Adobe Media Player
October 3rd, 2007
It’s starting to look at lot like Christmas… well for Flash developers anyhow
That comes from Daniel Todd and I think he’s referring to the amount of new goodies Adobe released in the last couple of days. We had the AIR Beta 2 Flex 3 Beta 2 Thermo and Adobe Media Player. Thankfully the new AIR beta fixes my favorite making AIR useless bug synchronous database access
But its Adobe Media Player I’m loving at the moment. It’s an AIR app and it needs the new beta runtime and for those who know nothing about it, basically it’s a cross between iTunes and Joost but for Flash video. With a modified RSS feed video suppliers can create a channel of Flash video for people to watch, favorite and share. It downloads the video so you can watch it offline as well.
So far, so iTunes. But a channel feed can also include branding elements to give every channel a different look. But not too special right. It’s the future of AMP that’s exciting, the ability to embed advertising, pre-rollers, post-rollers, interactive elements. The Buy that shirt the guy in the video has element which makes AMP attractive for content producers and distributers.
But a more interesting future for AMP is allowing companies to white-label it, skinning and modifying the player to create their own iTunes/BBC iPlayer (without the DRM and with the Mac!). A great idea, I’m just surprised Adobe is there first. Normally I would expect to see this kind of thing coming out of a company like Brightcove
Flex going Open Source
April 26th, 2007
Looks like Adobe are making Flex open source. This is a brave move by Adobe but has to be the right one. By open-sourcing the platform they are reducing the barriers to entry for anyone worried about propriety Adobe software and it will allow them to go toe-to-toe with an entity the size of Microsoft. This continues a recent batch of Adobe open-sourcing including the ActionScript Virtual Machine, ISO standardization of PDF, Spry and the Flex-Ajax bridge.
So what’s in and what’s out of the open-source license:| In | Out |
| The compilers and debugger | The IDE |
| The AS core components | Flex Data Services |
| The Apollo Flex components | Flex Charting |
More in the Adobe FAQ.
Of course the key element underpinning the Flex architecture, the Flash platform remains closed source which seems to break with the model of open-sourcing the deeper levels of your stack, while making money on your value adds. Never-the-less this is a huge leap in the right direction.
Flex: No REST for the Wicked
December 13th, 2006
I’ve been back to doing some playing around with Flex 2 and some other technologies I work with. I’m now much happier now we have Flex Builder on the Mac. My trial license of Parallels was up and I was debating opening my wallet.
Anyway looking in the documentation for HTTPService I could see it handled PUT,DELETE etc and I thought, thats great, lets do some REST stuff.
To make a long story short I couldn’t make a Flex application do more than GET and POST. A quick search found me this. The extended set of methods rely on having the Flex Proxy which is essentially part of Flex Data Services.
Shame really, REST support in the player would be great for some modern XML over HTTP applications, and using the proxy means basically having to pay the FDS licenses.
My thought is this. why does the proxy have to be part of Flex Data Services. The Flex proxy allows for connecting to data across the web sans cross-domain.xml. Truely this is needed for the Native Web of Data. We possibly shouldn’t need the full power (and cost) of FDS to get hold of this.
Any ideas?
Ruby On Rails for the Flex Developer Video
July 6th, 2006
The London Flash Platform User Group has posted up a video of my talk last month. You can find it here.
There is a little dodgy part where due to a dodgy internet connection my screenshots of Ruby On Rails sites don’t show. Good for a laugh though as i use the SmackBook
Ruby On Rails for the Flex Developer Presentation
July 1st, 2006
Last weeks presentation at the “London Flash Platform User Group” was great fun and it seemed like lots of people got really interested in Ruby On Rails as a result.
For your delectable delight here is a PDF of the presentation I gave. There isn’t much content in it as I go for the presentation style that the presenter is the content and the slides are just backing.
But there should be a video of that presentation coming soon and i’ll link to it so I can be laughed at by all.
Flex 2 Released
June 29th, 2006
Well Flex 2 has been released along with the Flash 9 player needed for Flex 2 applications. To top it off they have also released the preview of the Flash 9 authoring tool. It’s a big time for Adobe and worth a post.
There are also a few Flex development resources worth mentioning, the devnet and flex.org.
I thing its worth mentioning the pricing model in GBP :
Flex 2 SDK: Free as in beer
Flex 2 Builder: £370.12 a license. Free trial available.
Flex 2 Charting: £235.95 a license
Flex 2 Data Services: There is a free express edition for use on one application on one CPU. (Do Adobe realise that you can barely buy a one CPU server anymore, minimum spec is usually two making it pretty useless?). The full Enterprise edition is going to be priced per CPU, I would suggest haggling/negotiating over the price as with any Enterprise software.
Ruby On Rails at the London Flash Platform User Group
June 15th, 2006
Yours truly will be giving a little talk at the London Flash Platform User Group on Thursday 22nd June
Ruby On Rails for the Flex Developer (20:15 – 21:15) – Stuart Eccles
Ruby On Rails has been one of the hyped development technologies of the last 12 months but what is it really about? Find out how you can use Ruby On Rails to build database-driven back-ends for Flex 2 applications with less lines of code than ever before.
Stefen Richter is giving a talk on Flash Media Server which i’m really excited about. The Media Server is one of the things that makes Flash unique as a true Rich Media Application.
So if you are interested in Flex, Flash or Ruby On Rails and you are hanging around London the sign up at http://www.lfpug.com/
UPDATE:
O’Reilly have been kind enough to give me 5 copies of Agile Web Development with Rails and 5 vouchers for a free copy of their new book Ruby On Rails: Up and Running to give away as prizes to attendees.
So register over at LFPUG to be entered for the draw.
Spry: Adobe in Reservoir Dogs Type Stand-Off
May 19th, 2006 "Spry":http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/ oh why oh why? I am of course referring to Adobe's "recently released":http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/pgubbay_spry.html AJAX framework called Spry. See the problem I have with this is Adobe seem to be lining this up directly in comparison to Flex. After Adobe's recent adverts to "Go Beyond AJAX with Flex" they now seem to be hedging their bets by releasing their own framework in an arena with the other "135 other":http://ajaxian.com/archives/134-ajax-frameworks-and-counting frameworks (134 plus the "Google Web Toolkit":http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/overview.html). There is now so much choice it's unreal and how many people are going to use Spry over Prototype, DOJO, JSON, Yahoo's web widgets and "all the others":http://ajaxpatterns.org/Ajax_Frameworks. The way I see it Adobe should be 110% behind making Flex 2 a success which is fairly unique in its industry (yes I know about "Laszlo":http://www.laszlosystems.com/ et al.) At the moment they are only diluting their position. The developer community is going to watch them plug each other while they go on hacking around with their favoured AJAX framework. This said, Spry actually looks quite good. It's very much based on loading then manipuling XML datasets and will feel very familar to Flex developers and using it's dynamic region markup does make a page quite readable and succient while other AJAX frameworks require much more effort to understand where the data is coming from and being manipulated. But why would I use it over Flex? In non-Flash based environments? Maybe but then i've got "Prototype":http://prototype.conio.net/ and "Scriptaculous":http://script.aculo.us/for that. Instead what Adobe has done is sow doubt in my mind that they are not 100% sure Flex will suceed.....
Flex and Rails Part 2: Extra Time
May 13th, 2006 In honour of today's FA Cup Final (What a Game!!) here is an extra time on the last tutorial. There was some questions on how to productionise the Flex application. If the flex application is served from the same domain as your Rails application you can modify the HTTPService URLs to just point to your controller with a relative path. From
To
You can then compile the application and move the files from the Flex bin directory into the rails publicdirectory.
RubyOnRails (1.1) and Flex (2.0): Pt 2
May 6th, 2006
UPDATE: Continued from part 1
20 days!! That’s terrible of me, I didn’t mean to be this long in putting up the second part of ths tutorial but work has been madness and I just want to go home and sleep every day.
Still here we are, thanks for everyone who commented on the tutorial especially Mikey Jones for linking to it and Alex MacCaw for taking Up Flex and Rails so enthusiastically.
I think Ruby On Rails is a good choice for your hobbist Flex development, easier to learn for all the Flash Gurus out there and much quicker to learn and robust than PHP.
So in this part i’m going to look at a few new, more advanced things in Flex and some dead simple stuff in Rails. We’re going to do some Flex components, some parameter passing, some ActionScript coding, better Flex form code, some states and some transitions.
So stay awake at the back….
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April 16th, 2006
UPDATE: Part 2 of the tutorial can be found here
Some close friends of mine are dangerously good flash developers. In a recent pub meet-up I said I had some ideas on integrations between Ruby On Rails and Adobe’s new Flex framework.
Now I know that Ruby On Rails is all integrated with some cool AJAX features (I’m loving those RJS templates right now) but Flex does offer something different.
For the un-informed, Flex allows you to build Rich Internet Applications, defined in XML and delivered on the Flash player. Let’s set one thing straight Flex is Free The SDK and compiler cost nothing. Adobe are making the dough on the IDE Flex Builder and some of the harder core Java integration features.
So where does Rails come in to this. Well Flex can consume and publish to XML based URL services to create dynamic applications with a rich client. Rails1.1 has some great REST features which make it a truely rapid development backend for Flex applications.
So without much more ado here is the first part of a tutorial on integrating RubyOnRails and Flex. This is the simplest thing that works tutorial. The Part 2 tutorial is going to cover some more advanced integrations.
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