Richinternet Blog

Copy Fully Qualified Classname Plugin for Flash Builder 4 (CFQCN)

2010-09-01T22:41:12-02:00

I created a little add-on for Flash Builder 4 which gives you a "Copy Fully Qualified Name" entry to the context menu in the MXML/AS3-Editors of Flash Builder. This is especially useful if you're creating new skin classes in Flex 4 and need to know the FQCN of the skin class to reference it in the CSS file for example (oh - and for item renderers, also very useful, and for a few other things it's useful, too btw)

I was a bit lazy concerning the name for this plugin so I just called it CFQCN

To get proper result you have to point the cursor into the editor (i.e. click on an element), then right-click and choose the "Copy Fully Qualified Name" menu entry. This will try to get the FQCN of the element (in case it's an element in MXML) or the name of the topmost class (in case of AS3 file or top-level MXML elements).

Some notes:

Members, properties and imports in AS3 (AS3 class files and Script blocks in MXML) are currently not supported
You really need a selection on the element you want tp copy the name from, i.e. the cursor needs to be placed on the element by mouse or by keyboard

This is really the first version of the plugin and I will add more functionality over time.

To install, download the ZIP file from here, unzip it and copy the JAR file to the /plugins directory of your Flash Builder 4 / Eclipse installation and restart. That's all. Oh, and yes it's free to use. Enjoy!

Dirk.

AMF Explorer Add-on for Firefox

2010-03-04T15:16:07-02:00

Nathan Mische's AMF Explorer is a nice add-on for Firefox which allows to seamlessly debug AMF traffic from within Firefox. Looks very promising, especially as the capturing of the AMF packets seems to be written in JS (not sure, though).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/78928

Update: Nathan confirmed that the add-on uses an JS to deserialize the data. The implementation is based on the BlazeDS java code. Nice job!

Dirk.

My W-JAX 09 Slides

2009-11-13T15:47:42-02:00

In case you missed this year's W-JAX conference, here are the slides for my session "Flex and Spring integration". I'll post the demo files later. Enjoy!

Dirk.

Adobe publishes RTMP specification

2009-06-16T09:08:04-02:00

As announced in January 2009, Adobe now published the specification for the former proprietary RTMP protocol. The specs can be downloaded for free from here, for more background information check Kevin Towes blog entry

The EULA is pretty clear on prohibiting two things: you may neither create "stream ripper" software based on the specs, nor create a software that cicumvents security/DRM measures implemented by Adobe (rtmpe, rtmps). You may of course build your own security/DRM scheme on top of the open RTMP specs

So: who is the first to create a AS3 only RTMP-client that does not use NetConnection?

Dirk

CFLOOP: undocumented charset attribute for reading files

2009-06-10T16:18:57-02:00

ColdFusion 8 introduced a new feature which allows to use CFLOOP to read in a file line by line. This is a nice convenience method but I noticed that by default CFLOOP in this mode always uses iso-8859-1 encoding to read the file's content which of course causes trouble when the encoding of the file is e.g. utf-8. By accident I found that there's an undocumented attribute on the CFLOOP tag to set the charset to use when reading in a file:

Dirk.

Enabling SSL on ColdFusion 8 with integrated JRun

2009-06-10T10:14:36-02:00

I had a hard time configuring SSL on my local CF8 running with the integrated JRun (Developer Edition). I followed the common instructions for enabling SSL on CF (like here and here) but in the end I always kept getting strange error messages like "sec_error_bad_signature" in the browser when I accessed CF via https.

Finally, I found that the error was related to the Java JRE. When I switched the JRE from the one shipping with CF8 (1.6.0_04-b12) to a Java 5 JRE ( 1.5.0_16-b02) the error went away and SSL works like a charm. I'm not yet sure if this is a bug in the JRE or CF8 but for my testing purposes it's just fine now.

Dirk.

Spring BlazeDS article available online

2009-05-28T17:12:43-02:00

My article "Spring trifft Flex" (Spring meets Flex) for the German Java Magazin is now available online for free. Check it out here!

Dirk.

Pass CF Array as serialized ArrayCollection from CF to Flex

2009-05-12T09:52:58-02:00

UPDATE: Sorry, my assumption was plain wrong. See my comment in the Comments section.

By default, a CF Array is serialized to a native Flash Array when when using AMF3/Remoting between Flex and CF. If you want to pass a CF Array directly as an ArrayCollection to Flex instead of wrapping in into an ArrayCollection on the Flex client side, then just wrap the CF Array into a java.util.ArrayList in your CFC:

Dirk.

Distinguish between Flex Remoting and "normal" HTTP requests in ColdFusion

2009-05-08T09:43:00-02:00

After a lot of Flex and Java coding I'm currently doing a CF/Flex project again. I haven't really touched CF for quite some time and decided to use ColdSpring in this project just for getting an idea of it. I've used Spring in my past Java projects and wanted to get a feeling for ColdSpring - and it really rocks! Make sure to check it out!

One thing I remembered from my past Flex/CF projects was that it always was not that easy to build a CF backend that can both serve Flex clients with AMF over HTTP (i.e. Remoting) and "normal" HTTP clients (standard-browser-HTML-you-know-what-I-mean). For example, the error handling is a bit difficult as you want CF runtime exceptions to get transported back to Flex clients as FaultEvents but for HTML clients you want a nice HTML output with error information. I never found a decent solution for this... until now :) Sometimes it is good to change perspectives (or to switch languages).

In the past Java projects we either used BlazeDS or LC on the backend side. The server side API offers a broad set of ways to access the incoming HTTP requests and the AMF payload. A main class in the BlazeDS and LCDS API to access all that information is the flex.messaging.FlexContext class. The idea is quite simle: in your server side Java code you can use the FlexContext class to get the current client (wrapped in a FlexClient object), the sessions (wrappers around the HTTPSession) and so on. So to check if a method was called from a Flex client you just have to check if FlexContext.getFlexClient() is != null.

Thanks to the fact that CF8 uses the same (or parts of) server side Flex API to implement the Flex <-> CF Remoting infrastructure you can also use the same method in your CFCs making it *much* easier to distinguish between Flex and HTML-client requests. A simple example goes like this - it could be used inside your Application.cfc's onError method:

Dirk.

RC1 of Spring BlazeDS Integration available

2009-05-07T08:39:41-02:00

Springsource just announced the availability of RC1 of the Spring BlazeDS Integration project.

Some of the interesting new features are the option to export Remoting Destinations by using Java 5 Annotations instead of classic XML-wiring and full support for custom JavaAdapters like those provided by dpHibernate or Gilead.

Dirk.

German Java Magazin publishes my article on Spring BlazeDS Integration

2009-04-03T09:38:29-02:00

In the recent issue 05/09 of the German Java Magazin you'll find my article "Spring trifft Flex" (translation: "Spring meets Flex") where I show how to use Flex, BlazeDS and Spring together by using Spring BlazeDS Integration.

Btw, it is a print magazine so you'll have to buy it - and no, I don't get money if you buy it :)

Dirk.

HP releases tool to find security vulnerabilities in Flash/Flex applications

2009-03-24T08:38:54-02:00

HP?s Web Security Research Group has released a tool called SWFScan. The application aims at helping developers finding and fixing security issues in compiled SWF files.

The tool first decompiles the SWF file (ActionScript 2 and 3 is supported) and then scans the generated sourcecode for a range of several security vulnerabilities like hard-coded passwords, XSS and cross-domain issues. Also, the tool checks the code against Adobe's security best practices. So in contrast to other decompiler tools this one really adds value for the developer. Worth checking out!

Dirk.

BlazeDS for .NET !?

2009-03-16T22:23:27-02:00

Update: the link does not work anymore :(

While browsing the Adobe Open Source web page base I stumbled across the ~~"BlazeDS for .NET"~~ page - it's a bit early for April Fool's Day Joke so it seems as if Adobe finally brings AMF to the .NET platform. Still, it seems a bit odd that all the links on that page point to the Java version... so maybe someone from Adobe can clarify?

Anyway, a .NET implementation of BlazeDS would be huge!

Dirk.

Critical Update or Flash Player 9/10, Release and Debug versions

2009-02-26T09:01:08-02:00

Adobe has released a CRITICAL update for Flash Player 9 and 10 which fixes a security hole.

IMPORTANT: you'll have to update your Debug-Players as well as the default update will only update the Release version of the installed Players! The Debug-Player downloads can be found here.

Dirk.

Adobe Open Source down (kind of)?

2009-02-25T08:39:36-02:00

Anyone else experiencing that certain features of opensource.adobe.com are not working? Most notably, all the top menu links like Projects, Source are not working or give an error page here...

UPDATE: seems that only the top level navigation is broken, the Wiki pages work, e.g. http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Get+Source+Code

Dirk.