I create. I launch.

MySpace, SecurityErrorEvent is your friend!

by John C. Bland II | Sep 27, 2008 | Flash Platform

I saw this on MySpace but have increasingly seen it more and more lately on numerous sites.

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GTween: Quick Review

by John C. Bland II | Aug 25, 2008 | Flash Platform

One of the easy things to do in Flash is tween but it never hurts to make an easy thing easier and that’s exactly what Grant Skin…errr…my bad…gSkinner (hehe) has done. So, maybe it doesn’t suit you, heck…might not suit me all the time, but I would say it is at least worth a look.

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James Ward – Flex Videos

by John C. Bland II | Jul 24, 2008 | Flash Platform

This is just a redirect to James’ site. He has posted two videos which are both pretty good.

Last night I decided to not work but found myself on the computer. So while I was messing around I had the videos play in the background and he covered the very basic to the good stuff. I thought it was well done and organized.

“Video: Flex Best Practices”:https://www.jamesward.com/wordpress/2008/07/22/video-flex-best-practices/

“Video: Flex and Java”:https://www.jamesward.com/wordpress/2008/07/21/video-flex-and-java/

Good work James.

LCDS 2.6 Released

by John C. Bland II | Jul 21, 2008 | Flash Platform

I probably haven’t stated it publicly but LCDS is my favorite way of getting data into Flex. Even though I’m solid in CF I tend to enjoy setting a Java backend using Spring. Call me crazy but I dig Flex+Java(via)LCDS.

Anyways…”LCDS 2.6 is out”:https://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/upgrade/dataservices.html and in the wild.
(Source: https://www.forta.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/7/21/LCDS-26-Released)

As I stated previously, here are my favorite features/updates in 2.6:
* **Data Management offline improvements** – Using the SQL database contained in Adobe AIR, you can use the offline support introduced in LiveCycle Data Services ES 2.5.1 to persist data directly to a SQL database. With little additional code, you can use an application written to use data management offline with complete access to any data and queries you executed online. To do so, specify a cache id and either use the auto-save option or explicitly save queries or items you want to persist offline for retrieval later.
* **Alignment with Adobe Flex 3** – LiveCycle Data Services ES 2.6 supports the releases of Adobe Flex 3 and Adobe Flex Builder 3.
* **Scalable HTTP based channel** – Supports thousands of connections for each Java process. You can use the RTMP channel if you are able to make these connections from your clients directly to the LiveCycle Data Services ES process. You can use the scalable HTTP based channel infrastructure if your clients can only connect to your servers using the HTTP protocol. Using the flexible ChannelSet mechanism of LiveCycle Data Services ES, it is easy to support a list of channels so your clients can connect using the implementation which provides the most efficient implementation.

Read the full “release notes here”:https://help.adobe.com/en_US/livecycle/8.2/lcds_releasenotes.html.

Enjoy!

Flex 3: Two-way Form Databinding

by John C. Bland II | Jun 6, 2008 | Flash Platform

I saw this "trick" in someone’s code and have been using it lately so I thought I’d share. The idea is to create an object, bind it to the form elements, and bind the form elements to the object. In this example, I’m using a simple form from an app I’m working at the moment.

Userform.mxml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:VBox xmlns:mx="https://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" xmlns:dto="com.katapultmedia.mystreamer.dto.*">
    <mx:Script>
        <![CDATA[
            private function save():void{
            }
        ]]>
    </mx:Script>
    <dto:User id="user" />
    <mx:Binding source="firstNameField.text" destination="user.firstName" />
    <mx:Binding source="lastNameField.text" destination="user.lastName" />
    <mx:Binding source="emailAddressField.text" destination="user.emailAddress" />
    <mx:Binding source="passwordField.text" destination="user.password" />
    <mx:Binding source="isActiveCheck.text" destination="user.isActive" />
    <mx:Form>
        <mx:FormItem label="First Name">
            <mx:TextInput id="firstNameField" text="{user.firstName}" />
        </mx:FormItem>
        <mx:FormItem label="Last Name">
            <mx:TextInput id="lastNameField" text="{user.lastName}" />
        </mx:FormItem>
        <mx:FormItem label="Email Address">
            <mx:TextInput id="emailAddressField" text="{user.emailAddress}" />
        </mx:FormItem>
        <mx:FormItem label="Password">
            <mx:TextInput id="passwordField" text="{user.password}" />
        </mx:FormItem>
        <mx:FormItem>
            <mx:CheckBox id="isActiveCheck" selected="{user.isActive}" />
        </mx:FormItem>
        <mx:FormItem>
            <mx:Button label="Save" click="save()" />
        </mx:FormItem>
    </mx:Form>
</mx:VBox>

So, I’m not going to go line but line since it is pretty straight forward but here’s a brief outline.

Form Items

• Each TextInput is bound to the user objects respective property (ex – firstNameField.text is bound to {user.firstName}).
• The isActiveCheck is bound to {user.isActive}

Binding Tags

• Each Binding tags source property is bound to one of the form items.
• Each Binding tags destination property is bound to the respective user property.

That’s it. What happens is when I create an instance of this component I will set myUserForm.user = someUser; and when the user edits one of the form items the respective value of the user object will be updated instantly. This way, when the user clicks the Save button I can easily pull myUserForm.user and pass that dto (data transfer object) to the backend.

Kinda cool, huh? Well, I think so. Saves a good bit of Actionscript writing.

Enjoy.

Update: I should test code before posting. 🙂 I’ve removed the brackets around the source/destination properties on the Binding tags. They aren’t needed.