in a rush

On3 has some excellent ColdFusion Classes scheduled during the next few months to celebrate the grand opening of our new headquarters and training center location on the 16th Street mall in Denver. The new address starting on August 1st will be: Denver Petroleum Building, 110 16th St, Ste 604, Denver, CO 80202. Please drop by and see us sometime!

The Fast Track to ColdFusion 8 class covers databases, forms, search-interfaces, templates, and getting information in and out of ColdFusion. The class teaches an experienced object oriented or scripting language veteran the tips and tricks to getting started with ColdFusion 8.

The 2009 dates are: Jul 27 – 29, Aug 17 – 19, Sep 9 – 11,Sep 28 – 30, Oct 19 – 21, Nov 2 – 4, Nov 23 – 25, Dec 28 – 30.

Please check it out and then enroll today!

Having built/architected/developed/consulted many Adobe Flex applications and being one of the first certified Flex instructors in the world, I’ve seen a lot of Flex applications. Some good, some bad.

But no matter how many applications or who I’m talking to, I always stress the importance of securing proprietary information. By securing, I mean don’t put it in your application. Unless your are encrypting your application and decrypting at runtime, you are subject to a decompiler exposing your secrets.

There are Flash decompilers that will take any SWF and give you the source:
Trillix Flash Decompiler is one of the best commercial tools I’ve found.
I’ve even seen guys decompile, make changes and then recompile a Flex app. This is scary! Say goodbye to licensing software in Flash.

But HP just released a tool that has caught my eye as well. (Note: I have not tested this tool) It claims to decompile and test for security weaknesses. It’s called SWFScan and it’s a free Windows based tool from HP.

If security in a Flex or Flash based application is a concern for you, you must look at these tools. If security is not your concern, look anyway.

Beginning iPhone Bootcamp
If you’re a developer who wants to write applications that run on the iPhone, you should attend the Beginning iPhone Bootcamp at CFUnited.

The first two units of the course are devoted to learning Objective-C, followed by an intensive iPhone Bootcamp. Beginning iPhone Bootcamp will take you from complete novice to being able to build an iPhone application with confidence. After an introduction to Objective-C and the Foundation framework, we jump into the toolchain and the classes that make up the iPhone UI framework. Lots of practical advice and lots of hands-on walkthroughs.

In this one day bootcamp we will not cover everything about the iPhone, but it will certainly get you started and enhance your confidence in building your first “app for that”.

Need more than a bootcamp? At On3, we will be releasing a 5 day training course for building iPhone applications using the 3.0 SDK. We plan on holding the first class in early August at our training center location in Downtown Denver.

I got this Flex question from one of our Flex clients at On3:

“Aside from what I read here on image caching… http://userflex.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/image-caching/  do I have other options for improving performance of image rendering for flex? (Ex. I have to render 50+ low res images per page.) I realize for more ‘static’ images you can embed them in the .swf file but this does not seem like a nice approach as these images could change frequently and they have corresponding persisted meta-data. Do you know of any similar flex projects that serve up a lot of media and how they optimize download and rendering performance?”

My advice was to check out Ely Greenfield’s SuperImage class.

The examples and download are at the bottom of the post.

One thing I have to say is that the Adobe community is alive with collaboration and events. There are tons of people sharing their work and their ideas on better development with the Adobe products. One more example, the local Rocky Mountain Adobe User Group is hosting a very inexpensive event for the Flash Platform, Dynamic Media and eLearning.

“Adobe’s Flash Platform is a powerful tool set that spans digital disciplines such as application development, media production, and eLearning. Join us at Rocky Mountain Adobe Camp on June 22, 2009 in Denver for in-depth presentations and unique hands on activities for everyone from newbies to gurus.”

It sounds like a day well spent. See you there.

My company, On3, has added another Adobe Flex 3 Rich Client Applications class for June 1-3, 2009 and the Flex 3 LiveCycle Data Services Integrating with Data and Messaging class for June 4-5, 2009.

The class is in Downtown Denver the first week of June. Which is an absolutely beautiful time to visit Colorado.

Okay, maybe I do already love the Adobe RIA tools, but… if I didn’t, I’d be smitten with their latest offer to the community.

Once again, Adobe is reaching out to the community by giving away free licenses to their RIA development tools. Free Flex Builder licenses to academia and to the unemployed. And now, free ColdFusion licenses to academia.

So, if you had your choice of using the best RIA development platform (for free) or any of the up-and-coming tools, which would you choose?

Check my post on On3 for information about free Adobe licenses.

One of my CFUnited sessions:
AIR: Building Desktop Applications with Flex 3 – http://cfunited.com/2009/topics/235

Here is a little Q&A about CFUnited and me.

1. Have you spoken at CFUnited in the past?  What would you tell someone who hasn’t been to CFUnited before?

Yes, I have spoken at CFUnited in the past. And I’d have to equate it to seeing your favorite band in a small venue. Same great talent, but not nearly as crowded allowing you to easily network with so many very talented people.

2. Why should people attend your session(s)?

If you have been wondering about, thinking about or just plain curious about Adobe AIR, my session will clear the air… uh, no pun intended.

3. Do you have any projects in the works that you will be revealing at CFUnited?

I have been doing quite a bit in the mobile space, actually more of an add-on to some of our AIR development projects. So look forward  to ways to take your application to iPhone, Symbian and Android.

4. Besides your topic, what other sessions are you looking forward to?

I know I’ll get in trouble for this, but its not the sessions to which I really look forward. Its the one on one conversations that I’ll have with people from all over that help me solve problems and come up with new ideas. That is what I’m looking forward to. Oh and the sessions help me identify who I’d like to meet.

5. Where can people find you at CFUnited?  (At the bar, networking, working, in your room, etc.)

Networking.

6. What’s the latest news with you? Has anything changed since last CFUnited?

Since On3 is all about helping organizations grow their own Flex developers, we have opened a new training center in Denver, CO.

7. When you are not working what do you like to do in your free time?

Mountain Bike in the Spring thru Fall, Ski during the Winter

Adobe Flex Builder 3 software is currently available for free for software developers who are affected by the current economic condition and are currently unemployed.

https://freeriatools.adobe.com/learnflex/

Of course there are three restrictions. You must attest that you are:

1. Unemployed
2. Using it for personal use
3. Not using it for commercial or production use

UPDATE: The program was suspended, the last I looked, due to the high volume of applicants. But keep checking. You never know.

I’ve been working with Adobe Flex since its beta and have been a long time believer in using Action Message Format (AMF) as the communication protocol. I’ve also been working with Adobe AIR since its beta, but had only used AMF with Flex-based AIR applications. Until now…

I was working on a JavaScript-based AIR application (some refer to this as an AJAX-based application) recently where they wanted to use AMF, but didn’t want to hide a SWF in it to facilitate the AMF communication. Since there are other Flash Remoting gateways available, like openAMF and AMFPHP, it would be great if I could just use a JavaScript library to do the communication with those gateways.

If you look at examples in Flash that do this type of connection, you’ll notice that they use a NetConnection class. Guess what?! That class is also available in the JavaScript API for AIR. Yes, its that simple!

So with a simple refactoring of the same code from Flash, I was able to get my JavaScript-based AIR application to communicate with a Flash Remoting gateway. This example assumes you have installed a Flash Remoting gateway somewhere, that you replace [my_flash_remoting_gateway] with the gateway root and you’ve created a class with a method that you can invoke.

<html>
<head>
<title>JavaScript-based Flash Remoting</title>
<link href="sample.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
<script type="text/javascript" src="lib/air/AIRAliases.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="lib/air/AIRSourceViewer.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
function doAMF()
{
var netConnection = new air.NetConnection();
netConnection.connect("http://[my_flash_remoting_gateway]");
var responder = new air.Responder(onComplete, onFail);
netConnection.call("HelloWorld", responder);
}
function onComplete(results)
{
alert( results.length );
}

function onFail(results)
{
alert(results)
}

</script>
</head>

<body>
<h3>Get data over AMFPHP</h3>

<ul>
<li>Has access to AIR APIs:
<input type="button" onclick="doAMF()" value="Make AMF call"/>
</li>
</ul>

</body>

</html>

Here is an example class in PHP:

<?php
class HelloWorld
{
function HelloWorld()
{
$this->methodTable = array
(
"say" => array
(
"access" => "remote",
"description" => "Pings back a message"
)
);
}
}
?>