Saturday, July 28, 2007

FlexCamp

I went to FlexCamp last night at Adobe's office in San Francisco. It was awesome. Adobe really knows how to host an event and how to treat developers. I was impressed. It was really cool seeing new Flex Builder 3 features presented by developers (and QA!) One of the sweetest moments was one of the developers showing how you can preview variable expressions during debug sessions just by mousing over the expressions. That may sound like a small thing if you haven't debugged code, but it's really useful. It elicited huge, spontaneous applause from the crowd of developers.

The demos by MixBook and SlideRocket were also really impressive. I was particularly blown away by SlideRocket. I was talking to one of the Adobe guys during a break and he told me that SlideRocket was completely coded by one guy, which just blew me away.

I was also really impressed with the Fireworks integration with Flex. I loved the idea of a designer using Fireworks to create a visual prototype using actual Flex UI components. Designer-developer workflow is still a holy grail of application programming IMO, and this was a small, but significant step in the right direction.

I did a presentation on using Flex to build a Facebook app. It was late at night. I was pretty tired and tried to keep it to 15 minutes, but I think it went over pretty well. I had lots of people asking me for the slides afterwards, so here are the slides in PDF. Also, here's the code for YouTubeFaves.

4 comments:

  1. Hey, one label your missing on your right nav is for Fireworks. :)

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  2. Anonymous6:34 AM

    Michael - could you briefly explain your proxy.php? How might that look in ColdFusion?

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  3. Sure. The proxy uses curl. PHP has thin wrapper functions on curl (curl_init, curl_setopt, curl_exec). The ActionScript code puts the full URL as a parameter to a request to the proxy. The PHP script pulls this apart, and uses it to setup a call to curl, using the url, copying the headers, and copying any POST data. It then calls curl and pipes the response from curl to a local variable. It then checks if there was any errors. If there was then it outputs the error from curl to the client (the SWF), if not then it outputs the response from curl to the client and closes the curl connection.

    It's really easy in PHP because of PHP's curl support. I have never used ColdFusion, so I can't be too much help. In Java, I would have configured a java.net.URL similarly, i.e. setting headers, post data, etc. Then I would have used that to open a connection, and similarly piped back response or errors, and then closed the connection.

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  4. Michael, may you help on this? I can't find youtube.swf file. If possbible can we get the raw file?

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