Adobe Devnet has a security advisory on the upcoming Flash Player 9 update. The advisory lists a few very important changes to the security model in Flash Player which can possibly impact your existing Flex and Flash applications. The changes are primarily to address the vulnerabilities of the earlier versions of Flash Player (9,0,115,0 and before).

There are four key changes that can possibly impact existing applications:

• A socket policy file will always be required for all socket connections
• A policy file will be required to send headers across domains (This will possibly affect some of the Flex apps that I work with)
• The allowScriptAccess default will always be "sameDomain"
• "javascript:" URLs will be prohibited in networking APIs, except getURL(), navigateToURL(), and HTML-enabled text fields

» Continue reading "Important Flash Player Security Update - Check your applications"

I just saw that Universal Mind Cairngorm extensions for Flex are now set up on RIAForge (thanks Andrew).

We have been using the UM Cairngorm Extensions at Straker Interactive (where I work) for ZoomFlex since about six months.

One of the features that I really like about the UM extensions is the ability to combine together event-business logic. Given that any real-life application (like ZoomFlex) has quite a few commands, having a separate Command class for each command can become quite overwhelming. The ability to aggregate command logic into context-specific command classes is very useful.

» Continue reading "Cairngorm extensions from Universal Mind"

Just saw an interesting article on Engadget that compared iPhone SDK to Windows Mobile, Android, S60 and Toolchain.

What is really interesting is that Windows Mobile along with Nokia S60 supports Flash.

iPhone, as you know, does not support Flash (and won't support it any time soon, given Apple's comments yesterday about Flash being too slow to run on iPhone).

And what is even more interesting is that Microsoft and Nokia have signed a deal to make Silverlight available on Nokia S60 and S40.

So two things really:

1. Adobe needs to do something to get on to the iPhone platform. AIR runtime perhaps?
2. Adobe needs to look at engaging Nokia for AIR runtime.

Here is the article at Engadget: iPhone SDK Comparison Chart.

I just went to download Flex 3 SDK from the Try Flex Builder 3 page on the Adobe site.

The file that downloads when one clicks the "Download Flex SDK 3 for all platforms" link at the bottom of the page is called "flex2_sdk_hf1.zip".

When one unzips the file and looks at the readme, it confirms that the SDK vesion is: Version 2.0.1.

I presume the "hf1" in the file name suggests that it is Flex 2 SDK with 'hotfix 1'.

Is anyone else also facing this issue or is it only me?

The SDK that ships with Flex Builder 3 does indeed have a readme that indicates SDK version 3.0. I guess I'll just use that for now.

Update (9.30 a.m.):

The link on the download page has now been fixed. Adobe took just an hour to pick up this blog entry, respond to it, and fix the issue. Very impressive!

Given that I downloaded the incorrect Flex SDK (2.0) earlier today, and am downloading the correct one right now (3.0), I can't help but comment on the size of the SDK. Flex SDK 2.0 was 38.11mb. Flex SDK 3.0 is 78.44mb! Lots of goodies!

The next version of IntelliJ IDEA-- 7.0.3 -- will have built-in support for Flex development.

Among other things, it will support:

• Smart code completion for MXML and AS files, with cross-resolution of code symbols between them, even inside of mx:Script blocks and attribute values
• Automatic code formatting, highlighting and styling
• On-the-fly code validation with instant quick-fixes
• Search for perfomance bottlenecks, bad code practices
• Refactoring

Here is a tutorial using IntelliJ IDEAfor Flex development. You'll need to sign up for the early release program of JetBrains to get the beta of IDEA7.0.3.

» Continue reading "Flex Builder alternative -- IntellJ IDEA 7.0.3"

Today I was working on refactoring code of a large Flex application.

Many files contained lots of imports at the top. I was looking for a quick way to organize my imports.

I did vaguely remember that there was on an option somewhere to organize the imports, but couldn't remember where to find it! Did all my right-clicks etc., but just couldnt' see it. I was almost about to move on, but then I found it!

In Flex Builder, click on Source > Organize Imports to organize imports alphabetically.

Even better, there is shortcut keys for it organizing imports.

On Windows: CTRL + Shift + o

On Mac: Apple + Shift + o.

Keep in mind that that imports can only be organized in this manner in Actionscript files only. (This will not work in MXML files.)

But overall, it works beautifully.

I recently wrote a sample Flex application -- a simple Flex RSS Reader -- using Cairngorm.

I find that learning Cairngorm is made easier by looking at simple applications like this one. And the one I wrote earlier -- a simple contact manager.

When one looks at how Cairngorm is implemented across multiple applications, one starts seeing common patterns. And that is exactly the point of a framework like Cairngorm. Learning the framework is made easier by the fact that there is a certain repeatability and consistency in the way a Cairngorm application is structured.

» Continue reading "Simple Flex RSS Reader using Cairngorm"

I've just setup a Google Code project for the sample contact manager application I had written a while back. The contact manager used Flex, Cairngorm framework and ColdFusion backend.

The original version of the application was based on Cairngorm .99. I've been working on upgrading the application to Cairngorm 2.2.

» Continue reading "Flex, Cairngorm based contact manager on Google Code"

Today I was building an application using Cairngorm 2.2. All was going well and I was very happy with the progress I was making. But then, I started facing this error while compiling the application.

From the text of the error it appears that the locale-specific bundle for CairngormMessages is not available/visible.

» Continue reading "Unable to resolve a class for ResourceBundle: CairngormMessages"

Just finished my session on Working with Web APIs at Web on the Piste, Queenstown, New Zealand. The presentation was about:

• What are Web APIs
• How do they work
• How to use them
• Creating a ColdFusion and Flex front-end using Flickr API

As with my presentation yesterday on "Introduction to Flex", I had a lot of content, and lots to talk about. The presentation is attached with this blog. It was a light presentation. My session was one of the last few sessions for today and I just wanted to try and keep it simple and fun.

» Continue reading "Working with Web APIs -- Presentation at Web on the Piste"