I have some basic experience in making Flex sites, but I think I have more use for Flex in making a desktop AIR application.
Anyway, I was wondering if it is at least possible to use C# alongside Actionscript/AIR? I can't find any example of this.
Also, can I use custom Flash components in a Flex app? I know I can use Javascript components.
Thanks
Your options with AIR are limited to HTML/JS, Flash/ActionScript or Flex. There's no support for other languages and frameworks.
You can create a C# console application and call this application from AIR.
var file:File = File.applicationDirectory;
file = file.resolvePath("CSharpConsoleApplication.exe");
var nativeProcessStartupInfo:NativeProcessStartupInfo = new NativeProcessStartupInfo();
nativeProcessStartupInfo.executable = file;
nativeProcessStartupInfo.arguments.push("-arg");
var process:NativeProcess = new NativeProcess();
process.addEventListener(NativeProcessExitEvent.EXIT,onProcessDone);
process.start(nativeProcessStartupInfo);
In this way we have a C# application with AIR interface.
Slukse is correct -- it depends on what you mean by "alongside."
Obviously you can't compile C# code into a SWF -- that much we know. But you can certainly embed (as davr suggests) an ActiveX control into a .NET Forms app, load the SWF into that control, and use the ExternalInterface API to bridge the C# code running in the desktop app and the ActionScript code running in the SWF. If by alongside you mean writing server-side C# code to render data consumable by the Flex app, then of course, you can do that, too -- there's plenty of documentation out there covering how to connect a Flash or Flex (or AIR, by extension) app to Web Services of a variety of flavors, including the relatively new-ish WCF stuff.
Another way to go would be to run a standalone C# desktop app (e.g., a service, console app or the like) and have that app listening over a certain local port -- then have your SWF talk to that app using the Socket classes. I'm doing something like this now (with Java, not C#, but the idea's the same) for a personal project.
If by 'alongside' you mean using c# as middleware to connect to your database (probably SQL Server), or to perform remote calculations then yes you can. You can connect to a c# service using remote objects. The midnight coders produce a product called WebORB that is fairly simple to use. Version 3.4 was a totally free version that should suffice if you are building desktop applications in Air. The next two versions are not free but basically offer no real advantage to you.
The only way I know of doing this is with C# web service programs and the AIR/Flex apps communicate with the web services.
The whole point of AIR is to enable web developers who know AS/JS to be able to easily make desktop applications which are automatically portable to win, linux, and mac. Hence why there is no way to connect it to other languages like C#, C++, etc, since web developers generally don't care about those languages, and if they were used, the app is no longer portable (yes, most languages can be ported to other OS's with some effort, but the point of AIR is that you write whatever you want, and it runs everywhere with no extra work).
If you want to combine C# and Flash, instead of trying to put C# inside AIR, what you should be doing is putting Flash inside a C# app. There are various resources for this on the internets, here is one I found in a quick search: Example: Using the External API with an ActiveX container. When you are searching, make sure it talks about the newer, more advanced ExternalInterface / External API method, and not the oldschool SetVariable/CallFunction/watch method. The newer one is much easier to use & has more features.
Also, yes, you can use custom Flash components inside a Flex app. Generally you just make a SWC inside Flash CS3 (or CS4), and then import that SWC inside Flex Builder (or Flex SDK, or FlashDevelop, or ...)
If you are making the components yourself inside Flash CS3, you should use the Flex Component Kit. It provides some features for you, and puts in the boilerplate code, to make your flash component play nice inside Flex. It's included with Flex Builder/Flex SDK.
Related
I'm working in a webapp with Spring and I always used JSP and Jquery, In a recent conversation, some guy commented: You should use Flex instead.
Would Flex be a good choice for a web app? What are the advantages of using it vs. just JSP and Jquery?
I think you really mean to ask; why should I use Flex instead of JQuery.
JSP is a server side language. Flex or JQuery are client side languages. Flex is not a replacement for JSP any more than JQuery is a replacement for JSP.
Flex can be used to create a Flash Application; which can be deployed in a few different ways.
It can be used to create a browser based application that run in Adobe Flash Player. The Flash Player is only supported on desktop browsers, and there are no viable options to deploy a Flash Platform app to current mobile browsers. I would only recommend this if you had tight control over the machines accessing your application.
It can be used with Adobe AIR to create a desktop application for Windows or Mac machines. I, personally, think the use case for this is even smaller than creating browser based applications.
It can be used with Adobe AIR to create a Native Application on iOS, Android, and Blackberry Playbook. If you are tasked with building a Native Application that needs to be deployed on multiple mobile OSes; I think that Adobe AIR presents an intriguing option.
if you need to build Native mobile applications, and you already know JQuery, I'd recommend investigating options to build your JQuery apps as Native Applications. I know options are out there to convert HTML into Native Applications, but can't comment on them. I see no need to switch your technology unless you are running into limitations. To evaluate Flex ;you'd have to define what those limitations are and then decide whether Flex will help solve them. Usually the time savings of "use what you know" outweigh any benefit that comes from switching technologies.
That said; Flex provides some things that I don't see yet in the "HTML5/JavaScript" space. It has a robust UI Framework that works identically across all the platform targets, a step through debugger, and a memory profiler just to name a few.
The two technologies are completely different. JSP/jQuery would give you a web application. Flex would give you a Flash application.
Personally, if JSP/jQuery would work for you then you should go that route. If you don't need the features of Flex, there's no reason to require the user install the plugin.
How to create web application using Qt?
This depends on what you mean by "web application". If you mean an application that can show parts of a web page in its interface as rendered HTML, like a browser can...yes. Qt incorporates something called QtWebKit:
http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebkit-index.html
(Note: Back in the olden days it was Microsoft--I think--who first made an embeddable Internet Explorer control so that you could fetch a URL into the midst of some MFC or VB application and run a browser in the midst of your otherwise-form-based application. The event hooks for Microsoft's solution sucked, Qt's are much better.)
Anyway, this is great if you want people to install your application on their machine, where it fetches web data but takes advantages of native features to be richer than a browser could. But be careful because these days native apps have to be really outstanding to surpass the advantage of something that runs in a browser they already have.
HOWEVER If you are trying to use QtCore to push server-side content out and fulfill web requests, that'll be an uphill battle. You might find some related examples if you look hard enough:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100922075100/http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2006/12/20/whats-this-cgi/
Very few people use C++ (much less Qt) to generate web pages server-side. Yet there are still some doing it, even in pretty cool ways:
http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt
...regardless, QtCreator will be no help in that kind of pursuit.
The functionality you are asking for does not exist within Qt itself. However, there exists (at least) one third party library that allows some of the Qt code for a desktop app to be re-used to a certain extent for serving up a web app:
http://cutelyst.org/
However, this does not magically allow you to write a QML interface with QML Widgets and have a visual interface accessible via a web browser.
What do you mean by "web application"? Is it a desktop app with web features? If so, yes Qt in general is very good for that.
If you mean a kind of server that outputs HTML, then you should use something else because you would have to reinvent many wheels to make it work.
You'd require to run or embed web server. It would be more whise to turn to a Apache Web Server or Apache Tomcat based approach. Otherwhise you'd run somewhat against the odds.
Consider also using some HTTP server library like libonion or Wt. Wt is close in spirit to Qt. However, you won't use Qt itself. libonion is lower level (and you may want to use browser-side Web frameworks like e.g. JQuery or AngularJS with it).
If you already have some Web server, you could consider developing some FastCGI application in C++.
You surely need a good understanding of HTTP protocol and of HTML5 & AJAX.
Since this is 11 years old, I thought I'd come here to tell you that it does indeed seem possible now that qt supports webassembly. The newest version, 6.4 (newest version as of today jan 31 2023), now offers support for webassembly and their website has various examples of apps built with qt that run in the browser.
https://www.qt.io/qt-examples-for-webassembly
I am looking for approaches I can take to consume my .net SOAP service on the BlackBerry Playbook. So far I believe there are two main approaches to my problem.
Apache CXF wsdl2js
I have used wsdl2js to generate the javascript needed to communicate with the service. However I end up getting a http 500 error and have not been able to get past that. I have looked through the provided examples from the Apache CXF download and I have done some searching and cannot find a solid example of creating the javascript client. A lot of examples seem to somehow access the wsdl file at runtime from a server but my javascript is already generated from the CXF tool and I just include the scripts... if anyone has some tips here that would be great.
Adobe Flex and AS3
Another option I have considered is using Adobe Flex. I create a new Mobile Flex project in Flash Builder using the BlackBerry PlayBook SDK and Flex 4.5. However when I use the menu options to connect to a web service I get prompted with "This option is only available for flex projects."
Are there any other options out there that provide a solution to this problem? If you need more information just let me know.I understand this is a large topic, thank you for your time.
In Flex, you can use the WebService class to access SOAP WebServices. More info here.. I'm sure you can use this class for a non-Flex AS3 solution.
I'm not sure why they disable the Flash Builder tooling for this; but it shouldn't prevent you from using the actual classes to access WebServices.
I can't speak about the alternate approaches.
I came across the Adobe Flex framework one day. After watching http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/media/flexapp/'> the demo of Flex, it looks to me it is a bundle of different Ajax controls. I have no working knowledge of Flex at all and know very little about Flex. Therefore, I would like to hear from the developers here with some Flex experience to explain a bit more pros and cons of this Framework. In particular:
How productive it is to program in Flex compared to the .Net + Silverlight?
Any technical advantages over other frameworks?
Any disadvantages ?
Does it have any known scaling issues?
What kind of web servers can it be hosted on?
Any other things I should be aware of about Flex?
How productive it is to program in Flex compared to the .Net + Silverlight?
Way more productive than Silverlight as it has a much richer and capable control library. Silverlight is rapidly gaining ground here though. I think by the time SL 4 comes out they will reach feature parity, maybe even SL 3.
Any technical advantages over other frameworks?
If you can create it in Photoshop, you can pretty much do it in Flex with the help of the Flash drawing API. If you want to build very interesting data visualizations (tree/node diagrams, such as an org chart) you can do this Flex without a ton of work.
Any disadvantages ?
There is no server-side component to ActionScript so you need to find a way to pass data between Flex and your backend, be it Java, .NET, PHP, etc. There are libraries out there to AMF remoting with just about any backend which makes it easy. But as far as the objects you pass between the two, you need to maintain both or use a code generation tool to create AS3 classes from your backend classes.
Does it have any known scaling issues?
Flex is simply a presentation technology so this question doesn't really apply.
What kind of web servers can it be hosted on?
Again, only a presentation technology. It compiles out to a SWF file that is loaded by the browser over HTTP and then executes inside of the Flash Player plugin.
Well ~~ .. it's more that Silverlight is similar to Flex. It's not Ajax so much as a kind of 'walled-garden' inside of which you have a rich programming environment. Somewhat like Java apps say.
The usual criticism derives from just that. Flex/Flash applications tend to be ignorant of the browser (more or less) so that stuff like back-button usually gives unexpected results.
It'll run on all the current browsers on all platforms. You don't need to "host" flex as you build a SWF file that gets loaded into the browser and is executed by the Flash Player which your users are expected to have already downloaded/installed .. (95+%) penetration helps.
I've been using Flex for the last year or so and it's served my purposes well. It can be integrated nicely with javascript stuff on your web pages and provides a very rich set of capabilities for doing all sorta things like web-services and XML processing and of course all your video/audio/music rich media.
The language is ActionScript 3. Which is fundamentally a strict superset of javascript. You can use javascript as-is. (ActionScript was intended - by Adobe - to be next-gen javascript.)
It can compiled in two modes. One is for hosting in a browser as web app, using the Flash runtime object to provide granular GUI controls.
Or it can be compiled in desktop mode, where it uses another runtime (named AIR) to operate interchangeably on Windows, Mac, or Linux.
I wouldn't compare it to Ajax. It's more like .NET, if .NET didn't have such a disparity between desktop.NET and ASP.NET. Pretend ASP.NET offered a desktop runtime, maybe. (Not a bad idea, actually).
Like a lot of non-MS technology, it tends to be basic yet cover the important capabilities. More conceptual integrity, IMHO. About the same scale, scope, and complexity as VB6 and useful for about the same set of tasks, for about the same audience of developers and users. Yes, it's got good database connectivity too.
I'm new to Air. I've got an existing Flex 2 application which I'm considering bringing into Flexbuilder 3. My question is can I use the same base application (and source code) to make the Air version, or would I have to maintain to separate code trees: one for the Air version and one for the Flex/SWF version?
The best approach I've found to creating both Flex and AIR applications from the same source, is to use a core library project for almost all code, with separate small projects for the Flex and AIR applications.
There are two key concepts that make this very powerful and maintainable, allowing for not just two applications, but for many "editions" if you're so inclined.
Modules:- If the core application is
actually a module (or a module that
loads other modules) you'll be able
to easily create stub Flex and AIR
applications that are basically
there to set project properties,
reference classes for cross-module
communication, and then simply load
the core application module with a
ModuleLoader.
Factory Objects:- When there are
things you want to do on the AIR
desktop application that you can't
do in the Flex application, or any
case where you want something to
work differently across
applications, a factory object that
creates an instance of a project
specific class is a great way to do
it. for example, you can call your
"save" function, which for AIR saves
to the file system, but for Flex calls
a web service.
Have a look at Todd Prekaski's
excellent Flex DevNet article on
Building Flex and Adobe AIR
applications from the same code base
on how to do this.
Once you've created a Flex Library project where you're going to create your main module, create your Flex and AIR application projects. In the properties of the two application projects add the library project src directory to the Flex Build Path. While in the project settings you'll also need to add the modules to the Flex Modules section, setting the option to optimise for the project.
You can't mix both AIR and Flex in the same Flex Builder project, but you can share code. Here's how...
Create a Flex based project as you
normally would.
Create a second AIR based project.
In the second application, go to
project->properties.
Select the "Flex build path" option.
Under "Source Path" add the folder
that contains the source from your
first Flex based project.
Now both projects share the code from the flex project.
You need to be careful not to use AIR only API's in code you intend to share between both apps.
You can use the same.
One way is to put the bulk of the application in a Group-based component in a library.
Both Flex and AIR applications can embed that component in their Window.
If you need to have custom code, have your Group component accept an Interface object that has all the methods that are specific to a platform (loadFile, saveFile, etc.). Each application injects an object that implements these methods appropriately.
I've worked on a product that injected a whole local-data access layer (to the SQLite database) and the core application had no idea if it was running in a browser or on the desktop (connected or disconnected).
Cheers
Create 3 project: Air, Web, and common. from air and web, include common.
http://simplifiedchaos.com/how-to-compile-both-flex-and-air-application