JavaRanch was running book promotion for my book “Flex 3 with Java” from last week and it ended today. They announced their four lucky winners who will be receiving free copy of the book “Flex 3 with Java” (Packt was kind enough to sponsor those copies, thanks for that.).  I congratulate all four winners.

It was pleasure being on JavaRanch’s forum and I enjoyed interacting and answering member’s questions.

Thank you all.

I’m posting “Chapter 5: Working with XML” from my book “Flex 3 with Java”. This chapter will give you an idea about this book and its content. This is fairly small and simple chapter to start with collaborating XML into your Flex applications. This chapter mainly focuses on how to use and manipulate XML data and integrate with Flex list based components using simple URLLoader class.

In this chapter you will learn basics of working with XML data using E4X techniques and various XML classes provided by Flex 3 E4X API. You will also learn how to load external XML documents and manipulate it in your Flex application. This chapter will also provide you a comprehensive example for building a book explorer application using external XML data and E4X techniques.

I hope this chapter will serve a good purpose for solving some of the most common question asked by many Flex developers on how to work with XML data in Flex.

“Flex 3 with Java” book includes such many more and advanced chapters that will get you started with Flex 3 programming. To know more about the content of this book download Table of Contents.

This book is available now and can be purchased from PackPub.com and Amazon.com.

Keep Flexing and enjoy reading.

Other posts you might be interested in:

My Book “Flex 3 with Java” has been published.

Following up the pre-order release, today I am delighted to announce that my Book “Flex 3 with Java” has been officially published and is now available on the shelves.

I would like to thank everyone who was involved in the making of this book including my publisher Packt Publishing.

To know more about content of this book, you can download PDF of the “table of content“.  You can also buy print and ebook versions of this book from publisher’s website or from your nearest book store when it becomes available.

Update: You can now buy “Flex 3 with Java” on Amazon.

Cheers.

I’m very excited to announce that my book “Flex 3 with Java” has been announced for pre-order on Packt Publishing’s website. The book is expected to be released by June, 09.

This book is targeted to students, newbies and Java developers who want to get started with Adobe Flex 3 programming, this simple and clear handbook introduces Flex technology quickly and straightforwardly.

This book provides comprehensive information on various aspects of Flex 3 and ActionScript 3.0. These include developing simple applications, handling events, creating custom components and events, using RPC services, integration with Java and BlazeDS, styling and formatting, and how to package and deploy Flex applications and much more. You can visit Packt’s website for more information.

On pre-order you will get a special 10% discount on print and 30% discount on eBook versions, so go ahead and pre-order your copy.

Cheers,
Satish

I was reading through Mike Slinn’s article on InsideRIA called “Good Code is Beautiful” where he is talking about importance of writing code as beautiful as you would expect it to work. Well this reminded me how I transformed from following style of vertically spacing parenthesis to vertically compressed parenthesis style.

From This:

private function foo():void

{

   if(…)

   {

         …

   }

   else

   {

         …

   }

}

To This:

private function foo():void {

   if(…) {

         …

   } else {

         …

   }

}

I agree that vertically spacing parenthesis style is easy to read but again depends on how you look at it and individual taste. But it doesn’t work sometimes.

When I first started to work on Flex 1.5 I faced many problems but one of the particular problem which forced me to switch my liberal way of writing code to writing compressed code (I mean positively). The error is commonly known as “The 32k Error”. The Flex 1.5 compiler seems to consider empty spaces and commented lines while compiling code and sometimes this caused nasty compiler 32k Error. There are many reasons why this error would pop up during compilation and not all are known, however most common are:

1. Number of code lines or file size.
2. Using too many nested looping statements and process heavy data in it (I don’t know why)
3. Or any other reason you might find… (they are not know to me)

Once we encountered this error then it took us days or sometimes weeks to figure out what is causing the error and how to rid it, but over the course of time I learnt that major cause is number of lines in your file so better write a code vertically compressed manner and remove commented or unused code and split large files into many small AS files.

Today I am so used to writing vertically compressed code that I think it is the faster (you save hitting Enter key ) and best way to maintain your code in a long run and its best way to save space (not that you have to pay for space, but you never know).

Cheers,

Satish

I’m really happy to announce that I’m writing a book about Flex 3. This is my first professional book authoring experience so I am bit nervous and super excited about it. This book will be focused on getting started with Flex 3 programming with Java integration perspective in mind. However this book can be useful for any person who wants to get hands-on with Flex 3. I’ve already begun writing and tentative publication timeframe is set to early 2009. More details are coming, stay tuned!

Keep Flexing.

I have been discussing this question on flex-india since last week and saw many and verity of responses in developer’s and client’s point of view and saw some blog reactions to it as by Abdul Qabiz. Thought I would post my point of view on this topic whether search engines should index SWF content or not.

There are mainly two aspects to this question first developer and second customer/businesses, my opinion is kind of mixed of both. There is valid questions raised during this discussion as “RIAs are application not the content, hence cannot be seen as content holder as HTML. Does your desktop search index your desktop applications?”

First half of this statement is absolutely correct that RIAs are the applications BUT if your application is on internet then it is bound to deals with the content and if it is dealing with content then it becomes mandatory for enterprises to have it search engine friendly in order to increase “visitors + business + revenue”. That is why we call it Rich Internet Application (RIA).

I would like to quote statement stated by Chuck Frazier on flex-india thread, he says “RIA’s are applications and Flex has allowed my website to operate much like a desktop app. I love it for that reason. But if no one knows I exist, then it doesn’t matter how fantastic my website is. It would be like cooking a wonderful banquet, but I didn’t send out invitations to my friends. So the fact that SEO and web crawler techniques do not apply well to Flash / Flex is definitely a concern for anyone that wants to make money with their website.“

And this is definitely a concern and deciding factor for many enterprises to choose flash/flex as front end technology.

In desktop world the “visitors + business + revenue” factor is not there and hence it is not required for them to be indexed.

I love flex as much as any flex evangelist would but I do not want to see swfs used only for animation or as applets, today how many are using applets, when SUN released it as an internet applications technology (Applets are used to provide interactive features to web applications that cannot be provided by HTML), and to avoid applet like fate we need to make swfs more content friendly, swfs have to leverage html capabilities and continue improving and evolving RIA platform.

My personal experience, it is difficult to convince your clients saying that flash/flex is not SEO friendly and you cannot treat them as HTML. However there are some techniques available such as Ted Patrick’s post about writing wrapper around your swf content for making it accessible to search engine crawlers. Also go through InsideRIA post about Google is using Adobe’s Search Engine SDK to crawl through SWF content.

It is very interesting to see how swfs get evolve in future keeping in mind applications and content friendliness. As Chuck says “I somewhat agree with Abdul about the content versus app issue, but at the same time I think we’re looking at an evolutionary jump that will blur the lines and make those ideas less applicable to the “new Web” that Flex developers are creating.”

I would like to hear your idea/opinion on this question.

Cheers,

Satish

Finally I finished porting ShoutCast! to Ribbit Beta 2 API. Chuck Freedman was asking me this for DEMO but due to my busyness or laziness I couldn’t able to port it on time, sorry for that Chuck I know I missed DEMO showcase.

About ShoutCast! Beta 2 Release: Along with other features from beta 1 I have added support for sending DTMF tones.

Changes in this release, I am hosting ShoutCast! from my website so there is a change in Embed code please note it as following.

To embed ShoutCast! into your website or blog you have to use following code

<script src=”http://www.satishkore.com/shoutcast/shoutcast.js”></script>   (make sure double quotes ” are proper when you copy)

Just copy and paste above code into your html or if you are using widgetized blogger or wordpress blog then paste it into widget/page.

Very soon(?) I will be releasing next version with all new cool features with significant changes in user interface.

If you got any question regarding embedding ShoutCast! in your website then contact me.

Cheers,
Satish

Meeting will be held on 25th February and it is special for following reasons

a. Adobe is sponsoring this event.
b. Adobe is giving away raffle copy of Adobe Flex Builder 3 Professional.
c. Adobe is about to release Adobe Flex 3 and Adobe AIR 1.0 and this will be the focus of this meeting.

Flex 3 is a feature-packed release, adding new UI components like the advanced datagrid and improved CSS capabilities; powerful tooling additions like refactoring; and extensive testing tools including memory and performance profiling, plus support for automated functional testing in Flex Builder 3.

Adobe AIR is game-changing in so many ways, delivering rich Internet applications (RIA) on the desktop, enabling access to the local file system, system tray, notifications and much more. Now you can write RIAs on the desktop using the same skills that you’ve been already using to create great web apps including both Flex and AJAX.

The details about venue, speakers and topics yet to be decided. Keep watching Flex India Topic or Mrinal’s Blog for updated information.

Cheers,
Satish

Ah finally, my blog has been added to the Macromedia XML News Aggregator after a long wait but as somebody said “things don’t happen when you want it and when it happens then you don’t want it.” MXNA has added my old blogger blog to their list and I have recently shifted to my own blog.

Now I just hope that my blogger redirection to redirect traffic from blogger to my new blog will work for MXNA too. (Fingers crossed).

Edited: Redirection is working and MXNA is able to pick my posts