One and my Mac. Apple phone runs AIR application built with Flash (source code available here), on the desktop is also an AIR app but built with Flex (source code available here) and on Nexus One is also Flex app (keep in mind that this is not yet Flex Mobile version, source code available here) running in the browser. All of these connect through Java backend with LiveCycle Data Services ES2 (source code available here).