Flex Trainer

Contact me if you have any flex training requirement. Having realized the scarcity of good flex trainers in India, I have decided to be available as a trainer for a short period of time . Just to give a brief introduction of me; I have got more than seven years of experience in Flash platform. I have been developing Rich Internet Application (RIA) for large enterprises for quite sometime. Being one of the early adopters of Flex, I have extensive knowledge of training, mentoring and helping Java/.Net developers to pick up Flex. Apart from flex framework, I am also comfortable in Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES, Cairngorm Microarchitecture, unit testing framework . I have also had the privilege to conduct numbers of in house flex training sessions for the organizations I have worked.

Note: I will be available for a limited period of time.

New MXNA Reader: Cairngorm 2.2

I have developed a MXNA Reader few days back. I know there are couple of readers available online which are good in their own way. My aim was just to put together some of the best practices for flex development that can help others to learn.

Some of the features:

1. Flex 2.0.1
2. Cairngorm 2.2
3. Aqua Skin by Nahuel Foronda
4. Custom Preloader
5. This reader provides internationalization (I18N) and localization (L10N) support based on gettext.
6. Unit Testing and many more

It’s not ready to upload yet. It still requires little bit of re-factoring. Here are some of the screen shots for the time being :)

Check out adobe.com/devnet!

Finding information on adobe site was never so easy. Check out the new site .It’s just wonderful! No information overloading. All the information you need is just one click away. You will experience a better navigation and find a greater consistency.

For Flex resources and tutorials. Check out this link

Flex Builder: An error has occurred. See error log for more details

How Many times have you encountered the problem while refreshing your flex builder or opening a mxml file?

• An error has occurred. See error log for more details.
• Unable to create this part due to an internal error. Reason for the failure: The editor class could not be instantiated.

I get this error more often. How I solve it?

Earlier I use to go to my workspace directory and delete the entire .metadata folder without knowing anything. In this way I used to lose all my settings.

Recently I have found a better way of solving this problem:

• I go to [workspace directory]/.metadata/.plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.codemodel/searchCache

• Backup the directories in there that end with “.index”. zip them up and keep them somewhere else
  
• Now delete the directories and keep the file “catalog.xml” file as it is there
• Run builder again and I should not get any error now
  

The problem is that the lucene index was corrupted or lost, probably during a failed Flex Builder shutdown. When flex builders starts it tries to load the lucene index but it fails to load that file and then it throws the error.

PieTimer: A timer component using Piechart

One of my colleague, asked me to develop something like a timer using Piechart. It took only 15 minutes to develop in flex. I will provide the source code of it soon. Keep checking this place.

Everything about Cairngorm: Samples, Code Generation,Unit Testing

You want to develop a loosely coupled, scalable solution for your next project. One of your colleagues might tell you that Cairngorm (CG) is the way to go. But you found it really scary. Is it really scary?

Dear friend! I can assure you about the simplicity of the Cairngorm micro architecture.

Cairngorm is the collection of some design patterns borrowed from J2EE fraternity. Sounding tough? Hold on!

It’s nothing but some well-known and largely used solution for common problems developers encounter in their day to day job.

Cairngorm is very flexible. Creators of CG encourage you to modify it and use it as per your requirements. You will find yourself using everything or something of CG once you are comfortable with it. You just need to get into it and once you are into it,you will not look back. You will just love it.

Are you ready to get started?

How to and where to start?

I have listed down step by step guide to use those recourses you will find around the flex ecosystem.

Read this interesting post by Steven Webster before you try anyhing with Cairngorm

-Why I think you shouldn’t use Cairngorm

If you still interested and determined to implement Cairngorm in your next project. Have a close look to these diagrams.

Diagram
-Cairngorm Diagram
-Cairngorm Diagram Explorer

Interesting? Want more understanding on CG architecture. Read these six part articles by Steven Webster of Adobe Consulting.

-Six-part article

Now is the time to make your hand dirty with some real coding. Have a look to the below given link. It will give you step by step guideline on how to setup your Cairngorm project. You will also get to see a very basic implementation of CG which is famous by the name of Cairngorm Login Example. Keeping the legacy of Steven, he has also written 3 part articles for beginners.

-Login Example

Need to see more complex implementation. Here are some links for you:

-Cairngorm Store Example Updated to Cairngorm 2.1
-wordweb-visualization-graphs-keywords-from-digg-api
-WebService & Cairngorm 2 Example by Jesse Warden’s
-Some sample code examples on cairngorm

How about generating codes automatically ?

-Cairngen
-Cairngorm code generator

Need to do some Unit Testing?

flexunit_basics
cairngorm-iresponder-async-flexunit
Unit testing Flex with FlexUnit and Cairngorm - The IResponder interface hurdle

I have noticed some promising screenshots in thinkingdigital blog. This guy has got some cool plan on screenshots but not sure it will be ever materialized or not.

- Cairngorm Plugin