Scott Janousek’s Flex Blog

For those interested, there is an upcoming Boston Flex user group meeting from the Buzzword team (Adobe):

Info:
The Boston Flex User Group’s next event will be held on the evening of Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at Adobe Systems’ Newton office (275 Grove St, Newton, MA (Map) at 7 pm.

Please feel free to come at 6:30 or so and hang out before the talk.

Agenda:
David Coletta from the Buzzword group at Adobe Systems will be talking about how to build applications that run in both the Flex and AIR runtime environments, using substantially the same codebase.

What happens when you take a large, complex codebase like Buzzword that was originally targeted for web browsers, and adapt it so it can also run as an AIR application?

In this talk, David will address the technical and architectural challenges of adapting a codebase so that SWF binaries can be shared between the browser version and the AIR version.

First, UI considerations: for example, the browser environment favors everything happening inside a single window, while AIR supports multiple document windows.

Then, technical and architectural issues: for example, the Singleton pattern works better in a browser environment where every window is its own instance of the Flash Player, but not so well in a multi-window AIR environment.

He will cover techniques for abstracting areas of the code that must call AIR-only APIs.

And he’ll also talk about packaging code into modules that load over HTTP in the browser version and load from the file system under AIR.

There is an upcoming Flex Camp happening here in Boston (actually, Waltham to be specific) at Bentley College scheduled for December.

Here are the details:

FlexCamp Boston 2008
Friday, December 12, 2008
08:00 AM - 05:00 AM (ET)
Bentley College
175 Forest Street
Waltham, MA 02452
(Directions)

Here is a tentative agenda:

Last year we had a similar event and it drew in at least a couple hundred people (if not more).

NOTE:

There is a cost to attend this event, looks like $30 for early bird, and $40 standard.

I have more info and logistical info over on my mobile blog.

Test from MaemoWordPy on my N810.

This past Tuesday (Sept 9th, 2008) at the Boston Flex User Group, Marc Hughes gave us an overview of Degrafa and a custom Flex Framework he created called ObjectHandles.

Marc Hughes, Manager of Software Engineering at Tom Snyder Productions, will show us two open source Flex libraries, Degrafa and ObjectHandles.

Degrafa is a declarative graphics framework that lets you create graphical assets in MXML.

He’ll show us how to create some visuals without any bitmap or vector based art assets and then use those to skin Flex components. ObjectHandles is a library he wrote to allow developers to easily create a Flex application that allows movement & resizing of onscreen objects by users.

Marc will give a quick introduction to that and show off a few examples of it in use. After the introduction of these two libraries, he will demonstrate how to build a basic diagramming application using Degrafa and ObjectHandles.

You can see the application in action right below this paragraph:

Degrafa is intended to make Flash graphics features in Flex easier to use while increasing creative freedom. Delivering better designer and programmer collaboration & productivity, code reuse, development cycles, readability and optimization are all goals of the project.

Quoting www.degrafa.com: “The focus behind the Declarative Graphics Framework (Degrafa) is to bring the graphics classes up a level to provide a common ground between developer and designer within Flex, and enable the graphics classes to become first class citizens within the Flex framework.”

In addition to his work at Tom Synder, Marc is also a winner of Adobe’s AIR Derby with his Agile Agenda application. He is the creator of the ObjectHandles and Pulse Particles Degrafa libraries and you can read his blog at Marc’s Musings.

The previously scheduled speaker, Eric Hilfer, will be back on a later date to speak about using the Flex Automation Framework.

The meeting was pretty cool. Marc is a fun guy to listen to. Because of this talk, I now have many ideas which I’d like to utilize within the work I am doing, currently.

The next Boston Flex user group meeting is on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at Adobe Systems in their Newton office at roughly 7 pm.

The topic is “Advanced CSS Techniques and Programmatic Skinning”. This is a very cool topic to me in particular because I no very little about the techniques thus far in making a Flex application “look pretty”.

Hopefully this session will shed some light on the process for me, and get me excited about the potentials for really beautiful and effective designs for Flex based RIA applications.

Here is all the info for the event:

Date: July 8th, 2008 @ 7 pm
Location: Adobe Newton Office (Map)
Topic: Advanced CSS Techniques and Programmatic Skinning
Description:

T. R. Coffey, Design Lead at Allurent, Inc. will speak on “Advanced CSS Techniques and Programmatic Skinning”

At Allurent we’re constantly being challenged to design and develop Flex components and applications that, frankly, don’t look like Flex components and applications. With Adobe’s out-of-the-box Halo theme and CS3 graphic skinning templates and ScaleNine’s ever-growing library of downloadable skins, we have a lot of options and support to draw upon when defining the look and feel of our Flex applications. But, sometimes we just have to build what we want from scratch.

As a result, we’ve developed component skinning techniques and a Designer/Developer workflow that emphasizes Programmatic Skinning and some slightly unorthodox use of CSS. The result: applications that are visually rich, light-weight and easily customizable.

This talk will begin with a brief overview of Flex skinning followed by an in-depth discussion of programmatic skinning and advanced techniques for making CSS work harder for you.

You must RSVP for this event.

A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away I used to do Flex 1.0. But my boss then (at a startup) had great difficulty selling the technology the way Macromedia was peddling it at the time … we never deployed anything, and essentially it was R&D. With all the Flash work I was doing, I decided to wait a bit until the time was right to spring back into RIA development with Flex.

With Flex 2 and now Flex 3 with all the glory of ActionScript 3, it is now time I move into working with and offering Flex based services to my clients at hand.

This blog is to serve as my repository of all things Flex that I think are cool … including projects I am working on. Stay tuned for more postings as I gather more strength and muster out into the wonderful world of Flex based projects … who knows, perhaps I’ll even be doing Flex on mobile in a few years!