Posts filed under 'WEB/HTML Development'
Ok that was a long title. But I just got done with presenting at ZendCon 2007 in San Francisco and feel like a long title. The session was geared to take Cal Evan’s, “Flex and PHP: Party in the Front, Business in the Back”, a do some Flex enhancements on the Front end side.
What came out of the session was a Flex RSS Picture Book. Using Ely Greenfield’s FlexBook component, the picture book displays images from the keyword’s of the articles description text.
Here is the live example of the Flex RSS Picture Book, remember to click on the image to see the Article’s title and description.
You can find the Flex RSS Picture Book source here, this source includes just the MXML and a slightly modified FlexBook source to handle crossdomain security. You’ll need to get the PHP source from Cal Evan’s original article.
October 9th, 2007
A fellow Adobe employee helped make a very successful iPhoneDevCamp happen over the last weekend. I would have loved to attend but I am in vegas waiting for a new addition to the family to arrive.
Here are some of the highlights:
Large group of iPhone owners
Attendee’s thoughts
LA Times Article on iPhone and dev camp in San Francisco
Application created during the hack-a-thon
Top 10 Apps created that weekend
July 9th, 2007
The big news of the day is the Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta release on http://labs.adobe.com. There was also two other updates on labs that are still quite important for Adobe’s engagement platform. Spry is up to prerelease 1.4 and a new addition of JSEclipse.
JSEclipse is a new plugin for the Eclipse environment that helps developers code JavaScript faster and with no errors. With JSEclipse, you can complete a variety of tasks, from editing small sections of code to working with the next big AJAX library or developing plug-ins for a product that embeds JavaScript snippets.
Download and install JSEclipse and improve your JavaScript coding experience with:
* Contextual code completion & shortcuts.
* Project outline and quick navigation through function declarations.
* Syntax highlighting.
* Error reporting.
* Customizable code templates to get you started.
* Support for popular JavaScript libraries (Dojo, Prototype, YUI, Qooxdoo).
* Support for JavaDoc documentation and multi-line comments.
December 15th, 2006
I am excited to announce the release of an article on Adobe’s Dev Center, “Using Flex 2 RemoteObject and SabreAMF”.
I would like to thank Amy Wong, Adobe editor, and Evert Pot, developer of SabreAMF, for all the help making this article happen.
November 6th, 2006
In my first attempt with WebORB for PHP I came across an issue that was not keen with the examples I was trying to use. The issue had to do with using the “source” attribute on the RemoteObject class. The reason behind the missing feature in WebORB for PHP was that they modeled their services config files after FDS, which is JavaAdapter based. My examples are based on ColdFusion and use the standard services-config.xml <source>*</source> attribute defined for the “ColdFusion” destination, which is created by the ColdFusion connectivity feature in 7.0.2.
Continue Reading September 23rd, 2006
The midnightcoders have provided a nice package to use RPC services with Flex and PHP. The newly release WebORB for PHP is an exciting project. For there site:
WebORB for PHP is server-side technology enabling connectivity between Flex and Flash Remoting clients and PHP applications. WebORB for PHP can be installed into any PHP5 application to expose PHP classes as remote services. The product provides a complete implementation of the Adobe’s AMF0 and AMF3 messaging protocols and thus supports any Flash Remoting or Flex client.
Although this release only supports the RPC featureset of Flex Data Services it is planned for future FDS features. Their documentation and Quick Start guide are top notch and should be easy to follow. They use a deployment folder structure of “Weborb\WEB-INF\flex\” making it easy to use the New Project Wizards in Flex Builder to make FDS or ColdFusion connectivity projects.
Configuration
Now I usually like to take these projects and apply my standard Flex, AMF, and PHP example. This is where I ran into problems. The configuration files are setup disctintly like FDS. I tend to follow the ColdFusion connectivity default configuration files and setup one Destination tag with a <source>*</source> attribute. The * attribute value is not support in the current WebORB for PHP. You need to define the specific source for each destination tag in the services-config.xml (actually in the remoting-config.xml that is included in the services-config.xml).
I added the following to the remoting-config.xml
<destination id=”LoginServiceDestination”>
<properties>
<source>com.renaun.samples.login.services.Login</source>
</properties>
</destination>
The example Flex application is from my example code used in the RemoteObjectAMF0 and my SabreAMF example. You can get the my example code here.
Object Type Mapping
Object typing is a very important feature when working with RemoteObjects and Flash Remoting. FDS and ColdFusion connectivity have built in mechanisms that handle object typing for you. But other packages like SabreAMF, AMFPHP or OpenAMF you need to set the mapping manually. This is where WebORB for PHP uses PHP5 features to make object typing automatic, no manual attributes, method tables, or class mapping functions.
The hiccup was that the object typing didn’t work quite right. The example code provided by WebORB for PHP and my custom BookVO example had an extra “.htdocs.Services.” attached to the class type. I tracked down this issue to Util/TypeLoader.php class in the getFullClassName method. You get to set your services path in the Weborb/weborb-config.xml (default is <weborb servicePath=”../Services”>). The fix to get the correct object is to add “$servicePath = realpath( $servicePath );” in the getFullClassName method right after “$servicePath = $config->getServicePath();”.
Conclusion
Overall WebORB for PHP has great potential. The project is backed by a group that create many great products for Ajax, Flash Remoting and Flex on many different platforms. We are lucky to have them provide this project as open source. I am particularly interested in the further development of FDS polling and data management features.
September 6th, 2006
Flex 2 provides many new and exciting features. One of the improvements is the new Action Message Format or AMF3. AMF is used with RemoteObject’s components and requires a compatible server. The newer AMF functionality provides improved performance and better object typing.
Current AMF integration is predominantly done through the ColdFusion connectivity update found in ColdFusion MX 7.0.2 and Flex Data Services. PHP and other open AMF projects have been catching up to the AMF field. More and more PHP servers and clients are supporting the AMF3 format, now it’s a question about how easy is it to integrate and use with Flex 2 applications. This article we’ll explore such a setup using SabreAMF.
Read the rest of the article here
September 1st, 2006
I have been working with a component that loads FLV video and SWF animations. The component is sometimes CPU intensive because of the FLV video and SWF animations used….
Continue Reading June 14th, 2006
In trying to install the new CakePHP DB_ACL functionality I ran across some issues with my php CLI setup.
I was following the link here CakePHP ACL.
My setup was created by the “xampp-win32-1.5.1-installer.exe” installer. Basically a light version of Apache 2.2.0, PHP 5.1.1, windows XP installer.
I fired up the command prompt to run the command line code as outline in the CakePHP ACL instructions and came across some errors.
First Error:
Warning: require_once(CORE_PATHcake\libs\neat_array.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in C:\xampplite\htdocs\cake\cake\basics.php on line 392
I fixed this by added “define(’CORE_PATH’, CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH.DS);” to line 44 of acl.php
Second Error:
Fatal error: Class ‘Inflector’ not found in C:\xampplite\htdocs\cake\cake\libs\model\connection_manager.php on line 111
I fixed this error and later errors by adding the below lines of code right after line that says “require ‘cake’.DS.’basics.php’);”,
define(’LIBS’, CORE_PATH.’cake’ .DS. ‘libs’.DS);
require LIBS.’inflector.php’;
Then the acl.php script was able to be run as a php CLI command line script. Not sure if this is a common error with this script or if its just with my setup and php.exe configuration.
March 6th, 2006
We had a problem with a DHTML popup menu being rendered behind any flash content.
Code that is needed:
HTML:
-
<div id="swfContainer" style="z-index:0;">
-
<param name="wmode" value="transparent">
-
<embed src="main.swf" wmode="transparent"...
Continue Reading December 8th, 2005
