Since I need to start working on flex within a week for my firm, I started learning flex.
I did watch some of the starting videos from Adobe (here).
But, I found those videos too slow for my learning process and they don't seem to provide with much practical application programs to try out with.
Though, I will continue with those videos over the week, can anyone suggest some good website/online resource that could provide me with some practical examples, that would easy to work out on Flex Builder. It would also ease my learning process.
Thanks.
Try Flex 3 Essential Training. It will give you pretty good overview of Flex in a few hours.
There was a topic which possible contains useful links.
Tour De Flex - http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/tourdeflex.html Is a walkthrough of all the basic API's, simple examples that will get you up and started. It's an AIR app, just click the INSTALL button and it wil be installed on your machine.
Related
I am newbie in AS3 and learning day by day. I am looking for good AS3 code snippets/samples/small projects which I can use for learning purpose and for reference (with no dependency on Flash IDE because I use Flex SDK and Flash Develop). Also, I am specifically looking for tutorials/articles about Audio/Video streaming, creating own audio/video player, playing audio/video files and working with other media (such as images) and creating special effects. If there's any good websites(other than adobe.com) would be really really really thankful.
Thanks in Advance.
Adobe.com stinks for most documentation (Flex in a Week isn't bad). Here are a few flex/actionscript websites I use or have used:
http://actionscript.org/ Has a lot of ActionScript tutorials.
http://www.flexafterdark.com/ - some good tips and tricks.
http://active.tutsplus.com/ has some good information.
http://www.lynda.com (subscription based) has very good videos that can help you get started.
I would also highly recommend a few books. Flex 3 Bible/Flex 4 Bible/ActionScript 3.0 Bible
Google and Flex in a Week.
I recommend you to take a look at Flex Examples blog. It contains really great and really simple samples to learn.
Senocular is a great when it comes to explaining AS3. Check out his site below:
http://www.senocular.com
In particular his tutorial on AS3 is fantastic - it goes through everything new or challenging about AS3 like display lists and event listeners. It was the perfect primer for me when I stepped across to AS3.
http://www.senocular.com/flash/tutorials/as3withflashcs3/
Sencular is really popular on the http://www.kirupa.com forums (another good set of tutorials are there) plus I believe he works for Adobe now.
Otherwise checkout Grant Skinners work, recently he has been doing a lot JavaScript stuff, but do a search of actionscript and you will find a lot of stuff, especially around memory management.
http://gskinner.com/
We have a flex based UI whose functionality (eg: login, logout) needs to be tested periodically in IE 7. Manual testing takes a lot of time and hence we want to automate it.
EDIT: We dont have the source code of this app uder test so cannot use something like FlexUnit. Is there a way to automate this testing?
I have heard of FleXmonkey, but have read negative reviews of it and hence wary of trying it.
EDIT: source of negative review:
Automated testing of FLEX based applications
(Comment by Ryan H)
Please suggest if theres a way to go about it.
EDIT: An open-source solution is preferred.
Thank you.
You won't get very far in your development adventures if you avoid reviewing things just because you read negative reviews. ( Please provide a source for said negative reviews ). I've also read bad things about Flex and Flash Builder and the Flash Player. Yet, you still ended up using Flex?
That said, I strongly suggest checking out Flex Monkey.
RIATest is another option.
I believe you can also do this sort of testing with QTP. I couldn't find a specific source for QTP info, but there are a few links if you google.
http://www.learnqtp.com/does-quicktest-professional-support-flashadobe-flex-applications/
http://vishnuagrawal.blogspot.com/2009/04/flex-automation-testing-with-qtp.html
Without recompiling the source code, it is not possible to test Flex in all cases. Saucelabs IDE claims that it can test Flex without recompiling the code. You may check that.
I think FlexMonkey is pretty cool and worth judging on your own. Most of these tools use the same underlying automation framework provided by Adobe, and thus have many of the same pains and challenges. We've actually done a lot the last few months to make it easier to work with and have been working to provide more documentation on dealing with common challenges.
If you do have problem, you will find that our Forums are very active with questions and answers: http://www.gorillalogic.com/forum/7
-Jon Rose -
Gorilla Logic, Inc
Some Flex automation tools support testing of Flex applications without requiring to recompile it.
RIATest definitely supports it (called runtime loading) and if I am not wrong QTP does it as well. AFAIK there are no open source tools that support it.
Beware though that runtime loading is not for every application. If for example you are using custom html wrapper you cannot use it with runtime loading.
Searching the site didn't help, so if anybody has good tips for getting up to speed with Cairngorm?!
I have to make an ultra quickstart on this framework, since I have to dive into an existing project ASAP.
Any help is much appreciated!
This guys created a Flex application to help explain the work flow:
http://robsondesign.com/blog/index.php/2009/02/18/cairngorm-diagram-explorer-update/
I found this 5 part tutorial at www.davidtucker.net to be very practical and hands on. David moves fast but also gives solid descriptions for almost everything he does. The tutorial includes both blog posts and video code-alongs. I recommend doing both. The download files get a little messed up (renaming, Adobe AIR, Flex Web app), so I had to follow the code-alongs and use the downloaded source only for reference (I opened in a separate editor and copy and pasted as needed).
you don't mention which version of Cairngorm, but this is a good place to start if you are using version 2.1 or earlier.
cairngorm docs
The beta for Cairngorm 3 is out and you can find whatever info there currently is at
cairngorm 3
Here is a simple animated short about Cairngorm
Then you need to understand the MVC architectural pattern
Why to use design patterns (inspiration/motivation)
Then go ahead to these Cairngorm related links/videos:
Getting started links
Video tutorials
Then start coding:
A real case to work with
There's a book from Wrox on Amazon that really helped me Professional Cairngorm
I want to develop a simple race car game.
A user will see his car from above and can use right and left arrow keys to navigate in the track and between other cars.
What is the correct way to develop a game?
Do I use pure actionscript with FlashDevelop or the Eclipse plugin?
Do I use Flex3?
Is it better to use adobe Flash CS4 Professional?
The advanced version will also include 1-on-1 or multiplayer game.
Do you recommend a separate XMPP server to send real time data between players
or is there a flash server suitable for this?
A book about games in flash and links to tutorials will be appreciated.
Thanks
Man are you on the verge of a brave new world, ha.
Alright, so basically everything that you're mentioning is a viable option. A lot of it is going to come down to personal preference, honestly.
If you are a very visual person and it helps you to see things on the stage as you control them, go with Flash. It's not quite as powerful as Flex when it comes to dealing with data, but allowing you to link up your classes to sprites and movie clips in your library is huge and honestly underrated by a lot of "serious" developers.
If you're going for multiplayer, you might consider looking into Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Services. It's a hosted solution from Adobe that takes a lot of the work out of setting up a multiuser environment, though it's not free.
Finally, if you can wait a few months, Flash CS5 will allow much tighter integration between FlashBuilder (the upgrade to Flex Builder) and Flash. Basically you'll be able to use both together very easily.
If you want to get started learning this stuff, I strongly recommend Lee Brimelow's excellent site gotoandlearn. The first few on there are AS2 so feel free to skip them, but just watch all of his AS3 examples in order and when you're done you'll be a flash developer.
You can also check out the Adobe Flash/Flex Cookbooks to look up specific questions, or google "Flex in a Week" to learn flex.
Good luck!
In the 'good' old times I used to make small Flash games in Flash IDE with AS2. That was really fast. (Though, code was quite ugly.) Since AS3 is available, I use Flex. If graphics matter, I use Flash IDE and Flex Builder parallel (Build/compile/draw in Flash, code in Flex Builder). Of course, it's not the best, but I just hate how Flash IDE handles code.
For the multiplayer mode, I suggest taking a look at this article: http://www.flashrealtime.com/basics-of-p2p-in-flash/ It uses Adobe's Stratus server to do P2P communication. It's quite easy to setup and use.
Books: http://flashgameu.com/ - basic level, but good for beginning
And of course: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596526948
My favorite tutorial site: http://active.tutsplus.com/
first of all: there is no correct way to develop games ...
one advice I'd like to give you is: do not use CS4 for developement ... CS4 is a great tool to create graphics and animations, etc., but is terrible for programming ...
if you want to develop a proper game (or any sort of web app), that you don't want to scrap within months, you need to layout an extensible, flexible and robust architecture, which can only be done with rock solid code, and than plug in all you nice graphics and effects (which can be made in CS4 of course) ...
Flex is probably the fastest way to get UIs up and running ... if you are for example creating a strategy game, which requires a lot of forms and overviews etc., then you should use Flex for that, altough ASwing and other frameworks are reasonable alternatives ... I do not like Flex for a number of reasons, but I guess in the end they're all a matter of taste, so it is up to you to decide what you'll use to create all the standard UI your game will need to have ... the more UI to create, the more I'd advise you to use Flex ...
when it comes to servers, most people tend to use Red5 and SmartFox, which both perform quite well, yet in my opinion have quite a lot of unnecessary overhead and impose a lot on your networking engine ... still, you can start with them, and might find out they're just what you need ...
here comes my personal advice: use Haxe ... it allows you to use one language for servers and clients ... also, it is a great language, once you get the hang of it ... I used AS2 and AS3 for a lot of time, but since I finally had the courage to switch to Haxe, I don't want to go back ever again ... although the languages appear to be similar, they are not, so do not expect them to ... once you got your head around it, you'll understand what I mean ... check out ThreadRemotingServer for creating servers easily ... check out haxelib (more info here) to get some helpful stuff ... and don't be shy to post on the mailing list ... Haxe has a great, friendly, helpful and enthusiastic community ... there's also a forum (which is not used so much) and an IRC channel to get support ...
hope this helps ... ;)
I'm only answering this for points. Dude, you have a lot of work to do if you are serious about this (which i doubt, since you don't even now how to use a search engine or wikipedia). Anyway, here you go...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash
I would like to know about the LCDS. What it does? How to configure it? Do I need to know Java?
Can I get some sort of tutorial pdf for it?
I am a new flex developer.I would like
to know about the LCDS. What it does?
One of the major feature of LCDS is it provides a server side push implementation to your flex app.
How to configure it? Would not know, since it does not work in sync with c# have not explored it as much as I would have liked.
Do I need to know Java?
Yes, unfortunately Java is the major player in supported language, else I would be all over it.
Adobe® LiveCycle Data Services ES is a powerful solution for creating data-intensive rich Internet applications (RIAs) that integrate with J2EE applications and business logic.
That is from the adobe site: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=lcds26_td
Can I get some sort of tutorial pdf
for it?
Best way is to go through the tutorials on the adobe web pages. If you are using hibernate here is an extra example. http://blog.comtaste.com/2007/07/livecycle_data_services_and_hi.html and http://iamjosh.wordpress.com/2007/11/08/building-a-livecycle-data-service-application/
T
and welcome to the great world of Flex. One thing is for sure - your going to enjoy it.
It is always good to satrt with the official site: http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/dataservices/
if you want to see what can be done with Flex in general and with LCDS, install Tour-de-flex: http://gregsramblings.com/2008/12/12/livecycle-data-services-and-tour-de-flex/
This Blog was a good start point to new guys where I work. The most important suggestions he made was to:
1. Get to know google
2. Check out this lynda course.
Last but not least, AdobeTV have great videos to watch! see: AdobeTV Data services search page
By the way, AdobeTV itself is fully build with Flex.
Be sure what LCDS can do for you with respect to Coldfusion and Flex/AIR.
There is likely something there that will save you a great deal of time, money and coding.