calm in the chaos

A few years back I worked on a project that used the Google Maps API and at the time I was charged with recommending to the client whether to use Flash or Javascript/HTML to get the job done. At the time there was no readily accessible Flash API for Google maps, and I wasn’t that keen to go with the Yahoo or Microsoft offerings (though Yahoo now has a very robust Flash API, the Microsoft (surprise surprise) one doesn’t… though I found this Silverlight version). FYI the Kaurna Place Names site was developed to identify and map places with Kaurna (Aboriginal) names and to encourage the use and increase knowledge of these names. It begins with names in southern Kaurna country (which is the region of Australia where I’m from).

So there’s the back story. I recently came across a post which talked about the Google Maps API now being available for Flash AS3. With my current push to learn about Flex I was also pleased to see that there were components available that you could just drop into your MXML and whamo, insta-map!

Here’s what I pieced together, hopefully it illustrates what can be done with a few Flex components and the Maps code provided from the Google Maps developer site.

View source is enabled in the following example.

Obviously it’s not a scratch on Paul Neave’s venerable Flash Earth, but then this example only took 15 minutes to knock together ;-)

For the last week or so I’ve been diving into the world of Flex (after a few false starts with Flex 1.5 and 2 over a year ago).

Thought I’d post a few links that have helped out or have been of some interest along the way.

Firstly, this one’s closely aligned to my heart - Finally I get to learn Flex. I’m hearen ya Brad, I finally get to learn a bit about Flex as well!

Next came an example about Rich ItemRenderers. Seeing that sort of stuff always gets me excited about the power of Flex.

For a couple of weeks now I’ve been playing (quite literally) with a rather cool Flex interface.

Then I got involved in the discussion at polygeek when I was trying to make text in Flex look like a normal HTML link.

I’ve also been actively looking for Flex books. Checked out Doug and Deepa’s Adobe Flex 3.0 for Dummies at the Borders near Covent Garden (and yes I’m name dropping, the novelty of walking around the streets of London hasn’t worn off on a boy from lil ‘ol Adelaide… yet). I think I’ll wait until Programming Flex 3: The Comprehensive Guide to Creating Rich Media Applications with Adobe Flex lands in the UK. I’m also reading the pint size Getting Started with Flex 3 via the free 45 day trial Safari offers. Should be able to polish it off in 45 days, so not sure about the logic of offering a book like this on a trial like that.

Possibly a bit ahead of where I’m at at the moment, “top 10 mistakes while building a flex application” gives some insight into things I’ll need to (and to an extent) already am aware of.

Lastly the site that’s been the greatest help during my first tentative steps into the world of Flex has been Flex Examples (and specifically the Tags page). Love your work Peter deHaan! (who incidentally has impeccable taste in blog design ;-)

I find the willingness and depth of support for Flex astounding. And the view source feature is genius (whoever at Adobe came up with that one can probably take a reasonable amount of credit for the ever expanding Flex developer base).

I’ll post more about what I’m working on in the forth coming weeks. Plus I’ll get to posting the currency converter I whipped up (once it’s been Airified and Vistafied) as well.

So there you have it, a whirlwind trip through the last few days and weeks of my Flex journey. Here’s hoping it will continue to be an enjoyable one.

So it's been nigh on two months since I first experienced a strange Firefox webservice issue. My previous post details what was going on with the converter application and it's seemingly non-cross platform behaviour. I've tried a few different things since my first post, including logging bug reports with Adobe (which got no feedback), posting on forums as well as to the Flexcoders mailing list. All without any real assistance, so today I finally thought I'd connect up a different webservice (webservicex.com) and hey presto, It now works in Firefox!!!

I've gotta admit, this one tiny little issue has actually been holding me back from delving deeper into Flex 2. So now I'm over this one annoyance, I'll get back into cranking out some more Flex stuff.

Though I'd continue my work on the unit converter, add a few more conversions (Volume, Weight & Mass and everybody's favourite - Computer Units are now available). But the thing I really wanted to add was a currency conversion. This turned out to be more trouble than I had originally anticipated. Mainly due to the lack of documentation available about utilising web services with actionscript. I didn't want to use an mxml component (which there was a fair bit of documentation for), so hunted for an hour or so yesterday, and another hour today before finding the following: http://jeff.mxdj.com/as3_datamanager.htm. Love your work Jeff!

Before you check out the example, please note that I am still tracking down security sandbox issues when accessing the swf online. The web service loads fine locally, but the security sandbox in flash causes the queries to to the web service to never return! I'm pulling my hair out trying to debug this - I've got a crossdomain.xml file setup (though do I need this or does the webservice need it?), I've tried Security.allowdomain() and nothing's allowing me to use the currency conversion service remotely. Hopefully someone out there can view the source in the example and let me know what I need to do. I've posted the issues I'm having here and here.

Here's version 2 of the unit converter (please note that you'll need to run the example locally until I can sort out the security issues I'm having as mentioned above) 

I'm not sure how often the xmethods webservice I'm using is updated, but the results are returned very quickly… so lookout xe.com here I come!!!

I'd like to format the numbers now to reflect the currency chosen, which I'll detail in my next post.

This has been on my list of things to do in Flex since it was released. I finally got around to knocking together this units converter (the first three tabs are the only ones that work at the moment). During the development I think I finally grasped (well, got a better grasp anyway ;-) Events in Flex 2. The way that classes communicate also became a little clearer to me during the building of this. The lists in each section are actionscript components that call a Singleton class to do the actual calculation.

Check it out here (right click the movie to view the source - which I originally forgot to enable in the movie!)

I'm interested in feedback from flexers as to how they'd go about creating an interface to something like this. I think tabs is a reasonable way to split up the different unit groups, but want to hear of some other ideas of how the components could be used to create a better UI. 

Here's a link to my original take on unit conversion in Flash. I made this in 2002 using Flash 5! How things have changed…