Tom and John organized another excellant 360Flex conference. It is very cool how they are promoting networking within the Flex community. If you want to know what is going on with Flex, you have to attend!

Ok, I just gotta jump right in and tell you why it was one of they best times I’ve ever had.

During the Key note, Ali Daniali spoke about an opportunity during the conference to work on application for the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. They needed an application that would help people find Food Banks close to them.

Something about this really tugged on my heart and I thought, what a cool idea… Here’s a chance to work on a really cool project and help create something worthwhile.

I missed the first meeting that day but showed up that night at the hotel room where the Flex Code Jam was taking place. I asked what I could do to help and was assigned  the Yahoo Map component. Nobody seemed to mind when I explained I’d never worked with it before. The help was appreciated so I dove in and started researching the Yahoo Map Flex API. I worked until a little after midnight and got a small prototype to work.

The next morning I went back to Ebay, met up with the Code Jam Team and started integrating the Yahoo Map component into the main project. Believe it or not, I actually started running into problems with the Yahoo Map component…

I raised the issue to my team members and kept troubleshooting. Everyone else was pretty much swamped so I was on my own for a while. What I didn’t know was that SCRUM was about to change things for the better.

I’d heard of a SCRUM meeting but about all I knew was that you are supposed to stand up. We had a SCRUM meeting when I was about 3 hours into the day. In a SCRUM meeting the SCRUM master asks you to stand up and answer three questions; What have you been working on? What are you working on now? What problems are you having? It was amazing how those 3 questions brought accountability and moved the project along. Ok PMs wipe off that silly grin!

Because of the SCRUM meeting, I was able to quickly find out that two team members had just wrapped up their tasks and were free to help out. After trying several things the problem was finally resolved, not by me, you know who you are. I moved on to other tasks after the Yahoo thing was resolved.

Things really took off after Midnight, everyone was either focused on a task or was asking for something to work on. The team really gelled and worked together. At about 3 am we had a working application that was ready to present to the client. But there were a few hours left before we had to present the application at they keynote Wednesday morning so we kept polishing and testing the app.

I will never forget the experiance of working with some of the best Flex developers and the best people in the world! It is something that just doesn’t happen every day. If you get the chance to work on a charity application like this just do it! I really can’t explain what an amazing experiance it was.

I got a little choked up that morning during the key note when Tom, John and Ali talked about the project and Tom and John announced that they were donating 7K to Second Harvest. It felt really good to be a part of something like this.

I just want to say thank you to Tom, John and especially Ali for bringing this project together. You guys are truly awesome!

I also want to thank the Flex Code Jam team. It was great working with you and hope we can do it again sometime.

You can find a link to the app that we created below. The app currently works for zip codes around San Jose. You can use 95126 as a test zip.

http://www.flexcodejam.net/

The code is open source and is available at:

http://code.google.com/p/flexcodejam/

I can’t remember what people were saying but I think it’s pretty funny that I was watching people tell me what they were doing at 360Flex on a monitor that was at 360Flex. They were probably saying they were at 360Flex.

Today I was trying to find a Flex Twitter app. I found AirTalkr and TwitterCamp. Neither of them work. AirTalkr is supposed to hook into Twitter but I could not figure out how. At least it’s not obvious. TwitterCamp does not work with the production AIR 1 release.

I think TwitterCamp is cool and I would like to run it, now… I decided to download the source for TwitterCamp and update it to work with AIR 1. Then I thought this would be a great thing to Blog about so here goes…

I downloaded the TwitterCamp source from Daniel Dura’s blog at:

http://www.danieldura.com/code/twittercamp/

I copied the zip file to C:\Download\AIR and then unzipped it to C:\Download\AIR\twittercamp

I then created a new Flex AIR application in Flex Builder 3 and named it TwitterCamp.

I copied the files in the C:\Download\AIR\twittercamp source root directory to to the TwitterCamp\src directory.

The project wouldn’t build because I had accepted the default source directory of TwitterCamp\src. I fixed the problem by moving the files from TwitterCamp\src to TwitterCamp.

Then I had another build problem because com.adobe.utils:DateUtil could not be found.

I followed a link to the source code that was in one of the comments but it turned out to be a broken link.

I Googled com.adobe.utils.DateUtil and eventually found:

http://code.google.com/p/as3corelib/downloads/list

I downloaded corelib-.90 and expanded it to:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\corelib-.90

After adding C:\Program Files\Adobe\corelib-.90\corelib\bin\corelib.swc to the Flex 3 library path I then started getting:

Severity and Description Path Resource Location Creation Time Id
1119: Access of possibly undefined property window through a reference with static type flash.display:Stage. TwitterCamp TwitterCamp.mxml line 61 1204846931832 21

To fix the compiler error I changed

systemManager.stage.window.x = 10;
systemManager.stage.window.y = 10;

to

systemManager.stage.x = 10;
systemManager.stage.y = 10;

Then one more error was left:

Expected a single content tag in TwitterCamp-app.xml

I Googled “Expected a single content tag” and found a blog post that referred to a similar problem and explained how to fix it. The problem was caused by the app.xml being different in AIR 1.0

To figure out what changes I needed to make to TwitterCamp-app.xml, I created a new AIR project named TwitterCampTest and compared TwitterCamp-app.xml to TwitterCampTest-app.xml.

I changed

http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.0.M4

to

http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.0

I then started adding XML elements one by one until the compile errors went away.

I added:

the id, filename, version and initialWindow tag. For the id and filename tags I also changed TwitterCampTest to TwitterCamp.

I tried debugging and got the following error:

[SWF] TwitterCamp.swf - 1,148,762 bytes after decompression
Error: Error #2071: The Stage class does not implement this property or method.
at Error$/throwError()
at flash.display::Stage/set x()

I fixed this by commenting out the following statements:

//systemManager.stage.window.x = 10;
//systemManager.stage.window.y = 10;

note that I added .window back to the statements.

I ran the app but it didn’t look good on my laptop screen. It was too big. I changed the stageHeight and stageWidth to:

systemManager.stage.stageWidth = 800;
systemManager.stage.stageHeight = 600;

Now it all works!

It looks cool but I’d like to customize it so it says AIR instead of Apollo, etc… Stay tuned.

I have posted the code to:

http://www.riaplayground.com/download/TwitterCamp/TwitterCamp.zip

The installer is at:

http://www.riaplayground.com/download/TwitterCamp/TwitterCamp.html

I also left a comment on Daniel’s blog and let him know where the code is in case he wants to use it.

Summary: Flex 3 and Air 1 were released, Cairngorm still rocks!, had a lot of good conversations about Flex development.

I think most people involved with Flex development already knew that Flex 3 and Air would be released during the conference. I had known for a month. Of the new Flex 3 features, my favorites are refactoring, memory profiling and the AdvancedDataGrid.

One of the main reasons I went to the conference was to talk with other developers that are using Flex. I asked quite a few of them what they thought of Cairngorm. I was shocked to learn recently that not everyone is as excited about Cairngorm as I am and I wanted to ask developers at the conference what they thought. Basically I found that most of the developers had issues but not enough to make them stop using Cairngorm. The main complaint is that Cairngorm requires you to setup an event for each command. I’ve never seen that as a big deal.

The main “competitor” of Cairngorm is PureMVC. I talked to one developer about PureMVC and he explained that PureMVC does not allow binding model data to a view, service locator, etc… I see this as a big disadvantage. DataBinding is great and I can’t imagine doing without it.

My favorite sessions were the Keynotes, Doug McCune’s sessions on being an independent Flex developer and open source Flex projects, Ben Stucki’s 3D demos. The coolest demo by far was Joe Berkovitz’s demo of a music editing application.

The best technical presentation was by John Wright on Building an iTunes-like Browser Component for Flex. I wasn’t able to stay for the whole session because I had to catch a plane but he presented some good reasons for not using regular expressions in Flex. I plan on downloading the slides for this presentation and investigating further. Regular expressions are great but if the ideas he presented are faster then it’s worth looking into.

Most of the presenters have posted their presentations on their blogs. The 360Flex Atlanta site has a link to these blogs.

The conference was great and I’ll definitely go again.