Something totally different

I created the layout for our new website and I’d like to get some feedback before making the final decision, so hit me Click the image for full size view.

{{ My Store }} Holding the horses

I was planning on writing an A to Z explication on how to build the application, but then I saw this great tutorial by Nahuel Foronda and Laura Arguello, the people behind asfusion and Mate on how to build a basic Adobe Flex application with a Coldfusion backend, so I thought I might as well rewrite that one the Mate way.

I’ve sent an email asking for permission to do this, so until I get an answer, I’ll put the writing on pause. I don’t expect to have to wait too long for an answer, so check back soon.

{{ My Store }} Flex 3 + Mate version.

Let’s say we have a shop where we sell stuff for your house, like tables, chairs and couches. For the sake of this ‘tutorial’, we’ll stick to these 3 products.

We want an application to manage all our products in a database which we will link to our website so customers can browse and order our products.

So .. open Flex Builder and let’s get started.

Create a new project and call it mystore. In your src directory create a new directory called views. In this directory we will place all our interface related things. In the views directory, create a new MXML Component based on a VBox and call it MainUi.mxml. Add an ApplicationControlBar to it and in the ApplicationControlBar, add a label, a spacer and a button. Give the label the text ‘My Store’ , the spacer a width of 100% and the button label Products.

Now your MainUi.mxml file should look like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>                <mx:VBox xmlns:mx=”http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml” width=”95%” height=”100%“>   <mx:ApplicationControlBar width=”100%“> <mx:Label text=”My Store” /> <mx:Spacer width=”100%” /> <mx:Button label=”Products“ /> </mx:ApplicationControlBar>   </mx:VBox>

But when we launch our application, we only see a blank screen. This is normal because we haven’t imported our MainUi Component in our main application file yet. To do so, open the mystore.mxml file and put the following in it:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>          <mx:Application xmlns:mx=”http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml” layout=”absolute” xmlns:views=”views.*“>  <views:MainUi horizontalCenter=”0“ horizontalAlign=”center” verticalGap=”25“ /> </mx:Application>

Now when you launch the application you should see the applicationControlBar on top with the Label and the Button on it.

You can experiment with this all you want, give it a nice look, because I’m a programmer, not a designer, so all my apps look like crap, and stay tuned for more!

ColdFusion 8 struggling

As a final preparation before starting the actual Flex development, I tried to install ColdFusion 8 with MAMP on my mac running Leopard.

What a pain!

I will save you from all my frustrations and just tell you that the solution is out there .. It took me 2 days of trial and error until I found this super great post by Matthew Wallace on how to do this. You can watch it here .. Thank you Matthew!

WebORB for PHP

Before I can share my experiments with you, I want to make a (very short) post about WebORB.

WebORB for PHP is server-side technology enabling connectivity between Flex,Flash Remoting and Silverlight clients and PHP applications. WebORB for PHP can be installed into any PHP5 application to expose PHP classes as remoting services. The product provides a complete implementation of the Adobe’s AMF0 and AMF3 messaging protocols and thus natively support Flash Remoting or Flex clients. The product also offers remoting support for Microsoft Silverlight clients via Silverlight component included into the WebORB distribution.

For more info check the WebORB for PHP homepage.

Ofcourse there are other options out there, like Amfphp. I’m not going to go into the discussion of which is best, why I chose WebORB, or anything like that. I had to make a choice, considered WebORB to be the best for myself and so I went along with it.

Mate presentation

Last night (at 0:30 my time) I was lucky enough to be able to attend the live meeting organised by the Atlanta Flex Meetup Group, which was broadcasted throught Adobe connect.

The topic was the new framework in the Flex world called Mate (pronounced mah -tey). Developed by AsFusion, Mate is an tag-based, event-driven framework that many will find far easier to work with. Using the MXML language, Mate provides an easy map to define how your application handles its events. Laura Arguello from AsFusion was the guest and main star. She showed the many features and how to get started working with Mate. The presentation covered best practices and real world examples.

Needless to say it was a stunning presentation, including a sexy spanish accent There is not a single doubt in my mind that Mate is the way to go (at least for me). In this blog I will be focussing on how to make real world applications using Mate and WebOrb.

Stay tuned

Hello world!

Welcome to my Blog.

It will mostly contain stories or frustrations about my adventures in Adobe Flex. The main goal is to provide some getting started information by showing ‘real world examples’. The first post will be what I want to achieve and the last one will (hopefully) be the solution.

What’s in between, well, that’s up to you