Abdul Qabiz on Web Technologies, Flash Platform, RIA, India

There are many who complain about missing features and existing bugs in Adobe Flash Runtimes – Flash Player and AIR. But some choose to use their energy in improving the platform by using it and providing feedback.

If you believe in bringing the change:

• Download Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta 2 and AIR 2.0 Beta 2,
• Install them
• Help Adobe fix issues and add features by logging issues at https://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Our feedback matters, as it has always.

As soon as I read, Ted Patrick’s post, I started writing this post.  Please spread the word by writing on your blog and retweating the following text:-

Improve Flash 10.1 & AIR 2.0 via Beta 2 http://bit.ly/cty7Nm READ & RT #Flash #AIR #QUALITY

I have been maintaining a list of flex/actionscript/air bloggers on flex_india group. I updated the list today and I would be updating it again next week.

It’s nice to see more developers from India are blogging and sharing their knowledge with everyone. There are ( and always have been) very smart and cool developers in India but generally they maintain a low-profile or too busy with work or shy.

Check out the following list, I have used the names of bloggers instead of blog-title because it was for me to do so.

Flex/Flash/AIR bloggers from India

• Anand Vardhan
• Anjali
• Anupam
• Arpit
• Arul Kumaran
• Arul Prasad
• Bhaskar
• Bhavin Padhiyar
• Bhuvan Gupta
• Brajeshwar
• Debabrataa
• Deepak Verma
• Durairaj
• Elango
• Flexed
• Imai
• Jyoti Kishnani
• Karan
• Krishna Prathab
• Kumar
• Manish Jethani
• Mayur Rami
• Mrinal Wadhwa
• Nitin Gore
• Owas Bhat
• Prakash
• Raghu
• Rajesh Bhadra
• Rama
• Rashmi
• Ritesh
• Rohan
• Sanjeev Kumar
• Sara
• Satish Kore
• Shardul Singh Bartwal
• Shilpi Bharara
• Subramanian Sundaram
• Suketu Vyas
• Susrut Mishra
• Tushar
• Vijayram
• Vishwajit

You can bookmark this link.

Technorati tags: india, flex, flash, blog, blogger

I started looking at the latest version of Adobe Media Player(AMP) available on Adobe Labs. I notice lots of improvements, be it user-interface or performance or content-coverage, that is, more feeds/videos are available to watch.

Lots of audio/video podcasts can be played in Adobe Flash runtime. I wrote some code to check if videos from Podtech, Diggnation etc, and it works without doing anything extra. All credit goes to new video/audio capabilities (H.264 and AAC) in Adobe Flash runtime (player/air).

The only thing I miss in AMP is to be able to add custom rss-feeds, for example, AMP doesn’t show Podtech and Diggnation videos for some reason, if I can add those feeds to AMP that would be great.

Over all, AMP is good piece of work.

Technorati Tags: adobe, mediaplayer, podcast, video, rss

It was good to be at initRIA, I met many (known or new) people. The event went fine, we had some good sessions. The following list was the agenda:-

• Data Visualization in Flex – Raghunath Rao, Adobe
• Flash for Flex developers – Bhavin Padhiyar, SAP
• RIAjaxified – Rakshith, Adobe
• Designing RIAs with RC pattern – Yash Mody, TeknoPoint Multimedia
• Building Live Documents – An online Office suite leveraging RIA technologies by Sumanth Raghavendra and Adarsh Kini, InstaColl
• Optimizing Flex and AS3 – Mrinal Wadhwa, SAP
• Developing Flex RIAs with Cairngorm Microarchitecture Debabrata Acharjee, CapGemini
• Birds of a feather

We had couple of more session and some discussions (on Silverlight, AJAX etc) along with the above listed ones. I enjoyed most of the session, there is always something to learn. The most interesting session was by InstaCol guys, who showed us Live-Documents and also shared their experience with Adobe Flex.

I hope, all the slides/presentations (by everyone) would be uploaded to slideshare (preferably) or somewhere.

Around 130+ people were expected to attend (based on registration count) but it seems some fifty people showed up, which is not bad for something that was planned and organized in such a short time-span.

I feel, this is the first event, in India, which is focussed on the Flash Platform at the same time open for talks/discussions on all kind of RIA technologies. I am sure, next time (whenever it happens) we would have enough time to spread the word and developers from different RIA technology background can come up and share their views. As said, it was cool we had discussions on AJAX, Silverlight, AIR, Flex, Flash and RIA in general.

I managed to click some photographs, not really good quality due to my impatient and lazy nature since I have moved to Bangalore .Check out photographs.

Thanks to Mrinal Wadhwa of Bangalore FUG for taking the initiative and organizing the event. Thanks to Honeywell guys for a good venue with all facilities.

Technorati tags: initria

There are more seats available for initRIA event, if you have not yet registered, you can register here. You can read more details on Mrinal’s blog.

Two more days to go and I am already excited to meet everyone. I hope, I would get well by then.

Technorati tags: initria

Bangalore Flex User Group, precisely Mrinal Wadha, is organizing initRIA on Dec 16, 2007. Haven’t heard about it? Please read the details.

I hope to see good crowd and sessions there.

Technorati tags: initria, ria

I got to know about Aviary through a colleague. I looked at their site and realized, they have some amazing tools (Flex/AIR based), which are editors/generators for image, vector, 3d, video, audio etc. As mentioned, these tools are web-based (flex) and desktop-client (air).

I am yet to look at their tools which are accessible only on invitation. I hope, I would get an invite soon. Why don’t you check it out too?

This is one more example to show why entire flash/flex ecosystem is so cool.

Technorati tags: aviary, ria, flex, air, adobe, createonthefly

Adobe has just released new prerelease builds of Adobe Flex 3, AIR and Media Player (AMP) on labs.adobe.com. I downloaded Adobe Media Player and checking it out, it looks good.

Technorati Tags: adobe, air, flex, media-player, prerelease, beta

Adobe Flash Player Security-Sandbox is very good and we have not heard any major security vulnerabilities so far. However, I think, it can be made more intelligent, I have some use-cases where I can’t do anything.

XMLSocket API is cool, since it’s inception, developers could create cool applications (multi-player games, chat-apps, presence-apps etc). XMLSocket servers (unity, swocket etc) is needed to comply with a specification in order to work with Flash Player (as a client). Since developers are using/creating custom-servers, they could control various things on server-side, f.ex: configuring right security-permissions, serving right policy-file (crossdomain.xml) etc.

With Binary Socket API, in Adobe Flash runtimes, things have changed a lot. Applications (for Adobe Flash runtimes) can now connect to servers using standard protocols (POP3, SMTP, Databases, HTTP etc). Totally cool feature which allows creation of kick-ass applications (Yahoo! Web Messenger, mySql driver etc). But Adobe Flash Player’s security-sandbox is limiting Binary Socket’s capabilities.

I have been working on a library (as3httpclient) to do more things (http-status-messages, http-authentication over GET request, support for more http-methods etc) which are not supported by URLLoader API. This library (as3httpclient) doesn’t work in deployed web-application because Adobe Flash Player’s Security-Sandbox restricts it to.

I have following questions/concerns:-

• When URLLoader (or other such native APIs) can connect on any port, why can’t custom APIs (as3httpclient and others) connect?
• Why can’t Flash Player be little more intelligent to check, if connection is made to a HTTP server? Rules could be:- If connection is requested to same domain and destination-port is assigned to HTTP server, let communication happen. If destination server:port is in different domain, check for valid crossdomain.xml and allow the connection?
• Why doesn’t Flash Player consider to-ports attributes, if policy-file is served over HTTP?

With standards, we expect flexibility. We can’t expect a HTTP server to push policy-file to Flash clients? That’s not standard.

Technorati tags: adobe, flash player 9, security sandbox, binary socket, as3httpclient

Adobe has announced support for H.264 (codec) and AAC (audio) in latest update of Adobe Flash Player 9 Beta and Adobe AIR. I just read Tinic’s post, which is full of information. Some related links:-

• Tinic’s technical post on H.264 support and other things added to latest update of Flash Player 9 Beta 2.
• Adobe’s announcement on Yahoo! Finance
• Ryan’s post on H.264 support
• ReadWriteWeb on H.264 support

I think, this would increase Flash Player usage on web. I am hoping that this update makes to release version ASAP. Future surely looks great…

Technorati tags: adobe, h.264, video, standards, flash player

Google maps accepts flickr feed with georss extension (geocodes). I just pulled on-AIR-Bus-Tour pool feed and threw in Google Maps, now it would show on-AIR-Bus-Tour images on the map.
If you are Google maps fan, you can bookmark following link:

http://tinyurl.com/yrgpy4

Technorati tags: onairbustour, google maps, mashup, georss

I just created a mixercast to show all latest pictures, videos and twitter updates of on AIR Bus Tour. Check it, out by clicking following image.

Technorati tags: onairbustour, mixercast, flickr, twitter, video

Sometimes back, I posted about as3httpclient project which is an open-source http-protocol-library written in ActionScript 3, not yet completely done. Library has been updated recently by Erik, who has recently joined the project. It’s great to have him in the team.

Things that have changed:-

• package name has been changed to code.google.as3httpclient.* from com.abdulqabiz.net.*;
• HTTPURLLoader class has been renamed to SocketURLLoader
• Some more classes added.
• ASDocs has been added.

Now as3httpclient can be used for:-

• HTTP Basic Authentication without browser’s dialogue box
• Adding custom or standard HTTP headers
• Uploading files to server that requires http-authentication [new]
• Copying bytes (of images/files downloaded using this library).

Two important features planned for future release:-

• Support for more HTTP verbs (PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS, HEAD etc) – would be there soon.
• Support for SSL or Secure HTTP – This feature might take sometime because it needs some investigation.

Please check out the project. I would love to hear your feedback/bug-reports/suggestions.

Please get back in touch with me [mail at abdulqabiz dot com], if you want to contribute to the project.

Technorati tags: as3httpclient, actionscript, httpurlloader

If you are thinking to do serious Flex consulting or already doing it in India, please read this email thread on flex_India list. It’s interesting for individuals or groups.

Email thread link:http://tinyurl.com/3xpsbf

Technorati tags: flex, apollo, air, consultant, india

Apollo, which was the code name for Adobe desktop runtime, would be known as Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). Adobe Flex 3 framework would be cached by Adobe Flash Player for better performance (download wise). Latest beta build of Adobe Flash Player 9 has loads of enhancements.

In short, all these bits are available on labs. Download ‘em and give your feedback to Adobe.