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

Happy New Year to everyone, hope this year would bring more happiness and success in your personal and professional life. I also hope, a lot of problems in this world would be solved and make everyone (including animals, humans, trees, et al.) life easier and better.

New year (2010) started some ten days back, I am writing this post now? I can say, I have got lazy when it comes to blogging. It’s not that I don’t want to write, perhaps, I think too much before posting anything. There would be at least ten different posts in draft mode, I never posted those because I am not sure, those make any sense.

Anyway, many good things happened last year (2009) including my marriage. I am very hopeful that more good thing would happen in this new year (2010).

Last two years, I have been most inactive in Adobe Flash Platform community and social-media (blogging, etc).  I know, I would bounce back because I love to work on Adobe Flash Platform (specially actionscript), share what I do and help others. We all go through different phases in our life, for me it’s entrepreneurship where I am spending more time on things which would enable us to do great things in future.

Our company is doing very well, we have been focused on many things, specially a different culture, that would enable us to do great things in future, hopefully starting this year. We are happy that we have got very smart and nice individuals in our team, which makes us a great team.

As usual, I am always looking for smart developers (web and flash-platform), who can join us and be part of our journey. We are working on some nice projects and have plans for interesting products, I would surely need more passionate and smart people in my team.

For last many years, I have had new-year resolutions but this year my resolution is to get better at everything I do, that includes my health.

Once again, happy new year to everyone.

Peter Elst posted his thoughts about ActionScript and where it’s going. I agree with him and prefer to have simplicity we had once with ActionScript and Flash Platform.

I wrote my two-cents as comment to Peter’s post, that’s how it goes:

Nice post.

We have witnessed how Flash Platform evolved over the years, it has got more attention by people but at the same time, it has lost a lot of attention of those attached initially (as Keith said above).

Jeff Raskin, in Humane Interface, said something like that – complex tasks would require complex user-interactions but that’s no excuse to make simple tasks complex.

I believe, that’s what has happened. It’s not any more simpler to do simple things.

Adobe must think why they are doing it and for whom they are doing. If ActionScript is going to be clone of Java or C#, then why a new language – why not just use one of those?

There must be a philosophy behind a language and platform, what is that behind Flash Platform and ActionScript?

I had more fun in old days than now, just enjoyed the company of everyone (designers, developers, trainers, etc). It was because of simplicity that brought all of us together. I agree a lot of bad implementations were result of ease of doing things in Flash, but hey – there were far more good stuff then than now. A lot of innovation, cool stuff and apps to showcase. How much do we have now?

We are looking for some smart Flash Platform Developers who can be part of our team in Allies Interactive Services Pvt. Ltd., Kanpur, U.P.

We are a design and development company in Kanpur, though we are small but we are ambitious and have a great vision.

I posted the details on Flex-India sometimes back, pasting the same (edited the typos and formatted) over here:-

I have been meaning to post this for sometime but thought would it be appropriate to do that here?

I am part of a small design and development shop in Kanpur, U.P. Where, we mostly do web development using FOSS, mainly LAMP.

I moved to kanpur around 10 months back with a desire to build a great Flash Platform Team that would work on non-trivial type service projects and some great product ideas.

I could now start doing it, after we have managed to fix a lot of issues mostly a nice office, a good culture and some projects and a product in pipeline.

I need an experienced Flash Platform developer in my team, who can help us to make our vision, desire and dreams a reality.

Since Kanpur is not a metro or fancy place to live, it takes more than just technical aptitude to be here. That is some more strong reason f.ex. A desire to be part of a growing team, desire to be close to family, desire to contribute in the development of IT ecosystem in North and/or a desire to prove, hell yeah we can do great stuff from anywhere, even cities like Kanpur

If you think, you want to help me by being part of my team and understand what I meant above, please don’t hesitate to contact me on [abdul dot qabiz at gmail dot com] off-list i.e. Direct email to me, please don’t reply here on this list.

As far as job description goes, I have already given an idea. However, we are looking for someone who understands web very well that is HTTP and other standards. Fundamentally good at problem solving, the real world ones, ActionScript, Flex Framework, Adobe Flash Player and AIR fundamentals and APIs.

Of course, good experience that says about in your behalf. We would also talk to you so things would get clear, i.e. If we are match for each other.

If you want to know more about company, please check out http://www.alliesinteractive.com

I need a Adobe Flash CS4 Professional upgrade license because some projects need to be updated. I can not order online from India. I really don’t have time to seek a resellers help on this, I know it would take weeks to get the license.

I requested a friend in USA to buy it for me, he has been trying to do that but it seems Adobe store application, which is done in Flex, throws a lot of errors. A few things, which I have reported in past, like asking for exact address (line by line). In this case, I guess, store application requires the address even when you choose Paypal as payment option?

I don’t have exact details in hand now, but I can see my friend has been having trouble buying Flash CS4 on Adobe store. I know this friend of mine, he is a developer himself and very good at things, so I know,he is doing right, I would rather say, store-application is not done well. He has recently helped me getting a FlexBuilder 3 upgrade license and he had problems even then. It took two days and various attempts, perhaps a phone call also, to get that license.

No wonder, why people blame Flash Platform for lack of usability and accessibility, most of the times it’s the developers who don’t implement things correctly and platform gets a bad name.

I have also started feeling, why can’t stores have multiple options – I might want to choose simple html interface, if I am on mobile or slow connection?

Yet another frustration and my project is delayed by now. I could have bought license earlier, if I knew the requirements earlier.
I hope someday, Adobe and Apple would realize that they can help thousand of people like me, by just enabling online purchase, even if it takes order and makes me send cheque/bank-draft to them, if not credit-card/paypal integration.

I hope someday, these companies would realize that most of people in countries like India don’t have access to real stores/resellers in their cities or states. Yes, I happen to live in a city where it’s hard to get things, I have to travel, at least twelve hours (round-trip) for even simple purchase and with no certainty, I would get the stuff at the stores, whichever is there.

I hope, these companies help to reduce the piracy in India. I hope, these companies realize they can make people do the right by being more accessible to them.

I wonder, what is holding these companies? Is it sales guys who don’t want to have an online store? Is someone getting some favors from resellers?

I don’t get, why to have a middle man in this age, when an online store can enable a lot of users, not only buy but also have faster access to things.

I can not believe it’s tax issue or things like that, it’s lack of will to do. I am sure, there are other stores running well here in India.

Technorati Tags: adobe, store, error, flash, cs4, india

After a long time, I checked out Live Documents’ website and found they have released an Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) application called “Live Presentation”.

I couldn’t resist to check it out and hence started looking at it. I am impressed, it has neat user-interface though there is a room of improvement. Overall, Live Presentations is nicely done.

Technorati tags: live+presentations, air, office+suite, offline

I was at Flex User Group meeting in Bangalore. The room was full of developers, designers and managers interested in Adobe Flash Platform (Flex/Flash/AIR). I was, quietly, noticing things while various thoughts were going on in my mind.

I have been part of Flash (Platform) ecosystem for around nine years now. I remember old days of were-here, flashkit, flashcoders, flashcomm, flashlounge, indiammug, etc. I got to know some of great guys, who have inspired me in many ways.

I have seen Flash Platform evolving and probably know reasons why certain things (Royale – Flex, Central, etc) happened. It’s great to see, how businesses and developers/designers are embracing Flash Platform today. It’s great feeling that I belong to the batch who is among the oldest in my country and probably, this planet.

Those old days were fun, good to be among creative guys with amazing programming skills. We saw some great stuff (3d, chat, games, funky effects, nice apps, forms, etc) with limited capabilities of Flash 4.

It was amazing feeling, when I saw Flash 5 beta in Macromedia seminar in year 2000. I could see the expressions (wow) on everyone’s face and the excitement after seeing something – Flash 5 (amazing tool, ActionScript 1.0, XMLSocket, XML, Objects, etc).

Today is a big day, I am again witnessing something (AIR 1.0 release). I am equally excited, as I was during Flash 5 release. Honestly, I was more excited then because things were not that open, you would get to know about a product’s next version during some event or leaked information from few beta-testers, unlike today where prerelease cycles allows us to play with product/tool even before it’s released. But you get this feeling, you are part of product development, which was not there (for everyone).

I am sure, when I would look back after some years, I would feel more proud and happy for being part of an ecosystem and this community. I believe, success of Flash, Flex and AIR is result of the beliefs of thousands of developers and designers, who were always passionately involved, even in various up-down times. Times when your identity as a developer was questioned, because you were working with Flash, but hey who cares about what someone says, if you are in love with something.

It was hard to get a project or job with this skill-set, at-least in India. Even today, many companies are blind enough not to see how cool Flash Platfom is, but it’s lot easier now to convince them compared to what it used to be then.

Many religious and emotional developers, like me, who would fight or do anything to prove that Flash (meant: SWF, Player, ActionScript or technology in general) is the best. I have grown up now, probably different phase of life, I focus on products, ideas, users more now, but I am still in love with ActionScript and Flash Player.

Thanks to Macromedia/Adobe for listening and interacting us (developers/designers) in all possible ways (blogs, forums, mailing-lists, etc).
An old link (http://macromedia.com/into) still works. People talking about how Flash changed their lives, I am also somewhere in there

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

Sabeer Bhatia, one of the guys behind Hotmail, has been working on Live Documents, which has been announced a couple of days back. Live Documents is an office-suite for web and desktop (AIR?).

It is interesting to see, Live Documents chose to use Adobe Flash/Flex as front-end technology.

I read Zoho guys on Flash, I understand, it makes sense to use a technology that doesn’t have dependencies, easy to develop with, saves time, provides better experience to user and good for business. If Zoho guys think, they are achieving these goals with technologies of their choice, it’s totally fine. I would love to see how they respond to Live Documents release.

But hey, there are some (Live Documents, Buzzword, SlideRocket etc) which think Flash/Flex is cool (faster to develop, easier to use, consistent experience and better for business).

Technorati Tags: live documents, instacoll, zoho, office, suite, online, web, sabeer bhatia, flash, flex, air, india

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

I have compiled a list of sites, mailing-list and bloggers from India. Most of them blog about Flash, Flex, RIA Usability, Web 2.0 etc.

Website/groups:-

• iGeeks – website for Adobe User Group, India
• iGeeks Yahoo! group – on Adobe technologies.
• RIA-India Yahoo! group – on Rich Internet Application in-general.
• Flex India Google group - on Adobe Flex.
• Indian Adobe Mobile & Devices User Group – FlashLite

Blogs:-

• Anjali
• Anupam
• Arpit
• Arul Kumaran
• Arul Prasad
• Brajeshwar
• Debabrataa
• Deepak
• Durairaj
• Elango
• Flexed
• Jyoti Kishnani
• Krishna Prathab
• Manish Jethani
• Mariam (FlashLite)
• Mrinal Wadhwa
• Owas Bhat
• Prakash
• Raghu
• Rajesh Bhadra
• Rama
• Ritesh
• Rohan
• Shilpi Bharara
• Subramanian Sundaram
• Suketu Vyas
• Vijayram
• Vishwajit
• Vivek (FlashLite)

Above list is partial. If I have missed something, please feel free to leave the URL (of blog, site, mailing-lists etc) in the comment. I would update the list.

If you are Adobe Flex developer, you might want to register on International Registry of Flexcoders.

Technorati tags: flexcoders, flash, developers, blog, india

On flexcoders, someone asked, how to get the URL parameters in a Flex 2.0 application? By URL parameter, I mean the query-string variables, as shown below:

http://yourserver/yourapp.swf?name=Joe&age=22 or http://yourserver/yourapp.mxml?name=Joe&age=22

Note: To get the variables in flex via mxml file, you need server-side compilation of mxml files.

You can get the values of the params using from

mx.core.Application.application.parameters

object, which contains the name-value pairs (hash-map).

For example,

mx.core.Application.application.parameters.name

would return “Joe”, considering above example URL. You can find more information about this in livedocs: http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flex/20beta1/docs/00001300.html

Then someone asked, what if your swf is embedded in custom html wrapper, how to get the query-string params inside swf?

Most of us use ExternalInterface class in Macromedia Flash Player 8(onwards) to invoke some JavaScript functions and extract the value in ActionScript.

I wrote a quick-and-dirty class in ActionScript 3, which would get the values of params from URL query-string for you. You don’t need any extra JavaScript code in HTML. The same logic can be used for any an ActionScript 2.0 running Macromedia Flash Player 8.
QueryString class has following properties:-

• parameters – an Object which contains the name-value pairs from query-string
• queryString- String, this contains the entire query-string (url-encoded) name-value pairs.
• url- String, this returns the complete URL of the wrapper page with query-string.

See demo
Download source files