So update your links and rss feeds!

@echo off
SET v_test=%1
SET v_result=%v_test:\=/%
echo // > tempPublish.jsfl
:start
echo %v_result%
echo filename = "file:///%v_result%"; >> tempPublish.jsfl
echo fl.openDocument(filename); >> tempPublish.jsfl
echo curr_doc = fl.getDocumentDOM(); >> tempPublish.jsfl
echo curr_doc.testMovie(); >> tempPublish.jsfl
shift
if "%1" == "" goto end
goto start
:end
start "C:/Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Flash CS3/Flash.exe" tempPublish.jsfl

Save this file as flashpublish.bat or whatever suits you. Now we’ve got our batch file, it’s time to setup flex builder.

1. Goto ‘Run’ -> ‘External Tools’ -> ‘External tools’
2. From the configurations list, select ‘Program’
3. Click ‘New’
4. Give the configuration a name like ‘Flash Builder’ or something
5. In the location box, locate the batch file
6. Leave the Working Directory empty
7. Enter the following string in the Arguments field:
   ${project_loc}/src/${project_name}.fla
8. Select the ‘Common’ tab and select ‘External Tools’ at the ‘Display in favorites menu’
9. Hit apply and close.

You can now use Flex Builder for your actionscript projects. Just create a new Actionscript project (not a Flex project) and locate it in the same directory as the FLA file.

Make sure the projectname is the same as the filename of the FLA.

When you want to build, hit External Tools -> Flash Builder.

Now, to make it even faster to work with apply a shortcut to it:

1. Goto Window -> Preferences
2. From the ‘General’ section, select ‘Keys’
3. Choose Modify and select ‘Run/Debug’ as category and ‘External Tools…’ as name
4. At the key sequence name field, press the desired keyboard shortcut and klick Add
5. Click OK, your shortcut is added and ready to be tested!

Now, you finally have a descent Actionscript Editor which is capable of building FLA files!

In my previous post WebOrb was a factor 4 slower than it’s opponent, AMFPHP. With this new version, the difference is much smaller. I ran the ‘invoke large dataset’ test and the difference was only 40ms (It used to take 6 seconds, it now takes 270ms). So AMFPHP still holds the speed record, but WebOrb is closing in!

Unfortunately, I could not found any release notes for this new version, so I cannot post which improvements they’ve made besides the performance.

I’ve updated the test application, so it now connects to weborb 3. You can run it here.

All I can say is thumbs up for the Midnight Coders, and keep up the good work.

Cheers!

IKTree now has:

• Caching / Recycling of children, which reduce the ‘flickering’
• Label & IconFunctions
• Object access for labelfields. You can now access objects in the tree for the labelfield. For instance, you can set ‘obj.label’ as labelField. It will then set the label as data[obj][label].
• Doubleclick support
• Added some styles (indicatorThickness & indicatorColor)

You’ll find the files here:

Demo
Source
SWC
Docs

Please let me know what you think. If you find any bugs you can also post them here.

Read the original post.

The new version brings live matching and result highlighting

With Live Matching turned on, ASRET evaluates the expression every time the expression, the string to match or one of the flags is changed. You can find ASRET here.

Read the original post.

This gives you some advantages, like I mentioned in my previous post ‘Sneak Preview: Custom Tree Component for Flex’:

• Opening and closes is just a case of hiding boxes;
• It’s fast;
• Boxes are reliable, lists are not;
• Variable row height is no problem.

Update 04/03/08 15:59

I’ve uploaded a newer version (1.0.1b), which adds much of the ToDo functionality

This version (1.0.1b) supports:

• Drag ‘n Drop
• Custom Icons
• Lazy Loading
• Custom renderers (item renderer and drop indicator)
• Slightly stylable
• Drag from a component to the tree;
• Create folders on drop;
• Set default renderer automatically;
• Handle width and height as percentages

What the next version(s) need:

• Caching / recycling of children;
• Styles;
• Animations;
• Multiselect

The source is added to the demo as an swc file:

Demo
Source
SWC
Docs

This version is just an early release, it’s full of bugs, misses lots of features, has no documentation and is not very well designed. Therefore I’m not releasing the source code (yet) (however, you can see the source code of the example).

Features this version include:

• Basic events (open, close, selectionChange)
• Custom renderers, as long as you extend the IKTreeItemRenderer class.
• Lazy loading, just add your data to the children property of the dataprovider
• Custom icons, you can specify icons in multiple ways:
  • In the dataprovider (you can set an iconfield)
  • As a property of the tree, which accepts urls, objects (containing an folder and ‘normal’ icon url) or an array
• Drag & Drop (buggy, drag from or to the root is not possible)
  • You can move items, or copy (press the alt key while dragging)

Like I said, I wanted to avoid the list classes, instead it uses VBoxes to do the trick. This has some advantages:

• Opening and closes is just a case of hiding boxes;
• It’s fast;
• Boxes are reliable, lists are not;
• Variable row height is no problem

The goal of this component is:

Having a reliable tree which is simple to use but powerful enough to do more than just display dummy data. It will support ArrayCollections only, no XML or objects, only ArrayCollections. It will be able to do everything that a normal tree can do, and more.

I will be releasing updated versions in the next couple of weeks / months / years / centuries. If you would like to see features in this tree, just let me know and I will take them in consideration.

Btw, you’ll find the example here.

 Update 04/03/08

First version released, check ‘It’s here! IKTree v1.0 (beta) ‘

Please, let me know what you think of it.

And before I forget, I want to thank <theFactor.e> for giving me the time to develop this component.

I hear you thinking “why would you want something like this?”. Well, I’m rebuilding the tree component and I need to have a click event on the icon to open a node. Also I need a mousedown event on the node (icon and label) to enable dragging in the tree. When you call the dragmanager, the click event of the icon doesn’t come through (although sometimes it does…). I created a small test case, which you can view here (source available). Click on the small icon, it will start dragging it and write to the textarea that the mousedown event is received. Now disable the dragmanager and click again, you’ll see that now 2 events are captured.

The problem with this issue is that the mousedown event is fired before the click event, so you’ll never know if the user clicked the icon. Right now, I don’t really have a solution for this issue, maybe I’ll end up rewriting the dragmanager so that it won’t cancel out all events.

Update 03/27/08

I found a work around for this problem. You call the dragmanager at mouseMove, not at mouseDown. If you click now, the click event is fired and the dragmanager is not invoked. But make sure you set a boolean at mouseDown that dragging is allowed and set it to false at mouseUp. Otherwise, flex will allways drag if you move the mouse over the component.

You can see an example here (with source, of course).

This information is outdated, please see WebOrb closes the gap! for updated test results.

First some information:

AMFPHP runs out of the box, you don’t have to change settings in order to get it to run, just move your php classes to the services folder and you’re good to go. For WebOrb, you need to change the remoting-config.xml and add your gateway variables. Also, if you want to use it in a production environment, you need to clean up that file.

A good thing of WebOrb is the code generator, if you use one of the supported frameworks.

Enough of this, show me the test!

I created a small flex sample app and a small php class to test both products. It turns out that, depending on the request size, AMF-PHP is a whopping 4 times faster! When the request becomes larger, the difference is even bigger. (The when you set the for loop in php to 10000, WebOrb will time out, while AMF-PHP happily returns the result.

The source of the flex app is available under the right mouse button, the source of the php looks like this:

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<?php
	class test {
		var $lorum;
 
		function test() {
			$this -> lorum = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Ut id nisl non mi consectetuer rutrum. Phasellus a libero. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Praesent tempus commodo justo. Curabitur vestibulum, tortor eu eleifend feugiat, arcu libero auctor lorem, id varius massa nisl ac sem. Morbi aliquet, purus at ullamcorper porta, sapien purus rhoncus est, nec tincidunt nulla massa non lectus. Phasellus ut elit et augue pellentesque tincidunt. Sed eu purus. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Nulla velit nibh, sagittis sed, iaculis vitae, pellentesque et, neque. Praesent vulputate imperdiet orci.";
		}
 
		function testMethod() {
			return date("m/d/Y H:i:s");
		}
 
		function testLargeMethod() {
			$res = array();
			for($i = 0; $i < 5000; $i++) {
				$res[] = $this -> lorum;
			}
			return $res;
		}
	}
 
?>

Pretty straight forward, just place it under [amfdir]/services/ and [webOrbdir]/Services/
You can run the test yourself and download the source code here.

So, concluding, it turns out that when you want remoting on a PHP based server, AMF-PHP is the way to go. It’s lightweight, fast and free. The only downside could be that the team developing it has been quiet for a while. WebOrb has the better (more professional) console, but that’s it. It’s just dead slow! I hope that the .NET, java and ruby versions of WebOrb are faster, because this performance is not acceptable.

If there’s anyone with suggestions to speed up WebOrb, please let me know!

Let me give you some examples what’s wrong with FB3:

- First of all: it can’t run alongside FB2 (at least, the installer tells me to close FB2, so I guess it will remove FB2 before installing FB3), since I need to work on older projects too, I want to keep FB2.

- My mxml view is fucked up, look at this mess:
enlarge

Well, that’s not going to work very nice, does it?

-I like to run my applications using [ctrl] + [enter], just like in flash. So I head up to preferences and click on keys. Look what a beautiful screen it gives me:
enlarge
Nice job adobe!

And fourth (and last, I uninstalled FB3):

You cannot import old projects from your hard drive into the new FB3

In FB2 you could do new -> other, in FB3 this gives you an empty screen again. Or you went to import -> existing projects into workspace. In FB3 the import functionality is broken, you cannot import anything.

Adobe please…. if you want Flex to become a market leader in web apps, ‘defeating’ Silverlight and JavaFX, stop making crappy product and give us a decent environment! Honestly, I don’t see why you would release a product which is even crappier as the old one. Flash / Fireworks CS3 wasn’t too good either, so the only thing I can say is congratulations Adobe, you successfully fucked up every product of the macromedia group!

Ow and FYI: I work on Win XP x64, clean install, so don’t come telling me it’s some spyware shit or something!