Mike Potter

March 18, 2007

Blog Moved

I'm now blogging at RIAPedia.com. Please change your bookmarks. Thanks.

January 30, 2007

Flash, Flex and PHP Just Got A Huge Boost

Using Flash and Flex with a PHP backend just got a whole lot faster. Patrick Mineault, who runs the AMFPHP project, has released a new version of AMFPHP 1.9, beta 2 now. However, the real big news in his blog post was the news that there is now a C based AMF extension for PHP. According to his tests, this is up to 100% faster than using the PHP version of the AMFPHP library. In fact, his tests show that it takes less than 1 second to encode and send 100,000 array elements, each containing an object with 3 fields (7.3 MBs of data). Head over to his blog to read more about it.

January 26, 2007

Talking Flex to Students Around Toronto

If you're interested in seeing the latest web technologies, including Flex and Apollo, and live in Toronto or Waterloo, then you should drop by one of the three events that we're having next week. On Tuesday, I'll be presenting Flex and Apollo to students at the University of Toronto. On Wednesday, I'll be at Sheraton College and on Thursday I'll be at the University of Waterloo. All the events are free, and I'll be accepting resumes for 3 summer intern positions on my team. Finally, I'll also provide tips and tricks on how you can get a job at Adobe.

Here are the details. Remember, all the events start at 4 PM.

Tuesday, January 30th - University of Toronto at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology, 40 St. George Street, Room BA 1130.
Wednesday, January 31st - Seneca College
Thursday, February 1st - University of Waterloo in the Laurel Room at South Campus Hall.

January 23, 2007

Looking for students interested in RIAs and working at Adobe

Are you enrolled in a University in Canada, interested in a summer job with Adobe and interested in Flex, Apollo and rich Internet applications? I'm looking for 3 students to join Adobe this summer: two as software developers and one as a community relations expert. Interested candidates should: a) read the job descriptions below, b) be blogging and actively involved in the Flex community (you can start now if you're not doing that already) and c) email me their CV at mpotter@adobe.com.

Software Development Intern (2 positions)
The EDBU product marketing team has an immediate opening for a Software Development Intern located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The software developer will play an instrumental role in the adoption of Adobe Flex, Apollo and ActionScript. The student’s primary responsibility will be to write ActionScript libraries to popular web services, such as eBay, Amazon and Google and other large web companies. They will be expected to blog regularly, create and post content to the Adobe Flex Developer Center, and respond to questions and participate in mailing lists and forums. During their 4-month employment, the student will gain a deep understanding of ActionScript, Flex and Apollo. This is an unbelievable opportunity to work with some of the coolest technologies available.

Applicants should be enrolled in second year or higher in a computer science or computer engineering discipline. They should have an understanding of Java, JavaScript, ActionScript and XML, and developing applications with IDEs, especially Eclipse. Applicants should have experience applying these technologies outside of school in extra curricular projects, especially software programs or websites developed in their free time. A deep understanding of web services and APIs from major web companies is considered a plus.

Community Relations Intern (1 position available)
Position Summary
The EDBU product marketing team has an immediate opening for a Community Relations Intern located in Ottawa. This person will play a key role in informing Adobe about community activities related to Adobe software, especially Flex, ColdFusion, LiveCycle and Apollo. The student’s primary responsibility will be to monitor popular blogs, forums and mailing lists for questions relating to Adobe technology. The student will be expected to respond to issues as required, and to forward them to Adobe representatives if they are unable to respond. The student will also work with the product marketing team to create responses to the issues that arise.

Knowledge and Skills
Applicants should have a combination of business and technical experience. A student in an engineering and management program would be ideal. The applicant should have excellent written and verbal communication skills. The applicant should have a deep understanding of online communities, either running them or participating in them. The ideal candidate will be a motivated self-starter, and one who gets involved in extra curricular activities. Deep technical knowledge is not required, but a basic understanding of JavaScript, ActionScript, Flash, Flex, XML and web services is ideal.

Develop With PHP? Are you in the PHP Throwdown?

Do you develop applications with PHP? Have you entered in the PHP Throwdown? The PHP Throwdown is a contest where PHP developers have 24 hours to build an application, based on a concept or categories that have yet to be announced. The rules for the contest outline everything that you need to know. You only have 24 hours, you can code in teams, the app must be written primarily in PHP, but you can use Flex for the front end (if you're an experienced PHP developer then you know that Flex works great with PHP, can make your app look awesome and takes very little coding time, right? :) ).

Adobe is sponsoring the event, with a copy of Flex Builder with Charting to members of the winning teams. Check out the other prizes as well - pretty impressive!

There are a hundred teams entered already, if you haven't got your team ready, what are you waiting for? Sign up now. The PHP RIA SDK Mailing List is a good place to find other team members.

January 17, 2007

Learn more about Flex and ColdFusion in Ottawa

Ben Forta, who is the guy when it comes to ColdFusion, will be presenting at the Adobe office in Ottawa on Flex and ColdFusion. The event is scheduled for February 6th, from 9:00 AM to 12:00 Noon. Registration is free. This invitation has more details on the event. The event is being sponsored by the New Toronto Group.

No word on whether they're changing their name to the New Ottawa Group. :)

January 15, 2007

An Update On Flex and Ruby on Rails Integration

There's been a lot of work lately on improving integration between Flex and Ruby on Rails. Here's an update on what's been done lately, and how you can get involved. Carlos Eduardo has created an open source Flex scaffolding project that allows you to easily create a Flex application that talks to Rails. Check out his code in Ruby Forge, or this screencast demo that he's created.

Recently as well, Ilya Devers has been working on an open source Flex / Cairngorm generator for Ruby on Rails. For those of you unfamiliar with Cairngorm, its a framework for more complex Flex based RIAs. You can find out more about Cairngorm on Adobe Labs. Ilya's code is available on Google Code as an open source project.

(We've also recently moved a number of ActionScript 3 Libraries to Google Code as well. Check out this post by Mike Chambers for more information, or this search on Google Code for ActionScript projects.)

Derek Wischusen is writing a series of articles explaining Ruby on Rails and Cairngorm integration using WebORB for Ruby on Rails. Check out his great work at flexonrails.net.

Finally, Flexible Rails is a PDF book that outlines a number of connections between Flex and Ruby on Rails. If you're developing with Flex and Ruby on Rails, you'll definitely want to pick it up.

If you're interested in Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex, then you should join the Ruby on Rails RIA Google Group that discusses integration between Flex and Rails.

January 9, 2007

Updated PHP RIA SDK - Download Now

I have updated the PHP RIA SDK to include new releases of AMFPHP (v 1.9 beta) as well as the latest WebORB for PHP release from the Midnight Coders (1.3.2). The free (as in speech) SDK is available now from the Adobe Flex Developer Center. You can join the mailing list to ask questions about the SDK, or if you want more information on connecting PHP and Flex together.

There is a lot of exciting work going on in the world of PHP and Flex. I'm going to have some more great news to share with you later this month.

If you'd like to hear more about my thoughts on rich Internet applications, and what I think the future is for PHP, please come listen to me talk at one of the following conferences: Vancouver PHP Conference, PHP Quebec Conference, and PHP|Tek in Chicago.

As rich Internet applications start to blur the lines between desktop and web applications ( see my recently started blog RIApedia for great examples) , having a powerful client side tool that allows you to build attractive applications quickly will become even more important. Flex fits that bill perfectly. Add on a powerful, server side programming language with millions of developers, and you've got a very powerful and compelling solution.

I'm anxious to see applications that combine PHP and Flex. If you're building some, please comment in my blog or use the Contact Us page at RIApedia to let me know about it.

January 5, 2007

Most Popular Flex Book, as a Flex Widget

The other day I posted an entry about the most popular Flex Book at Amazon.com. A short time later, Kyle Hayes wrote me an email wondering how I was tracking that information. I told him I had an XLS file with links to the product information for each book, then I clicked on each link, read the information and inputted it into an XLS file. He thought there was a better way, and quickly created a webpage that looked up the information via Amazon's web services. Yesterday he expanded on that sample, and made it a Flex application.

Widget is probably a better word to describe it. I think this could be fairly useful in a sidebar of a website: reading in XML information, displaying the cover art of the books, and then linking back to Amazon to purchase them. In fact, the widget could also be expanded to allow someone to search for a keyword, then return the most popular books for that keyword, and show them in a number of different views (cover art, data grid etc...).

Nice work Kyle, will be interesting to see how this widget expands in the next few weeks.

January 4, 2007

Adobe Flex Wins InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year Award

From Ryan Stewart's blog: Flex 2 has won Infoworld's 2007 Technology of the Year Award for Application Development. From their site: "Adobe Flex 2.0 constitutes a big leap forward for this RIA platform, thanks to a new Eclipse-based IDE for drag-and-drop layout and code management, and a separate data services application for server-side messaging and data integration. Easy connections for Web services and Java objects bolster this very good choice for enterprise RIA scenarios."

Other winners include the Dojo Toolkit, Backbase, Sun NetBeans and others.

January 3, 2007

What's the most popular Flex or ActionScript book?

At the end of every month there are a number of stats that I like to track, to try and gauge how well we're doing at spreading the word about Adobe technologies, mainly Flex and LiveCycle. One of the items that I started tracking last month was the Amazon book ranking for a number of Flex and ActionScript 3 books. I figure if the books are increasing in popularity, then the technology must be heading in the right direction. O'Reilly does something similar.

There are 8 books that I'm currently tracking from Amazon.com. In order of popularity, they are:
ActionScript 3 Cookbook
Advanced AS 3 with Design Patterns
Adobe Flex 2: Training from the source
Programming Flex 2: The comprehensive guide to creating Rich Internet Applications
AS 3 Pocket Reference
The complete guide to Flex 2 with AS 3
AS 3 Essential Training
Learning AS 3 Design: The non programmers guide to AS 3

I haven't read any of them, but I've heard very good things about the Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns book from other Flex developers.

December 18, 2006

PHP and Flex Together in Portland

If you live in Portland, OR and would like to learn more about how PHP and Flex can work together, then you should check out the January Portland PHP user group meeting.  Pete Mackie, who has contributed a ton of code, documentation and help for the PHP RIA SDK will be on hand to present how the two technologies can work together.  Details for Pete's talk are available online.  Rumors has it that he might have a few Flex / ActionScript posters to give out.

technorati tags:php, portland, flex

December 14, 2006

Custom Holiday Cards from Adobe

I blogged about this last week at RIApedia.com, a new blog that I've started that covers rich Internet applications built with Adobe technologies - namely Flash, Flex and Apollo, but I thought it would be of interest to the wider Adobe popluation as well... A very creative team here at Adobe (not sure who it was) has created a Flash based online Christmas card creator.  Using the site, you can create your own customized Flash based holiday greeting cards.  You can customize the images, borders, text color, size, and music, and then send out your cutomized greeting card to friends and family.  Something fun in time for the holidays.

technorati tags:flash, riapedia, christmas, christmascards, adobe

December 13, 2006

Presenting Flex and RIAs at 2 PHP Conferences in early 07

In the past week I've received news that my proposals to speak at two PHP conferences have been accepted.  I'll be speaking in March at the PHP Quebec Conference in Montreal and in May at the php|tek PHP Conference in Chicago.  I'll be speaking about why PHP developers should be interested in building rich Internet applications, and how to build rich Internet applications with Flex and Ajax and PHP on the backend.  The talks will be similar but not identical to the one I gave at the Zend PHP conference a few weeks ago.

technorati tags:flex, php, php|tek, phpquebec, zend, ria

AMFPHP 1.9 Examples from Renaun Erickson

Renaun Erickson has created two samples that show AMFPHP 1.9 in action.  The source code to both examples is available as well.  (You did know that Flex applications have the option of publishing the source code right?  Right click on either sample and select "View Source" to see the source code.  To publish the source code for your own application, in Flex Builder select Project -> Publish Application Source...)

I will be updating the PHP RIA SDK by Adobe soon that adds samples for AMFPHP 1.9.  Join the PHP RIA SDK by Adobe mailing list to stay on top of things, and discuss things with other developers who are building out solutions with Flex and PHP.

technorati tags:php, flex, amfphp

December 12, 2006

AMFPHP Adds AMF3 / Flex Support

The AMFPHP project, headed by Patrick Mineault, has added support for AMF3, the newest AMF protocol that's used by Adobe Flex and ActionScript 3.  (There's a preview release of ActionScript 3 for Flash Professional on Adobe Labs.)

This means that developers now have 3 choices when choosing which PHP package to use for Flex remoting.  AMFPHP, SabreAMF and WebORB from the Midnight Coders all offer AMF3 support.  They are all open source projects, with the WebORB project being the only one backed by a commercial entity.

Remoting scripts like these allow PHP developers to write applications that can translate PHP objects directly into ActionScript objects in Flex and Flash projects.  Without these projects, PHP developers can still build solutions that output XML (REST interfaces), and then read in that XML with Flex and ActionScript directly. However, using one of the above projects allows you to bypass serializing data into XML and then deserializing it on the client - you can transfer objects, arrays and other data types directly from the backend server to the Flex / Flash application. 

What's this mean for developers?  Although its more complicated to learn, its more powerful  than transfering XML data... For example, when querying a MySQL database, you can transfer the mysql_result object back to the client directly: it will be available to you as an array, and you can access the items in the array directly, without having to decode any XML.

Developers interested in building RIA solutions with PHP should check out the PHP RIA SDK by Adobe.  This open source project contains libraries and a number of samples that show PHP developers how to build rich Internet applications with Flex, Flash and the Spry Ajax framework.  There's also a mailing list available.

technorati tags:php, flex, amfphp, sabreamf, midnightcoders, phpriasdk