Space of Flex/AIR technologies

New version of Swiz Framework was just released, it brings couple of new features and bug fixes. I’m looking forward to give it a try in next couple of days. I used previous version in some of my projects and I really loved it, it reminds of my favorite Seam Framework from my Java days

Changes / Fixes for Swiz 0.0.5:

- DynamicChannelSet now contains an ‘endPointName’ property that can be set to ‘flex2gateway’ for ColdFusion
- Multiple calls to autowire for an object or view will only create mediators once
- handleAutowireEvent ignores flash.* and mx.* classes
- DynamicMediators allow event properties to be null
- Primitive objects can be added to BeanLoaders
- Autowire now supports by type (with [Autowire] instead of [Autowire(bean="foo")])
- DynamicResponder supports passing an array of values to be passed back into the result handler
* for example to have the original saved object passed in to a save result function
- Refactored all bean factory specific functionality out of Swiz and into BeanFactory
- Added Strict flag and MediatorUtils for event type checking
- Added ExpressionUtils, also or event type checking
- Added Prototype object, for non-singleton bean definitions

You can read more about this release on Chris Scott blog - http://cdscott.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-swiz-005-for-new-year.html

There are many examples on the web how to use Zend_Amf as a standalone component but couldn’t find one that actually shows how you can run it with the rest of the Zend Framework. Main benefit of running it in a way I will demonstrate in this post is that requests to AMF service classes are automatically bootstrapped with configuration, database initialization and other Zend components.

Here is how I use Zend_Amf with the full framework. First we have to setup whole environment as it is in ZendFrameworkQuickstart (there is also already preconfigured archive available there).

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I just uploaded refactored version of flinks you can download it from here. It now can be instantiated with-in any component that supports states, that also includes externally loaded modules. I also changed some property names and default setting of auto deep linking. To use it you just need to put this in your component mxml that can handle states (Application, Module…):

<riaspace:EnableDeepLinking />

Major architectural change is that component responsible for mapping between states and url fragments is a singleton and EnableDeepLinking tag can be used any time for any component in your application. What it does it loads states configuration for owning component into a singleton registry…

I needed very simple logic to do deep linking based on currentState value. In order not to repeat same logic in couple of my small projects I created flinks library which I just uploaded to google code. Anyone interested in giving it a test drive please let me know how it runs

Believe me it is very very simple, the only thing you actually need to do is include this single line of code:

1

<riaspace:EnableDeepLinking autoDeepLinkStates="true" />

to enable it and to apply it to all your states. You will find other examples on project google code site.

p.

Last week I had a presentation at Grill IT event located in Wrocław/Poland. I was covering Flex/AIR technologies in context of RIA. During the presentation I showed my little Flex/AIR application called SpinIt (you can follow this link to give it a try) that demonstrates code/components reusability between Desktop and Web applications.

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