These individuals have all inspired and/or helped me at one point in time. I’d like to take a moment to point them out and say thanks. I’ve personally either worked with, met or digitally communicated with all of these peeps. They have all helped me greatly and their insight is fantastic. You should check out their blogs or follow them on twitter to gain great Flex development advice, code, tutorials, articles, etc. Thanks to all of you very much!!!!

…

Adam Flater
Adam and I started chatting on twitter in early 2008. He’s provided tons of great help and guidance on Flex, Java and design patterns to me ever since. Adam is a Technical Architect and Evangelist at Roundarch. His career has been centered on building innovative graphical user interfaces and research of emerging technology. He is also a contributor to InsideRIA and the creator of Merapi.
Check his blog here: http://adamflater.blogspot.com/
Folllow on twitter: http://twitter.com/adamflater/

…

From: SeanTheFlexGuy.com

It was great to work with all of you and I hope to cross paths with each of you again soon.

-adam

As Flex developers we’re often inclined to use server-side technologies like Blaze DS, LiveCycle DS, ColdFusion, amfPHP, RubyAMF because of the native object transfer layers that these technologies have available. The magic in these solutions is a binary format called AMF (Action Messaging Format). AMF allows disparate languages to communicate with native objects. For example, in a Blaze DS Java server project if I define a class that has the same public properties as a class definition in ActionScript, Java and ActionScript can transport data of this type and deal with the data as a native object instance in each layer. The benefits gained from native object data transfer are: compile time type checking, speed, and elegance. However, this post is not about AMF, but about the pattern of translating other data formats (like XML, CSV, JSON) into the Flex application domain.

An important distinction when implementing a Flex application is the separation of domains. In a typical web application there are several domains to think about, but for the sake of this example let’s look at two: the service layer domain and the UI domain. The distinction between these domains is important to ensure high standards of maintainability and modularity. It is essential to avoid a situation where a change in the service layer has major impacts on the implementation of the UI layer, and vice versa. The Data Translator pattern is a simple pattern, but an important concept for keeping these concerns separated.

In this example I will be using XML translated to ActionScript VOs (value objects). XML is a common format in the world of web services, and especially in Flex development, however this pattern can be used with nearly any data format that a service might expose. That’s enough setup, now let’s dig in to the Data Translator.

A Data Translator is a class with static methods for parsing data generated by the service domain into a format that is specific to the UI domain. Data Translators are typically invoked by Delegate classes. In my opinion, the Delegate layer is the appropriate place to handle data translation. If your Command class is dealing with data that is part of the service domain, you may need to rethink your architecture. Like nearly everything in any field of engineering, there are exceptions to this rule. If you are implementing an application that’s function is to display read-only data, XML can be a great format for that application. However, if your application involves modifying data that was retrieved from a service, value objects are usually the best solution.

So, let’s check out the example application:

View the Application | View the Source | View the Docs 

DataTranslatorExampleApplication – Defines a button that dispatches the GetItemsEvent, a console to show Cairngorm actions, and a DataGrid to show the result of the operation.

ItemsCommand – Invokes the getItems operation on the delegate class and by standard Cairngorm convention, updates the global model with the items returned by the delegate.

DataTranslatorExampleDelegate – This delegate is responsible for calling the service that responds with a collection of items. The items are returned in an XML format and then parsed by the ExampleDataTranslator class.

ExampleDataTranslator – Translates the XML payload into a set of objects of type Item.

Item – A value object that models the data of an “Item”

This pattern is a favorite of mine for dealing with the translation of data into a format for the UI application domain.

Up next, tip #2 Aggregated Commands.

Typinator is a tool for Mac OS that auto replaces character strings that are typed anywhere in Mac OS. In the videos below you will see a few ways that Typinator can be used in a Flex development environment.

Class Templates: If you’re tired of formatting your classes to read a certain way, why not setup a template with Typinator?

In this example you’ll see “-pc” expanded to a full class template.

Infrequently Used Syntax: If you’re like me, there are a few syntactical parts of ActionScript that you use infrequently. I generally have to look these things up in past source code or LiveDocs. Typinator is a great way to create a shortcut for those items.

In this example you’ll see “-ra” expanded into the remote alias meta data tag.

In this example you’ll see “-emd” expanded to the event meta data syntax.

I’ve been using Typinator for a while now and it’s become a useful development tool for me, even actions as simple as correcting functino to function (a common misspelling for me).

[UPDATE]

I shared my post with Ergonis Software and their CEO and Frounder Christoph Reichenberger replied with a very helpfult tip. Typinator allows you to specify an alternative cursor position after it has replaced the phrase you type.

If you look up at my remote alias example, you’ll notice that I used the left arrow key to backup to the appropriate spot to type the classname. In the revised example below you’ll see that after typing “-ra” the cursor is automatically positioned where I’d like to start typing the name of the alias.

Thanks for the tip Christoph, much appreciated.

It’s really great to see the Flex community cranking out cool examples with a technology that you’ve created. This is most definitely the case with the recent “Cocomo ready” Air Wiibot. These guys mashed up Cocmo, Flex, and Merapi to control a Lego Mindstorm robot with a Wiimote. So what’s Cocmo for? They’ve used Cocomo for live video conferencing as well as the ability to control the robot remotely. So, if my friend Jordan happened to have Nathan (our Lego Mindstorm robot) at her house, I could fire up this app at my house and control Nathan remotely using a Wiimote… really cool stuff. Here’s the YouTube video:

MAX Recap

For those of you that missed MAX there was a lot of Merapi action, here’s a quick recap.

First off, Tour De Flex.

Tour De Flex is an application created by Adobe used to explore components in the Flex community. Adobe used Merapi to connect the Eclipse plugin portion of the application to the Tour De Flex AIR application. You can get Tour De Flex at: http://flex.org/tour and read more about the Merapi integration on Holly Schinsky’s blog here: Flex/AIR to Java Communication Using Merapi.

Moving right along… There were a few new demos and a couple of Merapi announcements at the sessions we gave at 360 | MAX. One of the first demos I showed was Outlook integration. Here’s the YouTube video:

The next new demo was Excel integration. If you pay attention to the video on this one you will notice one of the announcements we made at MAX, Merapi is now in the browser! In this demo you will see a Flex browser application interact with Excel:

Thanks again to Universal Mind and Adobe for supporting me at MAX.

Coming up…

FlexCamp Chicago 1/23, FlexCamp OC 1/31, and 360 Flex | Indy 5/18-20 (probably)

I’ll be presenting at each of these conferences (assuming Tom and John let me in again.. they have yet to announce speakers)

There will be some especially interesting announcements at FlexCamp Chicago. Make sure you turn out if possible, otherwise, watch the blogosphere for the recap.

Thanks to everyone who has been using Merapi and giving us feedback on the framework. The creativity, ingenuity, support, and patience from the community has been excellent.

Enjoy the new release!

For those of you unfamiliar with Brightkite, here’s a quick overview:

Brightkite is a location based, micro-blogging, social networking platform. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last five years, you’re probably familiar with sites like MySpace and Facebook. One of the features of these sites is something called a status. The status you set is meant to reflect something about your mood, or what you’re up to, i.e.. “Adam is writing a blog post”. This concept is similar to an away message on an instant messenger account. The first site to gain traction as a platform that specializes in status updates was Twitter.

Brightkite retains the idea of status updates and friending other Brightkite users, but adds the concept of a “check in”. When you “check in” in Brightkite you’re saying where you are, geographically speaking. So, status updates (called notes in Brightkite) are posted from a place. This means these notes often have an annotative quality about the place where the user is checked in. Brightkite users also have the option of posting photos at a Brightkite location. There are a lot more features in the Brightkite platform including: an iPhone application, a mobile site, and integration with other social networking platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Fire Eagle. To find out more about Brightkite sign up for your free account at: www.Brightkite.com.

The Brightkite Wall is a kiosk-style application that provides a feed form a place, a person, or for search terms in the Brightkite ecosystem. The application was built using Adobe’s Flex 3 Framework for building Flash Rich Internet Applications.

One development challenge we faced was to implement a user interface that scaled in size regardless of the resolution of the display it was running on. Because the Wall can be launched on any machine, those machines might have a display like a small laptop screen or up to a large projection display. The Wall user interface needed to scale appropriately for each use case. This means fonts, images, and skins all need to look, relatively, the same one any given display size. Although this feature isn’t extremely difficult technically, it is a bit tricky. However, Flex does offer some advantages when it comes to implementing a UI like the Wall.

Another challenge was implementing an application that would execute in a full screen mode and reliably for a long period of time. To achieve this requirement we implemented a “BoundedList” UI class that automatically disposes of unused list items, but also allows for various transition effects to be applied as new items appear in the lists.

The data source for the wall is the Brightkite RSS feed. The application is parameterized to allow for dynamic configuration (on launch), of the RSS feed, polling rate, Brightkite place, and the size of the bounded lists. The parameters are passed using Flash variables and accessed on the initialization of the application.

Although The Brightkite Wall is a fairly simple Flex application, built in just a few weeks, it is a great example of how Flex can fit into a platform. Many companies rely on Flex for their entire product line, and it is often a great choice for many products. In the case of Brightkite, they had a specific problem to solve and Flex happened to provide an excellent solution for the problem.

The Wall is still in beta and Brightkite needs your feedback on the kinds of features you’d like to see in the next version.

The Brightkite blog: http://blog.brightkite.com
Brightkite on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/brightkite

Market Activity Replay Tool Wins the 2008 Adobe MAX Award in the Enterprise Category

NEW YORK, Nov 26, 2008 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX News Network) — The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:NDAQ) today announced that NASDAQ Market Replay — an extremely powerful replay and analysis tool — has won the coveted 2008 MAX Award in the Enterprise category.

NASDAQ Market Replay was declared the winner in San Francisco on November 18, 2008 at the annual Adobe(r) MAX awards, a global program that recognizes innovative applications of Adobe software for creating engaging experiences.

“This award is extremely significant for NASDAQ considering Market Replay was contending with a pool of highly-regarded and worthy competitors,” said Chip Greenlee, director of financial services at Adobe Systems Inc. “In the Enterprise category, Market Replay was an excellent example of how Adobe solutions can automate business processes and provide users with more efficient, engaging experiences.”

“This validates NASDAQ’s ability to create world-class data products that deliver unsurpassed transparency into the equity markets and meet the needs of our customers,” said Claude Courbois, Associate Vice President, NASDAQ OMX Global Data Products. “Since its debut earlier this year, Market Replay has already proven it significantly cuts customer costs and increases their understanding of market events.”

Market Replay is a powerful trading and compliance tool that provides intra-day and historical NASDAQ-validated replays and analysis of the market for securities listed on all major U.S. equity markets.

Market Replay provides every reported trade along with the corresponding consolidated best bid and offer quote activity, to provide investors a complete view of the market activity in a particular stock, down to the millisecond, during the requested replay period.

NASDAQ Market Replay provides replay and analysis of quote and trade activity in simulated real-time, with a customizable zoom feature to view events at the millisecond level to see exactly what happened. Following the completion of a trade, Market Replay allows users to analyze whether their trade received best execution and permits compliance officers to confirm if a trade met compliance standards.

Market Replay can be used for a variety of functions by all market participants including institutional and retail investors, professional and non-professional traders, and compliance officers. Market Replay enables users to:

  *    Review a situation for analysis or training;
  *    Analyze whether a trade complied with best-execution
       requirements;
  *    Review interesting situations and missed opportunities;
  *    Share a replay with clients to confirm best execution;

Market Replay is immediately accessible directly from NASDAQ OMX. To order, please contact DataSales@nasdaqomx.com or 301.978.5307.

NASDAQ Market Replay was selected by the Adobe Judging Council, a team of Adobe executives and renowned industry representatives. Selection criteria included innovation, achievement, application of technology, brand building, and overall design. For more information about the award, visitwww.adobe.com/events/max/max_awards.

Market Replay was developed with Adobe(r) Flex(r) 3 and deployed on Adobe(r) AIR(tm). Adobe Flex is a cross-platform framework for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs) and Adobe AIR lets developers use their existing Web development skills in HTML, Ajax, Flash and Flex to deploy RIAs to the desktop. For more information about Adobe AIR, visit www.adobe.com/go/air.

About NASDAQ OMX

The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. is the world’s largest exchange company. It delivers trading, exchange technology and public company services across six continents, with over 3,900 listed companies. NASDAQ OMX Group offers multiple capital raising solutions to companies around the globe, including its U.S. listings market; the OMX Nordic Exchange, including First North; and the U.S. 144A sector. The company offers trading across multiple asset classes including equities, derivatives, debt, commodities, structured products and ETFs. NASDAQ OMX Group technology supports the operations of over 70 exchanges, clearing organizations and central securities depositories in more than 50 countries. OMX Nordic Exchange is not a legal entity but describes the common offering from NASDAQ OMX Group exchanges in Helsinki, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Iceland, Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. For more information about NASDAQ OMX, visit http://www.nasdaqomx.com.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

The matters described herein contain forward-looking statements that are made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements about NASDAQ Market Replay and other NASDAQ OMX’s strategic initiatives. We caution that these statements are not guarantees of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties or other factors beyond NASDAQ OMX’s control. These factors include, but are not limited to factors detailed in NASDAQ OMX’s annual report on Form 10-K, and periodic reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. We undertake no obligation to release any revisions to any forward-looking statements.

NDAQG

This news release was distributed by GlobeNewswire, www.globenewswire.com

SOURCE: The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc.

NASDAQ OMX
          Media Contact:
          Wayne Lee
          +1.301.978.4875
          Wayne.D.Lee@NASDAQOMX.com

(C) Copyright 2008 GlobeNewswire, Inc. All rights reserved.

News Provided by COMTEX

Originally posted at: http://ir.nasdaqomx.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=350913

Whenever there is a conference or event, there’s a secondary bit of action taking place behind the scenes: the backchannel. Here, the attendees are live blogging, twittering, posting photos, and streaming live video about what they’re seeing on stage or in and around the venue. Twitter has always been the microblogging platform of choice in this scenario, but starting today, they just might have new competition from Brightkite, the mobile social networking service that’s making a name for itself among the early adopters.Last night, Brightkite released a new feature for their mobile social networking platform called the “Brightkite Wall.” This wall displays the live stream of notes, photos, and checkins at any one place. When launched full screen, the Brightkite Wall’s placestream can be shown on any monitor, projector, or TV, which obviously makes it perfect for conferences and events.

Using the Wall

To get started, simply browse to the desired place and click the new Wall tab. Then click on the embedded Brightkite Wall to go full screen. Organizers can even customize the Wall beforehand, if desired. The message and location name can be modified, the shortcode can be selected for use within the U.S. or outside the U.S., and checkins can be turned on or off.

Of course, Brightkite has a much smaller user base than Twitter, which could have made this new feature a non-starter. However, Brightkite has that problem covered. With the Brightkite Wall, anyone can participate by texting a pre-defined shortcode provided for you by the service.

Better Than Live Blogging?

Brightkite’s Wall may soon beat Twitter to become the microblogging platform of choice for live events because it offers a much richer stream of information. Instead of just displaying 140-character notes, Brightkite’s Wall also displays photos. Combined with notes and checkins, this makes the Wall a much more engaging experience.

For those virtually attending the event, watching the Brightkite Wall could end up being even better than refreshing a blogger’s post featuring their “live” coverage of the event. A live blog only gives you one point of view and set of images. Even if it’s a group effort, it’s not the same as being immediately tapped into the thoughts and reactions of all the event’s attendees as you are with Brightkite.

Potential Problems

Our only concern for this new feature is that it doesn’t appear to be any sort of administrative control over who can configure what. If some rogue conference attendee wanted to, he or she could highjack the Wall by customizing their own personalized greeting for all to see. That could lead to problems, especially if the message was profane or offensive.

Another concern is that there doesn’t seem to be any sort of archiving system in place, so while the Wall may be a great real-time view into the thoughts and activities that are taking place at a particular point in time, going back to view older images and notes could be a challenge if the same locale (address) is used over and over again for subsequent events.

The Wall feature is still in beta, though, so as people begin to use it and submit feedback, it may be updated to even better reflect people’s needs than it does now.

First of all, at MAX you can follow me on Twitter or BrightKite my handle is “adamflater” on both. By the way, the BrightKite guys were cool enough to setup a placemark for MAX. The placemark is “max2008“. That’s a valid placemark for checking in and posting your notes and photos while at MAX.

Aside from my scheduled events you’ll also find me at the Universal Mind booth throughout the conference. We’ll be demoing all of the apps we’ve been hard at work on in the past year, including our GIS / Data Visualization product: SpatialKey, and the MAX Award Finalist NASDAQ Market Replay. Market Replay is an application that I had the pleasure of working on with the NASDAQ team. Please vote:

The partner booths will be located at: Moscone West, Level 1.

My Schedule:

Speaker Dinner
When: Sunday, November 16th

I’ll be participating in several sessions at MAX and also attending the annual speaker dinner. I hope to see all the familiar faces as well as meet many of the other great folks in the Adobe community I have yet to become acquainted with.

Adobe AIR++
When: Monday, November 17th, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Where: Moscone West 2000

This is a session I’ll just be attending. Andrew Trice has been doing some cool stuff with Merapi and I definitely want to check it out. I’ll only be able to attend part of the session due to the Merapi session directly following this one. Andrew, we’ll save you the last demo spot at 360 | MAX.

Merapi at 360 | MAX
When: Monday, November 17th, 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm
Where: Moscone West, Level 2

John and Tom, the men behind 360 | Conferences, have always been extremely gracious about letting me speak at their events. This year they are hosting an unconference at MAX. The unconference will feature advanced Flex and AIR topics.

At the last 360 Flex conference in San Jose my friend Jordan and I presented on Merapi. We showed an AIR application controlling a Lego Mindstorm Robot in real time. At both of our 360 | MAX sessions we’re going to have a lot of people from the community present the Merapi applications they’ve been working on. You can count on seeing some pretty cool stuff from: Dave Meeker, Andrew Powell, Andrew Trice, Holly Schinsky, Joe Johnston, and me. We’ll be demoing AIR apps that integrate with GPS, RFID, Eclipse, Oracle, Outlook, Growl, MacBook sensors, and of course Legos.

You won’t want to miss these Merapi events and that’s why we have three of them.

MAX Birds-of-a-Feather (BOFs)
When: Monday, November 17th, 8:30 pm -10:20 pm
Where: Moscone West, Level 2

I’ll be participating in two BOFs on Monday night: AIR Gone Wild and the Intuit Quickbase Platform.

AIR Gone Wild is a BOF hosted by Greg Wilson from Adobe. We’ll be showing more of our Merapi goodness at this BOF. If there’s a question you don’t have the chance to ask in a session this BOF is a great place to come and ask it.

Intuit has a new platform geared towards Flex. It’s called Quickbase and it’s an interesting take on cloud computing. I had the opportunity to work with the platform on one project and I highly recommend checking these guys out.

Merapi at 360 | MAX
When: Tuesday, November 18th, 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Where: Moscone West, Level 2

In our second Merapi session at 360 | MAX we’ll cover anything we didn’t have time for in the previous day as well as demo all the cool stuff from the previous sessions. Conferences tend to be a place where a lot of people crank on cool ideas they have. So, you never know, a new app might pop up between Monday and Tuesday they we’ll demo during this session.

InsideRIA Outlook, 2009: What Every Developer Needs to Be Thinking About
When: Wednesday, November 19th, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Where: Moscone West, Room 2009

Rich Tretola, community manager of InsideRIA.com is hosting this session. This will be a panel format where each of the presenters brings their ideas on the future of RIAs. I’m pretty excited for this one, panel discussion are some of the most valuable aspects of any great conference.

Introduction to Flex Builder 3
When: Wednesday, November 19th, 2:00pm – 3:00 pm
Where: Moscone West, Room 2005

This will be a great session for those of you just getting starting or thinking about jumping into Flex development. I’ll be covering all the basics of the Flex IDE as well as an overview of what Flex is as a whole. In my source code demos I’ll be integrating a Flex app with BrightKite, the site I mentioned earlier in the post, to show you how easy it is to consume data in Flex. I’m looking forward to great questions at this session. It’s always interesting to find out what people need to know about Flex.

All right, well I think that’s enough. Looking forward to seeing everyone at MAX!

-adam