Christophe Herreman

Thanks to the free pass I got from Christoph Rooms at Adobe, I made it to the JavaPolis conference in Antwerp today. I visited the event last year and certainly didn’t want to miss it this year. There is a strange and attractive atmosphere of collective geeky-ness and it is oh so cool. The fact that there are people here from all over the globe proves that this is an interesting conference for every (Java) developer out there. Just like last year, this event seemed professionally organized. At the entrance, every attendee received a backpack with a shirt, a notepad and a conference magazine. There are several boots from vendors that give you interesting information on their products, reductions and of course tons of swag. There are also free drinks for everyone, dinner at noon and fruits and candies.

I arrived pretty late but just in time for the first session and found Peter Elst there as well. Up was a session on Flex for a full house. I think there were easily 500 people in the room. James Ward and Bruce Eckel (that’s right, THE Bruce Eckel) were pair presenting and did an excellent job at it. They thoroughly explained the advantages of using Flex as a presentation tier and showed some sample applications. Later on they walked us through an example on how to connect to JSP pages to fetch data and how to consume the Flickr API. The Java crowd seemed to like it and it gave me a confident feeling that we as a development team are using the right technology (Flex) for the right job (interactive user interfaces). Having Bruce Eckel over to present was probably the best move Adobe could make to convince a Java crowd.

Next session was on JavaFX by Jim Weaver. I hadn’t seen it in action before so this was my chance of getting to know it. Unfortunately I was not really impressed. The technology seemed to be ages behind on what we are doing today with Flex for RIA development and I can only imagine hard core Java developers wanting to use this. Of course their is a strong programming language behind it - just like C# is for Silverlight - but the whole thing feels like a desperate attempt to catch up with Adobe in the RIA space. I have the same feeling with Silverlight btw.

Last session was Erich Gamma on Jazz. He talked about how agile development teams are working today and how there still are many pain points in bringing all project information together. This being SCM, bug tracking, project management, iteration plans… Jazz attempts to bundle all this info in a single application that makes it easier to access project information for the whole team.

I’m glad to announce that I’ll be speaking at the 5th FeWeb Congress on december 12th. FeWeb is the Belgian Federation for Web Developers and offers support of all kinds for professional web developers.

In my session, I’ll cover some of the current development we have going on at Indie Group for the next generation of our e-learning and assessment tool called Edumatic. We’ll have a look at what we are developing, why we chose Adobe Flex technology, what tools and frameworks we use and how it all fits together.

For a complete schedule, see the 5th FeWeb Congress Program.

Hope to see you there!

Note: These are some notes from the Multi-Mania 2007 conference. I wrote them down while watching the sessions so there might be some typos and the sentences may be in telegram style.

Joey Lott: Stylizing Flex Applications

Joey gives an overview of the different possibilities of working with css in Flex (inline style, external css, runtime css, …).

Now gives a demo of styling a simple Flex application with inline styles. He created label and is applying a fontSize and a color attribute.

He’s changing the application to use internal css definitions. Talks about css class selectors. U can use “pt” or “px” in flex, but it will be disregarded, so you can leave it out.

.exampleStyle {
fontSize: 75;
color: #FF9900;
}

The properties that are defined inline overwrite the selector properties.

Now talks about TypeSelectors

Button {
text-decoration: underline;
}

This style will now be applied to all Button instances.

Inline styles require camelcase css properties. Otherwise you can use hyphens as well. (fontSize and font-size).

Now talks about embedding fonts.

@font-face {
font-family: CustomFont;
src: url(”C:/Windows/Font/gothic.ttf”);
}

Does this work with open type fonts as well? Will ask later. (answer: Joey never tried. I did and it doesn’t seem to work)

.myStyle {
font-family: CustomFont;
}

Joey talks about external css styles.

This will be done at compile time, not runtime! Flex 2.0.1 adds runtime CSS support.

Adds a creationComplete handler called “start” to the demo application.

private function start():void {
StyleManager.loadStyleDecorations(”style.swf”); // not style.css
}

You need to compile the css into a swf. This can be done by right-clicking a css and choosing the “compile to swf” option.

Now talks about skinning. 2 ways to do so: Graphical(png,jpg,swf,svg,…) and Programmatic (AS3).

Button {
upSkin: Embed(”buttonUp.png”);
overSkin: Embed(”buttonOver.png”);
downSkin: Embed(”buttonDown.png”);
}

Button {
upSkin: Embed(source=”buttonSkins.swf”, symbol=”ButtonUp”);
}

Now talks about scale9 to control the stretching of the component skins. Demos it with a png background for a VBox.

scaleGridTop, scaleGridRight, … used on the Embed statement.

5 Minutes left, starts talking about programmatic skinning. It’s a bit harder the graphical skinning, but you have more control. Shows how to apply a skin to a tooltip.

ToolTip {
border-skin: ClassReference(”com.domain.ToolTipSkin”);
}

ToolTipSkin extends ProgrammaticSkin
override the method updateDisplayList()

That’s it! He gives away some books and a Lynda.com training dvd. Nice talk Joey, thank you!

Related links: http://www.person13.com/

Note: These are some notes from the Multi-Mania 2007 conference. I wrote them down while watching the sessions so there might be some typos and the sentences may be in telegram style.

Mike Downey: Getting started with Apollo

Introduces Apollo to the audience. Apollo is the first space mission that made it to the moon. So Adobe is very excited about this product. Apollo is a codename, the official name will be made public around Summer. Or maybe let’s see how many Duvel beers Mike needs before telling us the name.

Talks about how it is possible to integrate with the flash api from within html content and vice versa.
Apollo APIs: File System Access, Network Detection, Notifications, Application Update, Drag and Drop, …

Now Demos the Ebay Desktop Application: enables you to use Ebay services on the desktop. Cool thing is that you can drag stuff from the Apollo app and release it on the desktop. The app created an excell sheet. Shows how to take pictures with a web cam in Apollo. In the background, jpg files are written to the file system. Now creates a new auction but doesn’t submit it. Working on a live account and almost sold his watch for 5 dollars some weeks ago

Now shows apollobook, by Ely Greenfield. A flip book example with live html pages. Ultra geeky cool!

Will now show how to build an Apollo app. Unfortunately, my laptop is running out of juice. I’ll charge it the Chess Café while enjoying a superb Spaghetti Chess.

Related links: http://madowney.com/blog/

Note: These are some notes from the Multi-Mania 2007 conference. I wrote them down while watching the sessions so there might be some typos and the sentences may be in telegram style.

Flex 2

Waldo Smeets is not here so Serge and Wim are filling in for him. Shows the Flex component kit for Flash CS3. Creates a tween and exports it as a Flex Component. A swc “UIMovieClip” is added to the library. After publishing, a swc is created of the tween movieclip. Now creates a new Flex project. Adds the swc to the build path in the flex project properties. The tween swc can now be added in mxml . A local namespace is created to define the custom objects.

Now creates a more advanced movieclip in flash with some AS3 on it. Again exports it to a swc and adds it to a Flex application.

Now hands over the mic to Marc Meewis, Sales Engineer at Adobe. Will talk about Flex Data Services or Livecycle Data Services as it is called now. Talks about where we are today, from mainframe to Client/Server to Web Applications to Rich Internet Applications. Demos the FlexStore application: a perfect example of a Bitch errrr Rich Internet Application.

Shows how you can copy data from a flex datagrid and paste it in to an excell sheet and vice versa. Ow yeah!