MyFlex.org

MyFlex.org is a new intersting set of tools for Flex.
All  blue-chip software producers have at least one thing in common – a vibrant community of independent developers, some of which become vendors of  components or tools that greatly enrich the main product. MyFlex.org is built  for independent software vendors who are creating free or commercial components for Adobe Flex 2. MyFlex.org has been created by an independent software vendor  Farata Systems, which is also a contributor of the first commercial plugins for Flex Builder.

For more info www.myflex.org.

Mango Blog 1.0 released

Mango Blog is an extensible blog engine released under the Apache license, built with ColdFusion. It provides the core engine to administer and publish entries and the necessary architecture to extend its basic functionality by adding plugins. Mango Blog can be easily customized by the use of exchangeable and completely customizable skins.

For info and download the new release chech this link.

AIR/Flex competition launched on SitePoint

SitePoint is giving away two copies of Adobe CS3 Web Premium (kindly donated by Adobe) to the authors of the best articles about Adobe Flex and AIR submitted over the next four weeks.

For more information check this link http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/04/08/write-for-sitepoint-and-win-the-adobe-cs3-web-premium-suite/

101 fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site

Surfing the web I found this itneresting article http://www.insidecrm.com/features/101-web-site-fixes-031808/.
The article outilines 101 easy to implment techniques you need to use in order to improve the performance of your web site.

MXunit

MXUnit.org (http://mxunit.org/) is proud to announce the first release candidate of Unit Test
Framework *and* Eclipse Plugin for ColdFusion Developers.

Features include a simple-to-use extensible framework that allows
developers to spend more time writing tests and code than getting
distracted by frameworks details. The MXUnit Eclipse Plugin further
facilitates test creation by integrating running and debugging of tests
within the Eclipse IDE.

Common desing patterns

There are tons of design patterns, the common patterns used in a Flex application are:

- Singleton
- Command
- Mediator
- MVC
- Observer
- Value Object

The following links are useful resource and framework in order to start to implment in the right way the design patterns listed above:
http://osflash.org/projects/arp
http://www.serverbox.com/foundry
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/blueprint_print.html
http://www.model-glue.com/flex.cfm
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Cairngorm
http://www.puremvc.org/

Debugging with data inspector

When debugging network programming code the use of a data inspector (packet sniffing tools) is invaluable.
These are the tools we use during the development of our RIA:

ServiceCapture
ServiceCapture runs on your pc and captures all HTTP traffic sent from your browser or IDE. It is designed to help Rich Internet Application(RIA) developers in the debugging, analysis, and testing of their applications.
http://kevinlangdon.com/serviceCapture/

Charles
Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP traffic between their web browser and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information). View SSL communication in plain text. HTTP/1.1 support.
http://www.xk72.com/charles/

Wireshark
Wireshark is the world’s foremost network protocol analyzer, and is the de facto (and often de jure) standard across many industries and educational institutions.
http://www.wireshark.org/

Fiddler
Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.
http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/

Intelligere FCS 1.0 just released

This chat system in based on Flash 8 and ActionScript 2.0 for the client side instead the server side is based on AMFPHP, MYSQL and Flash Media Server.
The db is provided in order to handle the users data, the banned users, the badword and the chat rooms.
Basically you can configure the registered user (type 0) or the moderators (type 1) and a list of badword that you don’t want the users type in your chat.
When a user type a badword it will be replaced with a lot of asteirsk (i.e. f**k).
The system also check if the user makes a lot of flood and kick it out from the chat.
The moderators and registered user will be automatically logged in if you pass in query string to the SWF file the id  and the kriptKey variables.
All the rooms may be set in order to handle private messaging, support multimedia (the user can change this settings when it’s logged) and can be marked as public (all the users) or private (registered and moderators only).
The moderators can kick and ban the user, the registered users may handle their friends and enemies list.
As usual the software is released open source under the LGPL license.

You can find the demo here and the souce code here.

Intelligere SCS 3.1 just relesead

The remote collaboration system, code mane SCS, is born out of the growing need to have collaboration tools that allow easier and faster online communication. In order to view an on-line demo you can use this address www.intelligere.info/demo.cfm.
In order to download the last version check this link http://sourceforge.net/projects/intelligere/.

2007 Open C Challenge

Forum Nokia has announceed the four winners of the first Open C Challenge sponsored in conjunction with Orange and the Symbian Developer Network. Using the Open C SDK all four finalists created innovative, impressive mobile applications that were a standout at Nokia World. Out of the thousands of developers worldwide, they join a select group that has delivered innovation to the S60 platform.

http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/technologies/open_c/challenge_winners.html