The Rich Media Institute rocked my February by providing these excellent online training for *FREE*! Response fast though; this is a limited time offer!
If you have been wanted to get started with Actionscript 3 or need a refresh the jump right in. Also FDT is a great coding enviroment for Actionscript and Flex development. The are offering an intro to using FDT for your development.
I recommend that no matter who you are you check out both of these video tutorials.
SharedObject in your flash project can make for a much improved user experience, and can help you do things faster and more behind the sense so that your applications and web sites work the way users expect them to work. Recently I had to discover the power of SharedObject myself in a chat applications that I am building in Flex.
Because our application will live on each page of a web site I needed a way to keep the user from having to login to chat everytime they do a page load. The chat app will basically store the users login info locally so that I can easily get their login creds and log them back into the server as they navigate the site. I also went a step farther and store the last few messages that they have either sent or received and load them back into the view when the app loads.
In these examples I am going to go over a couple of fundamental things you can do to store user info locally with SharedObjects. Everything in this post was coded using the new Flash Builder Beta but SharedObject has been around for a long time and should work even back in AS2. For my examples we will of course be coding for AS3 and Flash 10.
Remembering User Cardinals Here we have an example of storing user login information so when they return to our application we can remember there user name and password for them. Remember that all this data is stored local to the user’s hard drive so we are not transmitting anything over the internet at this point because flash player itself has the data we need.
If this is your first time viewing the the app what you need to do is fill in the info and check the box remember me. Then you will refresh the page and you will see that your info was stored. Unchecking the box will clear the data and if you refresh the page you will have to start all over. To show that your data was stored or cleared, click the check SO button. I have some code that will see if the sharedobject data matches what is in the text input controls or not and alert you if the data matches or does not match.
RIGHT CLICK SWF TO VIEW SOURCE AND DOWNLOAD SOURCE ZIP FILE
Remembering what the user did last This next example will pretty much do the same thing with sharedobject. Remember all we are really doing is choosing what type of data we need from flash player at runtime.
What we are going to do is remember the last thing the user did so they can pickup where they left off. In this simple app we create a ball. The starting X and Y location of the ball is 50px. As you click on the stage the ball will move to the location of the ball to your mouseX and mouseY location. The next time you load the app the ball will move to the last location you clicked. We do this by storing the last mouseX and mouseY location in the sharedobject. Give it a try by clicking around a few times and refreshing the page.
If you don’t want the app to remember the location then check the box in the bottom of the app and it will not store the x and y by clearing out the data.
RIGHT CLICK SWF TO VIEW SOURCE AND DOWNLOAD SOURCE ZIP FILE
The ball example could let you do something like not skip a flash intro if the user has been to the site before or maybe you only want an animation to play on the home page so after the user goes past that point in the site you store a Boolean value to let you know if they have been there before.
Keep in mind that sharedobject data should remain simple. I have gone as far as storing my own value objects in an Array within sharedobjects but if the data grows beyond 100k flash player will warn the user and get their permission before allowing the data to be stored., so you want to keep the data storage small.
Hope some of you found this useful and please feel free to leave your comments, suggestions or questions.
One of the things that I really like about the Flash community is that it always seems to have the coolness factor. Not that other development languages aren’t cool. I do program in more than just Flash and Flex. I guess the fact that design, animation and multi-media is a big part of what we do as Flash platform programmers, make for a cool development environment.
Well now enter what could be come the coolest Magazine / Show for Flash Player developers, programmers and animators. Flasher Magazine is all things flash player and multi-media related. Produced by Lee Brimelow of theflashblog.com, this Flash Magazine is shot in a style of the very cool Thrasher Mag. Lee has been very influential in my life as a programmer and always very helpful to the community. If you are a developer that programs too the Flash Player and you want to know the cool stuff that is going on I would check this out for sure. If you aren’t a Flex or Flash programmer and you want more info or reasons why you should become an Actionscript Ninja then this show is one more thing that may push you closer to taking the plung.
One of my most trafficked section of my blog is on installing the Flex and Actionscript 3 bundles for TextMate. Don’t let the title fool you. I still really really really enjoy TextMate. It has some great features for sure, but I have to say that Adobe has made a great move in using the Eclipse Platform for code editing Flex and Actionscipt 3 projects.
In the past I have done a tutorial on how to using Flex Builder for your Flash projects and it was a bit of a pain in the ass to set this up. Hence the reason I did a tutorial on how to do it. Even Flash Evangelist Lee Brimelow was linking to my post on how to install the Flex and AS3 bundles. Well leave it to Lee to one up me and I am so glad that he did. For the last week or so Lee has been experimenting and creating tools for better setting up Eclipse so that you can do all your Flash “Actionscript 3″ coding in Eclipse. He is utilizing some existing plugins, creating some plugins of his own and has also created an AIR application that does a really good job of creating the project files and directories needed for editing AS3 code that is part of a Flash CS4 project. The last post he talked about moving this AIR app over to be an Eclipse plugin as well. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with.
Do yourself a huge favor and head over to Lee’s site “TheFlashBlog.com” and check out what he has been doing. It will make your Actionscript and Flex development life a lot better and you will feel like you have all the tools that you need. It also sounds like this set up is only going to get better and better.
In this video I will set up a Flex project that will use the Railo 3.0 server and a coldfusion CFC to query a MySQL Database. The result that we get back will be displayed into a Flex List component.
I know the ColdFusion community has been paying attention to the open source CFML servers that are either already out in the wild or are going to be released soon. One of the coolest ones that have have gotten to play with is Rail 3.0 Beta, soon to be Rail 3.1 by the end of the year.
Now just for the record I am a very new CFML coder. I mainly work in Flash or Flex all day and don’t really care to much for the backend development at all. One of the best things I learned with in the past 6 months or so was how to use AMF and Remoting with ColdFusion8. The down side to the other CFML server where at the time AMF was an Adobe thing and none of the open source server where able to put it in.
Once Open BlueDragon came out I was excited but the did not have AMF and they are still working on getting it in there in the form of BlazeDS.
Here was my experience with Railo. I went to the site, http://railo.ch/, downloaded 3.0, put it in my home directory, launched the server, created a Flex hello world project, created a CFC, set up the NetConnection to the gateway and “HELLO WORLD” it worked. This was Freaking awesome!
Right now Railo 3.0 is using OpenAMF witch is AMF0. Before the end of the year Railo 3.1 will be out and the team has said that they will be replacing OpenAMF with Adobe’s BlazeDS witch will be AMF3.
In the following video I will show you how simple it is to get set up and running.
There has been a lot of buzz about Flex and Flex Builder. This is the IDE for Building Flex RIA’s and also for building pure actionscript 3 projects. After discovering the power of Flex Builder’s coding environment it was clear to me that this would be a great Actionscript 3 editor for my Flash CS3 projects.The following video will walk you through the setup that I use on all my Flash projects. I hope this will help out with your work flow. Let me know what you think. Watch Now!
Bigspaceship uses Flexbuilder for a couple of big AS3 and Flex projects and once you start to develop in Flexbuilder (Eclipse) you maybe don’t wanna go back and use a normal Text Editor. So i was looking for a way to use Flexbuilder for heavy graphical sites that also need the Flash 9 IDE.BigSpaceShip thinks…. http://labs.bigspaceship.com/blog/?p=76read more | digg story
So I have been at Adobe MAX 2007 in Chicago all week. The whole experience has been really great. What was even better than that was a sneak peek at a new application that Adobe says that it will be releasing sometime in 2008 – code name “Thermo”.
I can not tell you how excited I was about this app. What is Thermo you ask? Well let me tell you from my perspective what Thermo is….
Just a week before MAX I was finally wanting to write my first project completely in Flex Builder. This was a really really frustrating thing from a design standpoint. I would be what the industry is referring to as a “Devigner” Half Designer / Half Developer. I can write some code when it comes down to it and I really enjoy figuring out the functionality of an app but I have always done all my sites or apps in the Flash IDE and laid them out in Photoshop before I move everything over to Flash for animation and coding.
When it comes to doing a project by setting up your design in Photoshop and then getting that design into Flex Builder….. well …. let’s just say it. IT IS A PAIN IN THE ASS! As far as I am concerned.
I am totally not a coding guru just yet, but I have my eyes on the prise and I hope to one day know my stuff, but for now I will admit that I have a little trouble understanding some simple tasks that most programmers would not have any trouble with. We all know and love Textmate. The great text editor for the Mac. Heck I even use it to write my blog posts. You have to check out the blogging bundle if you have not used it for that it is great.
As soon as I got Textmate I started using it for all my actionscript. At the time the bundle was only for AS2. Now that I am starting to dig into AS3 and Flex it would be great to start coding using this editor. It launches way faster than Flex Builder or Eclips. There are some draw backs. The biggest being that you do not get the code hinting quite as much as you do with Flex Builder, but still it is a great tool to work in. In the next few steps I will show you how to install SVN (subversion) client for your Mac so you can utilize all the bundles and updates that are currently being developed for Textmate and most importantly there is an AS3 / Flex bundle that you can download.
Groovymag