Mario Talavera Writes

This time Adobe is giving away non-commercial licenses to Flex Builder to any unemployed developer (or any unemployed).  Just head over to: https://freeriatools.adobe.com/learnflex/ and fill short form.

Adobe seems to always giving away some awesome software in a similar fashion.  Good move!

Finding myself with all this free time and aside from working on the house and playing with the kids; I have been working my way thru this recently released book.

Similarly to Flexible Rails, Flex on Rails illustrates how to create and integrate applications where the client tier is written in Flex and the back end is written in Rails. While Flexible Rails provides you with a roadmap to creating a full blown application, Flex on Rails is a bit looser on the guidance it provides. Instead doing a lot of hand holding thru every step of the application(s) it encompasses to create, it dives right into many of the most desirable integration problems a developer would encounter or wants to tackle. In this fashion, it reads a little bit like a cookbook.

Most of the integration exercises are well known and recurring in any developer’s career like CRUD thru RESTful services, xml data manipulation, debugging multi tier applications, test driven development, working with hierarchical data and nested sets.

I still haven’t done the most exciting chapters (I am still on Chapter 5, Passing Data with AMF), but I find the material and approach novel and interesting.

Ironically, I find some of the topics covered in this book to be second nature because of my last job.  Life is funny life that. For example, the chapters on debugging, test driven development and authentication would have been a lot more enlightening in a Flex context if I hadn’t spent last year soaking in these from my colleagues.

If you decide to check book out at your local bookstore, do yourself a favor and print a coupon for decent savings. I was able to save 40% last week.

Lastly, if you buy it with the intention of working thru the whole book; I recommend matching the version of Rails the book uses as the authors use some interesting features that are buggy in the latest release of Rails. So far, this bug in Rails 2.3.2 will prevent you from fully implementing some of the features the authors use. Downgrading my Rails version to match book’s allowed me to proceed without slowing me down much.

I am happy more resources are coming out on this topic (Flex and Rails) for I think it is one of the most fun, affordable and exciting combinations available to us. I commend the author’s as well from answering my emails promptly when (easily) stumped. If you find this technology combination interesting and feel comfortable working in either Flex or Rails, I highly recommend this book.

Woohoo!

How timely (for me anyways)! Adobe is giving away free copies of Flex Builder to unemployed developers.

Lucky me, while I have spent lots of time pondering; I have not landed a new job yet.

In all seriousness, this is quite the gesture by Adobe. Way to go guys!

Sample application? check.

Slides? check.

Remote? check.

Adapters? check.

Ethernet cable? check.

Power cable? check.

What resolution is that projector again?  I certainly hope it can do more than 800 x 600.  My days of building traditional web applications for the masses are over and neither my slides nor my application would look as intended a small screen.  I guess I had almost everything covered.  Such is life.  Silly oversight; life and learn.

All the same, this is going to be a fun presentation among friends and peers.  Can’t wait.

For the past few weeks at work, I’ve been working on effective ways to convey a great amount of data visually. The result has been using geographical maps in Flash to best represent the data of interest. For this, I have written an application in Flex to explore visualizing this data in Flash.

Never before have I had the tools, nor been around such competent peers to tackle such an endeavor.

By now, I have a very decent proof of concept. I believe this application can be built upon to properly display data in a meaningful and interesting way.

Best of all, I will be presenting at our local Orlando Adobe User Group (ADOGO). I am very exited to share my application with my peers and gather their feedback. I am certain this will be a learning experience as well; the more eyes I get on this, the more beneficial this work will be to my company.

Hope to see some of you there.

I’ve been playing for the past two days with the excellent web version of Balsamiq Studio’s Mockups.  It is an application mockup tool written in Flex with a desktop version written in AIR.

If anything, it is a very easy to use and fast to develop your concepts in mockup tool.  I was able to quickly build mockups of a few ‘apps I want to build but never seem to get around to’.  I have only used the online version but someone at the office has downloaded the desktop version and seems impressed as well.

Licensing is very reasonable, $79 for the desktop version and there is an online version with a nag screen.  Also, the the developer (this is a micro ISV) provides online help thru forums and seems very dedicated to both the product and the community building around it.  His site, balsamiq.com, is worth visiting as he has plenty of information I am but mentioning here…  He makes a much better case with demos, samples and even some videos.

Even the free version has the ability of saving your work as a PNG file or as an XML snippet you can save and reuse further.  I’ve tested this feature already and have successfully exported/imported my work a few times without any hiccups.

Lastly, the application is fun to use and this matters a lot.  Hopefully, it will promote its use and lead to better application designs.  It will definitely save me a lot of time and streamline my thought process.

Here’s about 30 minutes of work from the first time I tried it (ianaa):

I think this is a wonderfull and worthy use of using Flex and wish the developer the best of luck with this endeavor.

In the endless wisdom of our group intelligence at Highwinds; we’ve decided to evaluate three of the most prominent Frameworks for Flex.  Max has created a sample application and tasked each of us, Tommy, Russ and I, to rewrite it using a different framework each.  Tommy has been tasked with Cairngorm, I think, because he has vast experience in it.  Russ has been given PureMVC because he seems to be able to do any of them and that one seemed like a nice exercise for him.

Unencumbered by he thought process and the lack of information, I am positively making great strides rewriting the application in Swiz.  Swiz is one of the newest frameworks being developed for Flex.  The other recent one is Mate but we have no more developers in our team…

Swiz is the product of Chris Scott (of ColdSpring fame).  ColdSpring is an inversion of control framework for Coldfusion and he is applying his knowledge of this to Flex with Swiz.  He recently opened a Google group for the framework.

Slowly but surely, information is making its ways to the tubes. Recently, Chris just posted a ‘getting started‘ guide and sample code. Almost as important, he was recently interviewed in the Flex Show where he gives very insightful information on Swiz.  Besides my colleagues, these are the only resources on this framework so far.

The Flex show also has interviewed Laura Arguello.  She is the author of the Mate Framework.  I haven’t listened to this one yet.  Mate seems a little more intriguing to me at the moment, if only because there is  more documentation for it.  Or, most likely, because this is the one we’re not evaluating…

I’m very exited to see where this exercise leads us.  I plan on using this great oppotunity to learn Swiz and to adapt some of my way-to-simple apps to use the framework and see how it facilitates working in Flex.