Richinternet Blog

Unser neues Amazon AWS Blog (alles über die Amazon Cloud)

2012-05-12T12:44:10-02:00

Als autorisierter Amazon Solution Provider haben wir natürlich nun auch ein spezielles Amazon AWS Blog rund um die Themen Amazon Web Services Cloud am Start. Schaut doch mal rein: http://www.aws-blog.de

Introducing Cocoon P2P library

2011-05-06T23:32:11-02:00

Cocoon P2P is an open source peer-to-peer library for Flex/AIR and mobile devices that makes peer discovery, messaging and object replication via the RTMFP protocol easy and straightforward. It was created with simplicity in mind and does most of the work (connection and group creation, message handling etc.) automatically for you. By default, it uses LAN only RTMFP connections (no server involved) which allows to easily connect multiple devices on your LAN/WLAN but it can also be used with Adobe's Cirrus service. Future version will support Flash Media Server as well. More information, sample and source is available at the project's home page. Cocoon P2P was created by Peter Elst and is maintained by Peter and myself. For updates you may want to follow Cocoon P2P on Twitter Dirk.

AIR 2.7 Beta available on Labs

2011-04-01T08:20:14-02:00

AIR 2.7 just got available at labs.adobe.com (Windows and Mac Desktop versions, Android version will follow later). The new features include a analytics API ("Media Measurement"), the Acoustic Echo Cancellation known from the Flash Player 10.3 beta version and enhancements to the HTMLLoader API. The release date for AIR 2.7 is scheduled for Q2 2011.

Dirk.

Creating Remoting channels at runtime in ColdFusion

2011-03-25T09:38:03-02:00

In a recent project I had to dynamically create a Flex Remoting endpoint (Channels) at runtime in the embedded BlazeDS of ColdFusion (this was due to the fact that we did not wanted the customer to mess around with the services-config.xml file).

By default, the "ColdFusion" Remoting destination only uses a non-secure AMFChannel but we wanted to use the SecureAMFChannel on that destination as well. Usually, you'd need to edit the remoting-config.xml file, add the "my-cfamf-secure" channel to the list of channels for the "ColdFusion" destination and then restart the server. With runtime channel configuration, you can just add (or even remove) channels at runtime with no server restart. Actually, you can do anything you want as long as the BlazeDS API supports it.

In my case, I use the onApplicationStart methode of the Application.cfc to call the configureChannels method which will add the existing "my-cfamf-secure" channel to the "ColdFusion" endpoint in case it has not been done already:

<cffunction name="configureChannels" returntype="void" access="private">
   <cfscript>
   var cls = createObject("java", "flex.messaging.MessageBroker");
   var broker = cls.getMessageBroker(javacast("null", ""));
   var service = broker.getService("remoting-service");
   if (service.getDefaultChannels().size() == 1)
   {
      service.addDefaultChannel("my-cfamf-secure");
   }
   destination = service.getDestination("ColdFusion");
   if (destination.getChannels().size() == 1)
   {
      destination.addChannel("my-cfamf-secure");
   }
   </cfscript>
</cffunction>

That's it.

Dirk.

How to deal with crossdomain policies and subfolders

2011-03-10T17:23:46-02:00

I had an interesting chat with Cyril Hanquez today: he contacted me with a problem he experienced with Flash Player when he tried to load data from domain B with an SWF that lives in domain A. This is by default not allowed by the Flash Player and this has been so for many years now. It's a simple security mechanism that just says: if you want your SWF to load data from a "foreign" domain then the foreign domain has to allow this explicitly. To allow others to load data, someone at domain B has to upload a so called crossdomain policy file to the webroot of domain B and all is fine (that's the short explanation, for a lenghty discussion see here or here)

There are plenty of special cases around this and one special case is this scenario: say you have a subfolder /data on domain B and you want a SWF file from domain A access this URL. Usually, you'd have to put the crossdomain.xml file into B's webroot. Now, when you don't have write access to the webroot (e.g. because your admins don't allow you to put things there) but only to the subfolder /data then you may put the crossdomain.xml file there. You'd then only have to tell the SWF on domain A to grab the policy file from that location. This is done by calling Security.loadPolicy("http://www.domainB.com/data/crossdomain.xml") - easy as this.

I told Cyril this and to our surprise this did not work and we still got security errors from the Flash Player. Debugging the network traffic he noticed, that the Flash Player was correctly pulling the crossdomain.xml file from the subfolder in domain B (so that was ok) but in addition, the Flash Player still tried to load the crossdomain.xml file from the webroot of domain B - that was new (I remembered it worked this way without problems... so maybe it had to do with the Flash Player versions again...)

After reading the documentation again (and again) it became obvious that since Flash Player 10, crossdomain.xml files in subfolders always require an additional master policy which tells Flash Player if additional sub-policies are allowedd or not (this is critical for hosted environments for example). As Cyril cannot but anything into the webroot this seemed like a dead end road, but again - the documentation to the rescue: it's also possible to send additional, custom HTTP headers to tell Flash Player which policies are valid. This is done by setting the X-Permitted-Cross-Domain-Policies HTTP header and setting a value (e.g. "all" to allow all crossdomain.xml files in this domain and in subfolders) - Well, that finally did the trick (turned out that this behaviour has been there since Flash Player 10 btw)

Dirk.

Flash Player 10.3 beta with Acoustic Echo Cancelation and analytics integration

2011-03-08T08:28:51-02:00

Finally, a long time wished for feature made it into the just released Flash Player 10.3 preview version: Acoustic Echo Cancelation. With this feature, it's possible to create VoIP and video chat applications with better voice quality and less audio feedback.

In addition, 10.3 comes with a new integration feature called "Media Measurement" which allows for running real-time analytics over video content (supports RTMFP, RTMP, Multicast and HTTP) and direct interaction with Adobe Site Catalyst.

Also, the Flash Player Settings dialog is now a nativ control panel with the same look & feel as the rest of the operating system and the Local Storage management ("Flash Cookies") now integrates with Firefox 4, IE 8 and future versions of Chrome and Safari.

Dirk.

Streaming Video Roadshow 2011

2011-02-02T08:41:33-02:00

Together with Adobe we're happy to announce the "Streaming Video on the Flash Platform Roadshow 2011". Don't miss this if you want to learn more about Flash Media Server 4, video streaming, content protection (DRM), building videoplayers on top of OSMF and so much more.

The first two stops will be Cologne and Munich, more to come soon. For more information and to register follow this link

Dirk.

DIY Dependency Injection (Diet style)

2011-01-26T09:24:45-02:00

The Swiz framework uses a nice approach to inject dependencies into view components. By registering an event listener for the Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE (and the counterpart Event.REMOVED_FROM_STAGE) on the systemManager, they track the adding/removal of view elements at runtime, then introspect the class definition and look out for those magic [Inject] metadata annotations. If found, a dependency from the BeanFactory gets injected (wow, what a rush!)

In cases where you don't want to add Swiz to your application (yes, I admit it happened to me when I created a little POC) you can use the same approach to inject certain "global" dependencies (Models being a good example) into your views to avoid the Singleton anti-pattern.

Implementation is pretty straighforward. In my case I have a central Model class which holds references to certain other objects. This model gets instantiated just once in the main Flex application file. Now, in each MXML view that should access this Model object, I created a new public var model of type Model (in Swiz we would now have to put [Inject] on top of it but we don't do this here, it's just convention over configuration).

The last bit of "wiring" is to use the creationComplete Event of the main application file to an event listener for the Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE event to the systemManager. The event handler function then looks like this (ok, not pretty and it works 100% in my use case):

private function addedToStageHandler(event:Event):void
{
  const target:Object = event.target;
  // check if the target has a model property
  // and if so, check if it's not set yet
  // (no further type checking here so beware!!)
  if (target != this && target.hasOwnProperty("model") && target.model !== model)
  {
    // inject the model
    target.model = model;
  }
}

Disclaimer: of course, I don't want you to stop using Swiz in favour of this (probably silly) approach. I still use Swiz all the time - except for the little POC :) So, if you want to try it go ahead, if you need more, please take a look at Swiz or one of the other fine DI frameworks for AS3/Flex!

Dirk.

Tip: use /dropins folder instead of /plugins folder

2010-12-02T09:53:05-02:00

Important tip: if you manually install plugins to Eclipse or Eclipse-base products like Flash Builder then make sure to copy the plugin's JARs or folders to the /dropins folder instead of the /plugins folder. The /plugins is kind of deprected for manual installations.

More information about the /dropins folder is available here.

Dirk.

Flash Player 10.2 public beta introduces StageVideo

2010-12-01T09:24:10-02:00

Adobe just released the public beta of Flash Player 10.2 which (among a few other cools things) adds cross-platform GPU based video rendering which increases video playback performance.

To compile SWFs that take advantage of the new feature you need the new Flex 4.5 "Hero" stable Build 4.5.0.18623 which was also released.

More information and a lot of sample can be found here and here.

Dirk.

TODO/FIXME extension works fine with Flash Builder Burrito

2010-11-30T10:36:22-02:00

Although it's more than 4 years old by now, the little TODO/FIXME Extension I created for Flex Builder 2 in 2006 still works just fine even in the latest prerelease version of Flash Builder "Burrito"!

Dirk.

Just passed the Flex 4 ACE Exam

2010-11-25T16:29:48-02:00

Yeah - I just passed the Flex 4 ACE Exam which is mandatory to keep my Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI) status for teaching the official Adobe Flex courseware.

It was the third time that I took a Flex exam (first one was about Flex 2) but still it's a moment of great suspense when I click on the final "End exam" button to end the test and get the results (it's a sort of online test which has to be taken at a test center)

This time I passed with 84% which means 50 out of the 59 questions were correct. Unfortunately they don't show you the wrong answers afterwards which would be very interesting.

If you want to certify as well make sure to take a look at the Spark architecture, Service integration (including LCDS and Model Driven Development) and general OOP topics with focus on ActionScript implementation details. And if you're a Flex veteran (like me) with a strong Flex 3 background make sure to take an extra deep look at the at the Spark architecture :)

Dirk.

New Perspective Switcher Plugin version

2010-11-24T22:26:01-02:00

I added a little but pretty helpful new feature to the Perspective Switcher Plugin: the Plugin will now automatically switch back from a Debug perspective to the previous non-Debug perspective as soon as the Debug session is terminated. This feature is enabled by default but can be explicitly switched on and off in the Preferences page

I tested it with the Java and Flash Builder Debuggers but should work with any Debugger inside the Eclipse IDE that is based on the DebugPlugin infrastructure.

If you used the previous version (0.1.0) make sure to delete the old jar file in the ~~/plugins~~ /dropins folder first before adding the new version (0.1.1) to it. ~~Afterwards, it's a good idea to start Eclipse with the -clean switch.~~

Download the ZIP file here.

Dirk.

Perspective Switcher Plugin for Eclipse / Flash Builder

2010-11-04T15:44:35-02:00

Update: current version is 0.1.1 - read below

In my projects, I tend to work with more than one language inside Eclipse. Sometimes it's up to four but typically at least two (e.g. Java and Flex). One thing that always annoyed me inside Eclipse is, that it does not automatically switches perspectives based on the current language (or IDE plugin). So I always end up in the wrong perspective, seeking for a certain view or getting nuts because some key bindings overlap and do something different in one perspective than in another one. Know the pain? Here's the meds :)

I'm happy to introduce Perspective Switcher, a simple plugin for Eclipse (3.4 and above) which automatically switches perspectives for you based on the rules you define. It is not specific to Flash Builder at all and should work fine with *any* perspectives inside Eclipse.

Also, as of version 0.1.1, the Plugin will now automatically switch back from a Debug perspective to the previous non-Debug perspective as soon as the Debug session is terminated (yeah!). This feature is enabled by default but can be explicitly switched on and off in the Preferences page (but you don't really want to switch it off I promise) - again, this feature should work with *any* Debuggers inside an Eclipse distro as long they are built around Eclipse's DebugPlugin API.

Essentially, in the preferences page the plugin lists all active perspectives in your distribution and allows to specify which file extensions should be associated to them:

There's no validation on the extensions and you can also assign one extension to more than one perspective but the plugin will only pick the first perspective it finds.

Also, when testing I found that changing perspectives when in a Debug perspective is probably not a good idea, so all Debug perspectives are not shown in the list.

The plugin only switches perspectives when an Editor (e.g. JDT's Java Editor or Flash Builders MXML Editor) gets activated, either by opening a file or by switching from one open editor to another (by whatever means).

To install, simply unzip the ZIP file and copy the JAR into your distributions ~~/plugins~~ /dropins folder. ~~Then restart Eclipse / FB with the -clean switch~~. You should then see the "Perspective Switcher" entry on the Preferences dialog.

Current version is 0.1.1 - Download the ZIP file here.

Enjoy!

Dirk.

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.