InSync: Automatic Offline Data Synchronization in AIR using LCDS 2.6

May 19, 2008 By 73 Comments

LCDS 2.6 allows you to build AIR applications with automatic offline data synchronization. This feature leverages the SQLite relational database system embedded in the AIR runtime, but the advantage is that the data synchronization process is entirely automatic: you don’t have to write SQL statements or synchronization logic to keep your local database in sync with your central database.

I have been getting a number of questions related to this feature, so I decided to build a sample application that demonstrates how it works.
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Filed Under: Air, Flex, LCDS, SQLite Tagged With: , , ,

BlazeDS: Open Sourcing Remoting and Messaging

December 12, 2007 By 153 Comments

Today is yet another exciting day for the Flex community and for the world of Rich Internet applications… Adobe is announcing plans to release its Remoting and Messaging technologies under a new open source product named BlazeDS.

The news is probably all over the blogs, but I thought I would summarize the key points:

  • The Remoting and Messaging technology previously available only as part of LiveCycle Data Services will now be available for free as a new Open Source product called BlazeDS (under LGPL v3 license).
  • The public beta of BlazeDS is available for download here (the GA version is scheduled for early 2008).
  • As part of this announcement, the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification is also being published. The spec is available here.
  • The JIRA bugbase is available here.

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Filed Under: Flex Tagged With: , , , ,

Speaking at FlexCamp in Boston on Friday

December 5, 2007 By 40 Comments

I will be delivering the opening keynote at the FlexCamp in Boston (at the Bentley College in Waltham) on Friday. This promises to be a really great event with great speakers from the Flex Engineering Team (Paul Reilly, Peter Farland, Tom Jordahl) and other Flex celebrities (Joe Berkovitz, David Coletta, Thomas Burleson, Matt Woodward). Hope to see you there: http://www.flexcampboston.com/

Filed Under: Flex Tagged With:

Interactive Bubble Pipeline: Another Hybrid (HTML/Flex) Example

November 12, 2007 By 62 Comments

A customer recently pointed out to me that many of our examples feature full-page Flex applications, and wanted to me to demonstrate how a Flex application can integrate with an HTML/Ajax application. Hybrid applications are definitely part of our vision for Flex, and there are many real-life examples of mixing Flash and HTML content out there (see http://finance.google.com/finance?q=adbe). This customer wanted to look at the integration at the code level. Instead of the usual “Hello from Flex”/”Hello from JavaScript” message exchange example, I wanted to show something more meaningful that would also show “why” you would actually want to do this…

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Filed Under: Flex Tagged With: , , ,

Experimenting with the ILog Elixir Components for Flex

November 12, 2007 By 24 Comments

I spent some time playing with the ILog Elixir components for Flex. If you haven’t checked them out they are definitely worth looking at. Live samples are available here: http://www.ilog.com/products/elixir/

I experimented with the 3D charts components which definitely provide a good example of the expressiveness of the Flex platform. Looking at the sample code, it looks like you can’t simply enable the 3D mouse interactivity (click and drag to rotate, mouse wheel to zoom in / zoom out) by setting a component property: you actually have to write some code, capture mouse events, etc… In my own experimentation, I isolated that code in a reusable Chart3DControl component that makes it easy to provide this kind of mouse interactivity in any component in your application.

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Filed Under: Flex Tagged With: , ,

Salesbuilder for Flex 3 / AIR Beta 2 (AIR file + source code)

October 4, 2007 By 35 Comments

I migrated the Salesbuilder application for Flex 3 / AIR beta 2.

Click here to install the application.

Click here to download the source code.

Follow this script for a guide tour of the application.

Filed Under: Air, Flex, SQLite Tagged With: , , , ,