Archive for the 'Flex Plugins' Category

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19
May

Flex Builder 3 Professional

0 Comments Flex Plugins and Learn Flex

A professional Eclipse based developer tool enabling intelligent coding, interactive step-through debugging, and visual design of the user interface and behavior for Flex applications. Includes support for building desktop applications with Adobe AIR.

Flex Builder 3 Professional

System Requirements

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Already have Eclipse installed? Download the Flex Builder Eclipse plugin instead.

Flex 3.0 SDK

The Adobe® Flex™ 3 Software Development Kit (SDK) includes the Flex framework (component class library) and Flex compiler, enabling you to freely develop and deploy Flex applications using an IDE of your choice.

Flex 3.0 SDK

 

English

Flex 3.0 SDK

08
May

10 Flex and Ruby on Rails Integration Examples

1 Comment Flex Examples and Flex Plugins

I love RIA technologies and Ruby on Rails. I always think combination of the these two could be greatest system framework. I’m glad Adobe recognizes that too, so do a few great guys. Here are the examples:

Integrating Flex 2 and Ruby on Rails

This Adobe article was written by Derek Wischusen from flexonrails.net. This is a full example writing including all the source code and the details on how it works. Very good start point to understand the beauty and power of the dual, Flex and Ruby on Rails.

When using Flex you have several options to choose from for back-end server software. So why might you want to choose Rails? Ruby on Rails, like Flex, is a well thought out, elegantly simple framework. As you will see, Rails uses code generation and metaprogramming to make it incredibly easy to integrate with a database using almost no SQL code. Furthermore, when you use Rails, you also get to use Ruby, a programming language that is both extremely powerful and easy to use. Using Flex and Ruby on Rails, you will be able to get more done with less code.

Flex + Rails + Ruby = RIA Nirvana.

I can’t agree more.

Combining the Power of Flex2 and Ruby on Rails

This is a combination of both vediocast and podcast. It’s a interesting way of delivering technology content itself. I’m not it’s good way of getting hand on something but rather a entertainment of learning to love a piece of great technology.

RubyOnRails and Flex

Stuart Eccles from liverail.com posted the mini serial article on the integration of Ruby on Rails and Flex. Here they are, Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 2 Extra Time. Just remind you they are not some quick blog posts. Those are lengthy technical details step by step. If you know both technologies, you’d love these. Thank you!

Flex On Ruby on Rails

Automating the communication between the client and server. It’s written by Harris Reynolds. The server technology it used is WebORB by Midnight Coders (www.themidnightcoders.com). This WebORB approach is somewhat different because the server side has been handled by not just spiting out XML, rather, a more robust engine. If you are considering a big scale serious application, this could be solution for you.

Flex for Rails Developers

If you are looking for a Flex + Ruby community, then http://flex.org/ruby is the place. The greatest part of this community is that you can pick up a bunch of components for your Flex Ruby experiment.

Flexible Rails

Peter Armstrong’s Flexible Rails is a site that prompts his ebook, Flexible Rails, which costs $20. Besides the book, there are good amount of information and sources relate to Flex and Rails.

RailsLog Visualizer

I’ve mentioned this couple of times, only because this tool is still evolving, now on Adobe AIR too. Well, it’s not really integrating with Rails, however, it’s close to Rails enough to be listed here.

RESTFul Rails from Flex

If you have no idea what RESTFul means, then you probably is not in the Rails camp. In that case, you might know what DRY means either. But never mind, this article will help you some. It’s not long but very very thoughtful approach for Flex and Rails integration.

Adobe Flex SDK for Rails

Yes, Adobe is still very trendy and hype and it does Rails too with Flex. They put it open source on Google Code.

WebORB for Ruby on Rails

WebORB for Rails is server-side technology enabling connectivity between Flex and Flash Remoting clients and Ruby on Rails applications. WebORB for Rails can be installed as a plugin into any Rails application to expose Ruby classes as remote services. The product provides a complete implementation of the Adobe’s AMF0 and AMF3 messaging protocols and thus supports any Flash Remoting or Flex client. This is a very serous product that you can take it as great solution for a real application.

Here are a few articles from them: Invoking Ruby objects with <mx:RemoteObject>.

 RubyAMF

People doing Flash might familiar with AMFPHP, the open source Flash Remote framework allows Flash or Flex communicate with PHP backend. RubyAMF does the same thing for Ruby. Like WebORB, it’s not directly involved with Rails but it provides the fundamental building block to enable high performance Flex Rails integration, beyond XML messaging.

08
May

Three Ruby on Rails File Upload Plugins reviewed

1 Comment Flex Plugins

Hardly any web application this day won’t need file upload, mainly for all the media types, photos and videos. When using framework like Ruby on Rails, there are all kinds of plugins you can pick to speed up your development. For example, file upload, there are three major ones available. Which one you should go for? It’s actually a question harder than you thought.

These three file upload plugins are Acts As Attachment, File Column Plugin and FlexImage. The last one has nothing to do Flex, just you know. Before I start the review and comparison, I’d like say Ruby on Rails is great but documents from Ruby on Rails developers suck!

They all use RMagick to resize uploaded image and create multiple versions in different sizes.

Acts As Attachment

Written by Rick Olson, member of Ruby on Rails Core Team. It’s a very complete RoR plugin, in terms of testing and well structured code.

What I like:

  • The generator comes with it can generate model with metadata such as file size, content type, height and width, etc. The data will be populated at creation time automatically. The data structure also trace the relationship between main image and the thumbnail image via self reference attribute parent_id, a defaulting attribute name for RoR to allow out of box Acts As Tree behavior.
  • It allows you store file in file system or database blob, with reasonable default filesystem directory structure, to RAILS_ROOT/public/my_models/5/blah.jpg.

What I don’t like:

  • Have to read the source code to figure out how the file get stored. There is no way to configure the file storage place to be flexible. Some model method such public_filename has to be overwritten to make flexible location available.
  • File attachment validation is flicky.

File Column Plugin

The oldest and most used file upload plugin.

What I like:

  • There are ways to set custom file storage location. Good. You can do callback function at :store_dir option to make it fits exactly how you want the file get stored. The reason I’m asking for file storage flexibility is that once you know how to get file uploaded, uploading is trivial, however, managing files are big deal when you do expect large amount of files.
  • It provides view helper to generate image url for viewing.
  • Many RoR developers use it and provide feedback. Easier to find hacks or modifications.

FlexImage

This is relatively newer file upload plugin for RoR. It has build-in features to provide special effects on the image you present, via RMagick. It’s cool when you first see it and use it.

What I like:

  • The build-in special image overlays. It’ll help you branding your data.
  • It’s super easy to store image into BLOB column and retrieve it. Along with page caching, it could be great file management solution, if you like store file in DB.

What I don’t like:

  • Once file gets store, there is no metadata information. By default, your file name becomes the id.jpg. The original file name is not preserved unless you code something around this plugin, not very DRY.
  • No flexible way of store file into filesystem under custom directories. All files, if use file system, will be stored in one place. It’s practically unrealistic for site deal with lots of uploads.
    We’ve been using FlexImage. Now I think we’ll switch back to File Column Plugin. As I mentioned earlier, uploading file is not a big deal once you get it works. You like to have the flexibility to efficiently manage the files on your server. Especially when you are expecting large amount of files coming in, when a more robust distributed file storage is under consideration, you really want to put the files to the right place earlier on. Another big challenge imposed to the site design is that file system or DB BLOB? I like file system but I’m sure there is good cases that DB BLOB works better.
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