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Archive for July, 2007

Hostlynx 2.0 – Serious Flex app

Friday, July 13th, 2007

There is a claim that there isn’t enough serious Flex applications out there. I’ve recently had the honor to preview an impressive one, and also to conduct a short interview with Dima Gutzeit the Project Manager of this app, named Mailvision Hostlynx 2.0.
This is another one for you to showoff when arguing for the right technology for your next application, currently there are only some information and screenshots, but, I’ll let you know when a full demo is publicly available.

Q: What is Hostlynx 2.0?

A: Hostlynx 2 is the next generation of MailVision Class 5 SoftSwitch for VOIP telephony (SIP protocol). The product allows a system provider to setup a telephony network and offer advanced telephony services to its subscribers (IPCentrex). System management of the solution is based on Flex+Webservices.

Q: Who is the audience of this application?

A: Service providers and corporates who wishes to enter the fast evolving VOIP market.

Q: Why do you think Flash is the right technology for this project?

A: During the research for the project we have considered several technologies, including various AJAX toolkits, JSF and etc. The following convinced us to go with Flash/Flex: Flash player is installed on 98% of desktop computers so in majority of cases it will not require any client side installations. We wanted to deliver the best user experience we could and flash allowed us to do that.

Q: Generally, how is this app structured, client, backend, architecture etc’?

A: Our application uses webservices to communicate between client and server, where Flex application is used as a webservices client and JAXWS on the server side. When we started working with Flex (2.0) its webservices implementation was very weak and basic, so we had to create many workarounds on the server side to compensate. Flex 2.0.1 Hotfix 2 changed that, since we were part of the beta program for Hotfix2 and Adobe staff were kind enough to listen to our requests and enhance the webservices implementation.

Q: Have you used Cairngorm?

A: Yes, we do. Our application uses MVC, and this is done by using Cairngorm (2.0). ServiceLocator is responsible for all the webservices related stuff – sending requests and etc.

Q: How many people worked on the project?

A: Project development involved 2-3 developers and one designer. Project duration was around one year.

Q: Did any of the developers had previous experience with Flash or Flex?

A: That was one the “negative” factors when we decided on technology, since none of our developers had any previous experience not with Flash nor ActionScript. The learning curve was not a short one, since all the developers were from Java/JSP world.

Q: Will there be an online demo of the app?

A: We are on Beta 2 release, and a full featured demo will be available as soon as the application is stable enough.

Q: Do you have plans for creating similar apps?

A: I believe that the majority of future web/desktop projects of Mailvision will use Flex/AIR.

Q: What do you think is the future of the Flash platform and RIA in general?

A: Flex rocks .

Posted in AJAX, Actionscript, Flash General, Flex 2.0, Miscellaneous, VOIP 2.0, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

My blog is Iphone compatible

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

See a bunch of crowded geeks these days?! There is a good chance that Apple’s Iphone is involved. And the first thing that geeks with blogs do is to check theirs on it. I’m proud to announce that my blog is almost completely compatible with the Iphone. But, seriously, while the web experience with the Iphone is the best I’ve seen from such a small device, I don’t understand how can apple call it a not “watered down” version of the Internet without Flash support and not a full Javascript support. There is a fairly good JS support on this scaled, proclaimed to be full, Safari, but, not like what we already used to get from latest generation of browsers. Hopefully these issues will be fixed with the first update.

Screenshots:

Iphone 1

Iphone 2

Posted in Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »

Too much focus will kill you

Sunday, July 8th, 2007

I’ve just came across of a way to kill the Flash player with a few lines of AS 2.0. I know of at least one other way of killing the Flash player along with it’s host, may it be the browser or the Flash IDE, but this was with the old 7th player, this time we’re talking about the latest 9th version. It’s a little awkward, and don’t ask me how I got it, but, it involves a MovieClip, a TextField, Selection, Macromedia’s Delegate, a filter, and a trace, yeah, it won’t work without a call to trace. I think the main trouble maker is the Selection.onSetFocus, but, I couldn’t recreate it without any of the above ingredients, and I have a feeling that AS2′s trace is also problematic in Flash Player 9. (You should anyway “Omit trace actions”, from the settings, when publishing swfs)

Focus Kills

I haven’t tried it, but, I doubt that it can be recreated with AS3 on the VM2, it’s the VM1 that we have to carry along for backward compatibility that causes all this trouble. I tested it on some different machines with different Flash players and so far it crushed them all, here is the list:

Copy this code into an empty FLA first frame, or download the source below to see how it goes.

^?View Code ACTIONSCRIPT

var mc:MovieClip = this.createEmptyMovieClip("mc", 0);
 
var tf:TextField = this.createTextField("tf", 1, 20, 20, 300, 100);
tf.type = "input";
tf.border = true;
tf.text = "Flash Player Varsion: " + System.capabilities.version + "\nDebug Player: " + System.capabilities.isDebugger + "\nOperating System: " + System.capabilities.os + "\n\nClick here or press the TAB key to kill Flash";
 
tf.onSetFocus = mx.utils.Delegate.create(this, glow);
 
Selection.addListener(this);
 
function onSetFocus(oldf:Object, newf:Object):Void{
Selection.setFocus(oldf);
}
 
function glow(){
mc.filters = [new flash.filters.BevelFilter()]; // any filter except BitmapFilter()
trace(mc.filters);
}