Dave 360 Flex Conference Seattle 2007

My first flex app

2007-08-23T22:25:00.000-07:00

So this is what i'm going to try and build for my first flex app. The goal is to have a nice interactive chart that users can look at seefusion data with counters, pages, and queries all plotted on same chart.

http://www.stretchmedia.ca/code_examples/chart_range_selection/main.html

Steps involved:

Download and familiarize with script

Talk to seefusion database via cfc

Dump data into cartesian chart

Optimize

Day 3 Afternoon

2007-08-16T12:23:00.000-07:00

The afternoon featured two presentations id been getting hints about all week. Do

Doug McCune: Advanced Custom Components
flex.com.mycomponent.isawesome=true
Arriving late to this one was not a good idea. I ended up standing the entire presentation yet still took 3 pages of notes. I'm sure glad this one was on the last day otherwise id be clueless. Basically Doug, the guy with the taxi-driver haricut, is like a coal miner, getting underneath the ground floor and chip, chipping away at Adobe's Flex framework. Making small changes, molding for his app.

Basically his main point is, the flex framework contains 245,883 lines of code. Use it. Don't waste time developing from scratch. Take an existing component thats almost what you need and tweak it.

From my experience, normally these types of developers dont give presentations. They are usually too busy coding and have no desire to speak or share to large crowds. He jumps around a lot, its almost like we are sitting in his work environment just hanging out with him while he tries to solve some flex app...Someone raised a question, "will there be notes posted from this meeting? This is really kind of scattering my thoughts".

So maybe I'm crazy but it all came though to me perfectly.

This presentation quickly began to run itself. Its like a huge brain dump from all the top developers.

Takeways and URLs

dougmccune.com/blog/

www.tileui.com

look at how the base framework code is structured if you are stuck on coding a componenet

invalidate property

dirty flag? commit properties

3 things u do 99% of the time (createchildrn, measure, updatedisplaylist)

Always define events with constructor

Deepa: layout manager class good resource

Always define metadata (code hints)

Sometimes its best to change things from the ground-floor

default.css (contains all styles for components)

Someone else: use flexmix to initialize methods [mixin]

Doug also showed tons of code, switching from this presentation to eclipse. Look for link to presentation soon.

David Zuckerman (Adobe): Flex Builder Secrets
This was a great presentation going over short-cuts and adding functionality to flex builder. David has been an engineer on the flex builder team from the onset. Lots of nice shortcuts and he showed refactoring which rocks.

takeaways

Ctrl-o - outline view

Autowrap strings by hitting enter

F1 - Context sensitive help

Ctrl-shift-j - show all uses of a variables

Refactoring - Where is something defined changes it by type, it knows and it works!

Ctrl-/ or \ - toggle comment

Overall these last two presenations gave me a good idea of what is possible. and that programming in flex isnt that hard. theres a slow ramp up to get started but then the learning curve is much nicer! And its very nice how you can go and modify everything you need. From flex framework to styles...

Day 3 Morning

2007-08-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

Mike Moriarty (Adobe): Flex Builder Debugger
This was a nice overview starting from debugging basics to more complex watches and what not. Mike worked directly on the flex debugger. Also provided nice short-cuts for debugging...

download debugger version of flash player

ctrl-shift-b add breakpoint

add bindings to ur components

FDB (Free debugger modeled after gdb, command line)

And that was the only morning presentation because of the final keynote.

Day 2 Afternoon

2007-08-14T19:52:00.000-07:00

The afternoon featured 2 topics I thought applied well to what we do..

Ben Stucki: Byte Array 202
"You have reached the end of the internet, please go back the way you came."
www.benstucki.com
This was a very interesting topic. The ability to read things into flash as bytes. You can pickup a lot more information then other means. For example you can find out the type of file even if someone had changed the name of the file. Plus, as Ben stated, byte methods are 'crazy fast'. He also showed some sweet examples of mp3 players, one air app where you could drag and drop mp3 files and it would load with the album cover.

Here are some resources:
www.bytearray.com
richapps.de
metaphile

Dave Coletta: Buzzword - How'd they build that?
www.colettas.com
This was one of many application walk-throughs. Very entertaining presenter showing off his company's online word proccessor. Very slick interface, being launched Fall 07. He said his framework for coding was taken off of flex coders framework code.

Mansour Raad (ESRI): Mapping Component
This was by far the most impressive real world use of flex that I've seen. He went through is work proccesses for a recent project. They got a job for the City of Mpls for the 35W bridge collapse. City wanted a real time interface for citizens to see driving routes. And there is a back-end for the city to add/remove road-blocks. The api at arcwebservices.com is open for personnel use. Pretty cool maps, different from google.

Also demo'd an app for san fran police tracking. you can view real-time locations of police cruisers and they actually move live on the map...also an insane feature, if you click on the car it gives you the cop's profile as well as a view of his dashboard camera! (pretty cool, heh) Another demo showed a book component from eli at www.quietlyscheming.com/ that had a map and then you could fold over pages for different overlays for sex offenders, schools, etc.

Resources:
www.arcwebservices.com
www.trafficcast.com
www.papervision.com
www.greasemonkey.com (scraper)

Day 2 Morning

2007-08-14T11:41:00.000-07:00

The morning for me was all about learning some degugging stuff and basic flex framework.

Jun Heider: Memory Management for Flex/Air
Very nice info here for optimizing apps for the flash player. Didn't get many notes as I arrived late and had to stand. (The alarm clock doesn't like me)

Deepa Subramaniam: Flex Framework nitty gritty
Deepa provided me a good visualization of the flex framework as well as some good things to know/avoid developing in flex. Couple takeaways: Have a production swf and development swf, watch what you do at startup and avoid unnecessary nesting of templates.

Nice its time to head to Taco Bravo!!

Hell yeah, twins are in town

2007-08-13T23:23:00.000-07:00

Realized last night the twins are here and Santana was pitching so I went over to the game tonight. Even though the twins lost at least they scored and it was a great game. Plus Safeco field is kick-ass. You can stand right on the field in center and look right into the bullpens. Man did the twins pitchers take a beating from a bunch of drunk mariner fans. Lots of twins fans at the game though...

Afternoon wrapup

2007-08-13T18:09:00.001-07:00

George Cominos: Building Flex Apps with Flex Builder and CSS
Was 20 minutes in to this one and then snuck out when it seemed to be mainly design stuff for CS3 (dont have) and Flex 3 (brand new). 2/2 macs used in presentations.

Flex 101 Building RIAs
This was the shot in the arm i needed to start building flex apps. Picked up a copy of the instructional which actually lasted 4 hours. I stayed for about 15 mins after i felt like i was in elementary school. the one they had for the 'left behind' kids. moving too slow...

Brendan Meutzner (CNET): Advanced charting
This guy did a rewrite of google finance in flex. very cool app, src code on his blog. He extended the chart components (area, cartesian, easing functions, Series) Lots of work with annotations.

also see: eli greenfield (www.quietlyscheming.com)

Andrew Trice: Programmatic Visualization using the drawing api
Standing room only presentation delving into using the drawing api in flex. much simpler to get going then in flash. Probably the most dialed-in presentation so far. No wandering or tangents yet. Ex. friend relationship, network monitors..nodeHashmap class displaying items rendered with relationships, override updatedisplaylist method.

Ben Forta: CF Powered Flex

2007-08-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

Just got out of Forta's presentation on integrating Flex with CF. For some reason forta's accent is very soothing in the morning. Sitting in about the 5th row its crazy how many people in front of me are spacing out during this presentation. Don't they know who Forta is? There's some good stuff here...or maybe the people checking their emails and escaping to their laptops already know all this stuff..

Wrapping up..

Suggests working in AS 3.0, Flex 2, CF 7.02 or higher (preferably CF 8)

Live Cycle Data Services (formerly flex data services) - Integrated into CF8, ability to push data from server to client. Setup producer and consumer channels.

Quick wizards in flex builder to create a matching AS class file for a CFC or vice versa (nice!)

Wizard to create a cfc data service from a database table (very nice)

Links to his examples coming soon..

Flex Conference Preview

2007-08-12T23:06:00.001-07:00

Welcome to Geek City!
Checked into the red lion and proceeded to the kickoff party. Good to see a nice showing of geeks in Seattle. Last I heard there was about 500 people registered, and a quick count gave me like 8 females. For those not married thats a killer ratio!

After the keynote tomorrow, I'll be checking out Forta at 10 and head to one on working with Flex Builder and then go from there...

FYI. web005 scheduled tasks are f-d.