Be sure to check it out! May 29th in Orlando, take the family and hang with that world famous mouse after! The all day jammed packed day of Flex/Flash topics is to be held on the campus of The University of Central Florida. Its a inexpensive sure way to get some good info from experts in the field that will be speaking. Head to Flash Camp Orlando
peas
DK
As promised, below please find the URLs to the ppt file and the AIRVJ application code. The code is a Eclipse archive, should be able to simply import it into your workspace. You can also check the code out via SVN at the Google code site: http://code.google.com/p/airvj/
Under the source tree there exists a Config.as file. Enter your AWSAccessKeyId to enable the Amazon integration. Also in this file enter your lyricsFlyAPIKey that you can get from http://lyricsfly.com/api/
The ppt file of course can be found on your USB key distributed by those Masters of the 360 Conferences Multiverse.
happy coding and rawkin!
peas
DK
Live in Atlanta? Get out and register for CFUnited Express! Come see the famed Charlie Arehart and that Jedi of Jedis Ray Camden speak on ColdFusion. Also on tap are John Mason, Master Andy Powell, as well as myself. I’ll be covering the Flex Component Life Cycle in depth and with as much humor as I can inject! Yeehaw! Be sure to register its this coming week and remember, your money spent on this is applied to your CFUnited fees! So its a win-win!
http://express.cfunited.com/go/atlanta/2009/
About
CFUnited is coming to Atlanta Georgia. This is our second time visiting and we are so excited to be welcome by the AtlantaCFUG. Join us for an entire day of excellent topics by Charlie Arehart, Douglas Knudsen, John Mason, Andrew Powell, and Raymond Camden.
Date
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Check out the Topics!
The cost for this event is $149, which expires 4/10/09; after that it will be $199.
http://express.cfunited.com/go/atlanta/2009/
Seems to be a bit of a current topic floating around on doing heavy work in Flex/AIR efficiently. If you have done any sort of data parsing or fetching large amounts of data with your UI in Flex or AIR you have undoubtedly been introduced to the Windows “Not Responding” message or the MAC spinning balloon thingy. Sure, your routine takes only 3 seconds to run, “so what is the issue?” you say. Well, 3 seconds is a long ass freakin time for one thing to occur uninterrupted in Flash. Consider Flex having a default frame rate of 24 frames per second. This leaves about 40 milliseconds, yes milliseconds, per frame. Even though Flex uses primarily one frame, this frame is re-entered every 40 milliseconds and Flesh re-draws what is needed. Thus you get that nice Halo effect showing up when you mouse over a Button for example. Running a procedure that takes 3 seconds is far longer then that 40 millisecond spot in the universe, eh? Thus Flash freaks and no UI updates are made resulting in what is known as UI degradation.
So, how do we get around this? Tell your client less information is better here, no one can really digest 100,000 points of light, eh? Common answer for sure and one that can make sense most of the time. Well, after your clients come back to you and say no way Jose, our users need to see 100,000 points of light, you begin to realize you just may have a data centric application and not a information centric one. A point to note here readers, there is a difference between information and data. What to do?
Enter the topics of threading, concurrency, and Mean Greenies. Well, maybe not the last item per se. Recently I had the pleasure of hearing Charlie Hubbard speak at our local Flex UG AFFUG. He spoke on Concurrency issues in Flash. He has a mondo in depth three part blog post on it here. Sure, he mentions the use of callLater() to break up your worker process and allow time for Flash to get to the next frame and redraw. Further mentioned using timers to achieve a similar goal. While both of these can work and get you on the path of righteousness, they are not so performant. Charlie’s approach was to address this by making better use of the time a frame exists before its great circle of life repeats itself. The skinny on this is to maximize the time alloted to a frame by measuring each step in your process, keeping stats on it, and deciding when to wait for the next frame to begin. Oh and giving Flash a itsy bitsy tiny bit of room to redraw itself and be happy. Ironically Jesse Warden recently blogged on this very same topic too.
This whole discussion centers around the idea of Green Threading. Green Threads are essentially scheduled batches of work-time in single threaded architectures. That is, in a single-threaded architecture like Flash, Green Threads are chunks of work you dedicate to a certain procedure(s), scheduled by Flash and your code. These are different then kernel level threads which are handled by the OS. Drew Cummins did some work a bit back on a Green Thread library for use in Flex. Charlie Hubbard added to this a bit and put his library out in Google Code land here. Check out his Mandlebrot Set example and see a virtual shite load of data points be drawn on screen.
What about AMF/Remoting you ask? I’ve found this croaks belly up with large Arrays, yes Array not ArrayCollection, of VOs. In my case the VOs had maybe five properties tops. Have you had better experience here? Please let me know!
Now, with all this stuff going on I decided to play around and build a rough little test app today in AIR using this library. I’ve put together a AIR app that consumes a 100k line CSV file, then concatenates it to be 300k lines. This concatenated CSV string is fed to four different cases: Loading into a array of 300k typed objects synchronously and then asynchronously and loading the same data into a SQLite table synchronously and then asynchronously. Times are output for comparison. Please notice some things while running the app. Both of the synchronous functions lock up the UI for a bit, you will notice right away mousing over the buttons does not show the Halo glow at all. The asynchronous functions do not lock the UI up, in fact, there is a progress bar displaying the progress LIVE! Timings for each are quite close without tweaking or tuning the settings Charlie has setup in the Green Thread library.
Go ahead and download the app here. The source is viewable by a simple right-click on the application. Please note that the CSV test file is included here, so the download is a bit large being 144MBs Enjoy!
Peas!
Head on over to the recent CFConversations podcast to catch a interview with yours truly! Dan Wilson kicks the interview in gear with my self talking about Hooking That Shiny New Flex App Up To ColdFusion, the topic I will be speaking on at CFUnited 2009. Be sure to listen in. If you have yet to register for CFunited, kick it in man! Be sure to check out Brian Meloche’s blog too, he’s another of the main squeezes behind CFConversations.
I also chat a little bit about my old stomping grounds in South Florida. Shout outs to all the peeps from those 80’s and 90’s back in the day! I also mentioned some listening preferences. Of late I’ve been listening to Chinese Silk style music as well as some Persian Classical, all via Shoutcast of course. REally helps the concentration. For more info on Silk Music see this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiangnan_Sizhu
peas
DK
I’m pleased to announce that I will be speaking at CFUnited 2009. Thanks to all who voted me up there! I will be among some distinguished and better known list of speakers listed here: http://cfunited.com/go/speakers/2009. This is where its at for the mash-up of ColdFusion, Flex, and Air topics that will get your heart pumping and your coding fingers twitching. Be sure to register now! In a large team? Talk it up with your managers now and get that training approved! Don’t forget to mention the corporate discount plan!
About:
This year’s conference is a 3-day event with a bonus on Saturday repeating the most popular sessions. In addition to the keynotes and sessions you expect at any conference, this year will include Birds-of-Feather discussions in the evenings, panel discussions, round tables, and many other social and networking events. If 4 days isn’t enough for you, we have a full-day hands-on classes instructed by CFUnited presenters the day prior to the main event.
peas
DK
peas
DK
Tom and John those hip cats that are turning heads all around the world, hey as in 360! On their busy horizon is another not to be missed 360|Flex this time held in Indy! This time around they are putting teh topics to a vote. Leave your hanging chads behind and head on over to http://360flex.uservoice.com/ and vote for your fav topic.
Now, I should have been better at my titles and descriptions for sure. I may have left out the shit, hehe, but hey, if interested in hearing about the following, vote now!
“The Life and Times of a Flex Component”: Yeah, this topic can be dry and somewhat boring. Here I spice it up with some humor. This topic is brought to you from a recent article appearing in Flex Authority. Voting or not, be sure to check out this months awesome issue! Here I cover all you need to know in making performant reliable custom components using invalidation methods and other pieces in the Flex Life Cycle.
“The Great Mashup”: Be looking for this session on the list. Everyone is mashing up in Flex these days, why aren’t you? Drop in and learn how to mash up various cloud or other APIs from MTV, Amazon, Twitter, eBay, or various others listed on programmableweb.com. Emphasis will be placed on consuming XML by way of e4x utilizing REST or Soap. I will ROCK you out during this session!!!!
“How Do I Hook This Shiny New Flex Application Up To CF”: This topic I have covered before, I’m passionate about it! Even if you are not using ColdFusion, this is a useful topic. I cover e4x use, HTTPService vs Remoting, etc.
Again, I just want to say, drop in and get your vote on HERE Regardless of your interest in my topics, make sure you head out and exercise your right. Further, kudos and many thanks to Tom and john for all their hard work at this. Have a gander at http://www.ourstartupstory.com/ to know more of their story.
back to coding…peas
DK
Folks, be sure to check out FlexCampOC out in Cali. Tom and John masters of the 360 universe are sure to impress with a day long Flex conference. What, no cash? No excuses there, only $25 clams, dude! Goin back to Cali, Cali, Cali. Goin back to Cali, Cali….
Come on out and check it out and here speakers such as Adam Flater on Flex 4, Evan Gifford of cairngormdocs.org fame, Thomas Burleson, as well as myself chatting away about Flex and CF.
peas
DK
The fine folks over at CFunited have opened up the can o’ suggested speakers. This is really a awesome way to get the community involved in deciding what the community wants in a conference. Do you want to hear about ColdFusion or The Dyson Vacuum that sucks more? ha! So, step up to the plate and get out the vote!
http://cfunited.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/12/4/CFUnited-Topic-Survey–VOTE-NOW
While here I’ll plug my topics I submitted 
“How do I hook this shiny new Flex tool up to ColdFusion?” -This is intended to be a talk on the three ways to connect your Flex/AIR application up to ColdFusion for data and what not. I cover not only the three types, but how to use e4x and XML generated by CF. Also, I cover Remoting and CFC-to-AS object serialization and the converse. I further compare and contrast all three techniques, you know, which is faster and which is better, offering a world famous answer to the latter!
peas
DK
