On a project I’m working on, I need to have semi-transparent containers to hold controls over top of screen-filling bright and colorful background. While I’m not 100% satisfied with it, I think it will suffice for the time being.
I was originally going for an effect similar to the window borders in Windows 7 where the background image is blurred when viewed through the glass. I couldn’t find an easy way to do that effect in Flex 4. If you know of a way, please comment below.
This summer, my two children have expressed an interest in learning about what daddy does. I’ve never taught kids to program before, but I wanted to share what we’ve been working on so far.
The first thing that we did was find good logic computer games to work on. The best I’ve found so far is lightbot. You give a little robot commands and even call functions to tell him how to move and light up tiles. The downside to this game is that it gets challenging very fast. First and second graders can’t really handle nested loops too well when starting out.
http://armorgames.com/play/2205/light-bot
After some experience with lightbot, we were able to translate some of those concepts directly into the KTurtle environment on Edubuntu linux. KTurtle is a graphical drawing program that moves a pen (the turtle) around a canvas. You move the turtle by issuing text commands such as “forward 100″ and “turnright 90″. I’ve given the kids some challenges to work toward on our white-board. For anything that required a bit of trig and the Pythagorean theorem, I gave them the numbers.
How do you teach kids to program? What suggestions do you have for me?
In order to debug on your new HTC Incredible smartphone on Windows 7, you need to install USB drivers from Google. Well, it turns out that the phone is too new for Google to have included support for the Incredible in their driver package. Here is how I got it all working though. It may or may not work for you.
1.) Install the Android SDK and download the USB drivers into a folder inside your SDK as Google tells you to do. My drivers ended up in C:\android-sdk-windows\usb_driver
2.) You next need to hack the file android_winusb.inf to add support for the HTC Incredible.
Find the section labeled [Google.NTx86]. At the end of that section, add the following lines.
Find the section [Google.NTamd64]. At the end of that section, add the following lines.
On your Incredible, go to Settings->Applications->Development and turn on USB debugging. NOW, you can connect your phone to the PC.
On your PC, Go to Start->Right-Click My Computer->Manage
You should see a device with a warning on it called Other->ADB. Right-click it and choose Update Driver Software… Install the drivers manually and point that to your usb_drivers folder. Ignore any warnings about unsigned drivers and everything should install just fine. After installation, I see Android Phone->Android Composite ADB Interface in the Device Manager.
After that, I went to the cmd prompt and typed
I recently had an opportunity to give a talk at 360|Flex along with Randy Troppmann. Slides and code examples are posted below. Video of the session will come sometime in the unforeseen future as they have many hours of other sessions to post-process before getting to mine.
Presentation PDF (warning: large)
MileageBuddy (viewsrc enabled)
I had the privilege of speaking to the Indy Flex User Group last night on the topic of Degrafa. While I’m not one of the architects or contributors to the project, I do make extensive use of Degrafa in most of my personal and consulting development work. Below is presentation material and example code I used during the presentation. All the examples have view-source enabled. Just right-click.
Presentation:
Degrafa_IndyFlex_User_Group.pdf
Simple Circle Example:
DegrafaExample1
Button Skinning Example:
DegrafaExample2
Component Development Speedometer Example:
DegrafaExample3
Axiis Example:
Smith Chart Example
ChromaPassword FXG Example:
ChromaPassword
MiniShapeDesigner Example (note, not mine):
MiniShapeDesigner
I’m slated to speak at 360|Flex San Jose on March 7-10 on the topic of GPS data and doing neat things with it in Flex/AIR. I’ll be co-presenting along with Randy Troppmann. Randy had been doing work for quite awhile in the GPS space with his work on runningmap.com. Runningmap.com is a website that allows runners/walkers/joggers/movers to track and catalog their accomplishments. They’ve also developed an iPhone application that can record your gps track as you run. It’s quite an honor to be able to present with such an accomplished developer.
I’ve been holding off on doing a blog post about 360|Flex until I could give you a sneak peak of the new prototypes of Swift GPS. Swift GPS is a wearable hardware device that will allow you to record GPX files to a USB thumbdrive that tracks your current position and movement. During my part of this session, we’ll go into how to take this GPX data and do neat things with it in Flex like overlay the data onto a 3D map. Other highlights will be doing a bit of heat-mapping using the GPS data.
This conference WILL SELL OUT, so don’t be one of the hundreds of chumps posting regrets to your twitter account after the conference starts and you didn’t get in. Click on my 360|Flex badge on the right-side of the blog to sign up today. If I win the speaker suite for the most signups through my blog badge, I’ll give away a prototype device to one of the people who helped put me over the top. Don’t wait. Sign up today.
If you followed my previous post, you know I dug into some serious networking in order to get myself some static IP addresses. As of today, FlexJunk has officially become self-hosted. Since fixing the IP issues, I’ve built a new server box to house flexjunk.com. I had never built a rack-mount system, so this was my first foray into that arena.
Specs:
Ubuntu Server 9.10 64-bit OS
IStarUSA WO2-15B 15U Open Frame Rack
ARK 4U-500-CA Black Rackmount case
Intel Core i7 2.66GHz
12GB DDR3 1600 Ram
6x Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 80gb drives (RAID 5)
I recently purchased a block of 8 Static IP addresses for use with my U-Verse plan. U-Verse has always been a very stable and reliable ISP for me the last two years and their price of $15/month was pretty good so I jumped. This gives me 5 usable IPs that I can use to host various websites.
I want to host websites on a machine on my internal LAN in the 192.168.x.x block, but use port forwarding on my firewall so that port 80 can be sent on through. The reason for this is mostly so that I can access the server machine on the internal LAN, host print servers, etc… while still using it as a secured internet webserver.
Normally, ISPs give you a block of IP addresses, you assign them in your router and send them on where you want to go. Not so with U-Verse. Each static IP is actually dynamically assigned via DHCP from the U-Verse gateway router box. Each IP address pulled dynamically off the gateway MUST have a different mac address. Unfortunately, most off the shelf firewall routers don’t support this capability. They have one, maybe two, mac addresses that they use. Normally, the uplink port has a single mac address that it pulls a dhcp ip address from.
I’m using a D-Link DIR-615 rev. C that I had laying around and noticed that OpenWRT listed it as a supported device. OpenWRT is custom firmware flash for routers that runs a small version of the Linux operating system on it. I figured if I could get Linux running on the device, then I’d be able to accomplish what I wanted…namely, pull all 5 usable IP addresses off the U-Verse gateway, and forward certain traffic on a per-IP/port basis to particular internal LAN machines.
I first downloaded an OpenWRT package (http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-dir-615-c1-squashfs.uni) for my router. I then held in the reset switch for 30 seconds while plugging in the power. This puts the router into recovery mode. I manually set my computer’s ip address to 192.168.0.2 and navigated to http://192.168.0.1 which brings up the recovery flash page of router where I could apply the .uni flash file for OpenWRT.
I reset my computer’s ip to dynamic and restarted the router. After all the lights stopped blinking, made sure I had a valid 192.168.1.x IP address and did
telnet 192.168.1.1
This brought me up to the linux shell of the router. I ran the passwd command to set my root password for the device and then exited the shell. Once the password for root is set, telnet becomes disabled, but SSH is enabled. I then used putty to connect to 192.168.1.1 again.
Next, I installed the packages ip and kmod-macvlan. These packages allow you to create virtual ethX adapters with separate mac addresses.
I modified /etc/rc.local to create the virtual adapters.
eth0 is my local LAN interface. eth1 is my main outgoing public internet interface. eth2-6 are virtual macvlan interfaces that will each hold one of the static ip addresses. I also modified the file /etc/config/network so that the new virtual adapters would be included in dhcp setup.
I made sure to set the gateway option on all of the virtual adapters to 0.0.0.0 so that the regular default gateway of eth1 would be used instead of the static IP default gateways.
After re-booting the router, I navigated to the U-Verse gateway and configured each of my new mac addresses so they mapped to the static IP addresses instead of internal 10.0.0.x ones.
After rebooting the router one last time, I now had all of my static IPs assigned on the router and could install and utilize the LuCI interface for configuring routing and port forwarding.
GraniteDS is a free and open source (LGPL’d) alternative to Adobe® LiveCycle® (Flex™ 2+) Data Services for Java EE application servers. Java Message Service (JMS) is a technology designed for handling real-time Publish/Subscribe architectures of which Apache ActiveMQ is an implementer.
By default, the GraniteDS messaging architecture (called Gravity) uses its own internal simple Publish/Subscribe infrastructure. This works great if your front-end only needs to worry about handling clients from Adobe Flex, but what about if you need to send messages from other back end processes and have your flex app update in real-time?
The GraniteDS download package ships with a good example called graniteds_chat. It demonstrates a simple chat application between two or more Flex clients using the built-in Publish/Subscribe architecture of GraniteDS’s Gravity component. My goal is to use this example, but replace the default GraniteDS architecture with the more robust ActiveMQ architecture running in a separate process.
The reasons for doing so are several. First, ActiveMQ can handle persistent messaging. If my server crashes for some reason, I won’t lose messages that were currently in the queues/topics. Secondly, I want to demonstrate running ActiveMQ in a separate process. GraniteDS already has an Embedded ActiveMQ example on their wiki where it loads and runs inside the Tomcat container. I want to break it out as a completely separate process. This gives me additional future scalability if I need to run ActiveMQ on a different box entirely, or setup a multi-machine JMS infrastructure.
First, download the latest package of GraniteDS. Extract out the folder structure, and modify any of the env.properties file to point to your installed Flex SDK. My env.properties inside graniteds/examples/graniteds_chat looks like this:
#==============================================================================
# Granite Data Services Examples build properties (http://www.graniteds.org).
#==============================================================================
# Set 'FLEX_HOME' property to your flex3 sdk installation directory and
# 'FLEX_TASKS_JAR' to your flexTasks.jar location.
FLEX_HOME=C:/Program Files (x86)/Adobe/Flex Builder 3 Plug-in/sdks/3.4.0.9271
FLEX_TASKS_JAR=${FLEX_HOME}/ant/lib/flexTasks.jar
# Set 'SERVER_HOME' property to your JBoss installation directory and
# 'SERVER_HOME_DEPLOY' to your JBoss deploy directory.
#SERVER_HOME=/jboss-4.2.3.GA
#SERVER_HOME_DEPLOY=${SERVER_HOME}/server/default/deploy
# Alternatively, set 'SERVER_HOME' property to your Tomcat installation
# directory and 'SERVER_HOME_DEPLOY' to your Tomcat deploy directory.
SERVER_HOME=C:/apache-tomcat-6.0.16
SERVER_HOME_DEPLOY=${SERVER_HOME}/webapps
Next, run ANT inside the graniteds_chat folder. It will pick up everything that needs to be compiled from the parent folders and deploy a war package to your local tomcat installation. Before starting tomcat and watching the default chat example in action, you’ll first have to modify Tomcat a bit so that it can support non-blocking IO. GraniteDS recommends using either the HTTP APR or the NIO connector in Tomcat to enable non-blocking IO. For our purposes, we’ll use the NIO connector for Tomcat. Inside the Tomcat conf folder, edit server.xml and look for a line like the following:
<Connector port="8080"
protocol="HTTP/1.1"
connectionTimeout="20000"
redirectPort="8443" />
Modify this section so that Tomcat can use the NIO Http connector.
<Connector port="8080"
protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol"
connectionTimeout="20000"
redirectPort="8443" />
After that change is complete, start Tomcat and navigate with two separate browsers to http://localhost:8080/graniteds-chat. Login with separate usernames and make sure that you can chat successfully between the two browsers. You should see something like the following:
Next, let’s go about integrating ActiveMQ. Download and install ActiveMQ in its own folder. Browse to the bin folder and run activemq.bat. This should be all we need to do on the ActiveMQ side of things. Next, we need to configure GraniteDS to talk to ActiveMQ via JMS instead of its internal messaging architecture.
Stop Tomcat and drill into the installed chat application and modify services-config.xml. Mine is located at C:/apache-tomcat-6.0.16/webapps/graniteds-chat/WEB-INF/flex/services-config.xml. Before editing, you’ll notice that it’s using its own internal SimpleServiceAdapter.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--
GRANITE DATA SERVICES
Copyright (C) 2007-2008 ADEQUATE SYSTEMS SARL
This file is part of Granite Data Services.
Granite Data Services is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version.
Granite Data Services is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License
for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
along with this library; if not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-->
<services-config>
<services>
<service id="messaging-service"
class="flex.messaging.services.MessagingService"
messageTypes="flex.messaging.messages.AsyncMessage">
<adapters>
<adapter-definition id="default" class="org.granite.gravity.adapters.SimpleServiceAdapter" default="true"/>
</adapters>
<destination id="gravity">
<channels>
<channel ref="my-gravityamf"/>
</channels>
</destination>
</service>
</services>
<channels>
<channel-definition id="my-gravityamf" class="org.granite.gravity.channels.GravityChannel">
<endpoint
uri="http://{server.name}:{server.port}/{context.root}/gravity/amf"
class="flex.messaging.endpoints.AMFEndpoint"/>
</channel-definition>
</channels>
</services-config>
You’re going to want to modify this services-config.xml file so that it uses ActiveMQ and the JMS Adapter.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--
GRANITE DATA SERVICES
Copyright (C) 2007-2008 ADEQUATE SYSTEMS SARL
This file is part of Granite Data Services.
Granite Data Services is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version.
Granite Data Services is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License
for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
along with this library; if not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-->
<services-config>
<services>
<service id="messaging-service"
class="flex.messaging.services.MessagingService"
messageTypes="flex.messaging.messages.AsyncMessage">
<adapters>
<adapter-definition id="default" class="org.granite.gravity.adapters.JMSServiceAdapter" default="true"/>
</adapters>
<destination id="gravity">
<channels>
<channel ref="my-gravityamf"/>
</channels>
<properties>
<jms>
<destination-type>Topic</destination-type>
<connection-factory>java:comp/env/jms/flex/TopicConnectionFactory</connection-factory>
<destination-jndi-name>java:comp/env/jms/discussion</destination-jndi-name>
<destination-name>discussion</destination-name>
<acknowledge-mode>AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE</acknowledge-mode>
<transacted-sessions>false</transacted-sessions>
<!--
JNDI environment. Specify the external JNDI configuration to
access a remote JMS provider.
-->
<initial-context-environment>
<property>
<name>Context.PROVIDER_URL</name>
<value>tcp://localhost:61616</value>
</property>
<property>
<name>Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY</name>
<value>org.apache.activemq.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory</value>
</property>
</initial-context-environment>
</jms>
</properties>
</destination>
</service>
</services>
<channels>
<channel-definition id="my-gravityamf" class="org.granite.gravity.channels.GravityChannel">
<endpoint
uri="http://{server.name}:{server.port}/{context.root}/gravity/amf"
class="flex.messaging.endpoints.AMFEndpoint"/>
</channel-definition>
</channels>
</services-config>
You may have noticed that the GraniteDS JMSServiceAdapter uses JNDI to find and connect to JMS. Since Tomcat has a valid JNDI container, let’s define the necessary info in Tomcat. You can add the JNDI info inside tomcat’s conf/context.xml file.
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<!--
Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
(the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.
-->
<!-- The contents of this file will be loaded for each web application -->
<Context>
<!-- Default set of monitored resources -->
<WatchedResource>WEB-INF/web.xml</WatchedResource>
<!-- Uncomment this to disable session persistence across Tomcat restarts -->
<!--
<Manager pathname="" />
-->
<!-- Uncomment this to enable Comet connection tacking (provides events
on session expiration as well as webapp lifecycle) -->
<!--
<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.CometConnectionManagerValve" />
-->
<Resource name="jms/flex/TopicConnectionFactory"
type="org.apache.activemq.ActiveMQConnectionFactory"
description="JMS Connection Factory"
factory="org.apache.activemq.jndi.JNDIReferenceFactory"
brokerURL="tcp://localhost:61616"
brokerName="activeMQBroker" />
<Resource name="jms/discussion"
type="org.apache.activemq.command.ActiveMQTopic"
description="Discussion topic for GraniteDS"
factory="org.apache.activemq.jndi.JNDIReferenceFactory"
physicalName="discussion" />
</Context>
Finally, copy activemq-all-5.3.0.jar from your ActiveMQ install folder to apache-tomcat-6.0.16/webapps/graniteds-chat/WEB-INF/lib. This will ensure that JNDI has access to the ActiveMQ classes it needs to communicate to the ActiveMQ JMS broker. Start tomcat and refresh your two browser windows running the chat application. Send a few messages back and forth to ensure everything is working.
Now, we need to prove to ourselves that messages are indeed going through ActiveMQ and not just through GraniteDS. Open a new browser tab to the ActiveMQ monitor page http://localhost:8161/admin/topics.jsp . Make sure that the topic "discussion" exists and has some enqueued and dequeued messages.
If you really want to test out the system, create a simple Java program that can send a JMS message to ActiveMQ. Make sure the resulting message ends up in your Flex app.
import javax.jms.Connection;
import javax.jms.Message;
import javax.jms.MessageProducer;
import javax.jms.Session;
import javax.jms.Topic;
import org.apache.activemq.ActiveMQConnectionFactory;
public class ChatTest
{
/**
* @param args
*/
public static void main(String[] args)
{
try
{
ActiveMQConnectionFactory connectionFactory = new ActiveMQConnectionFactory("tcp://localhost:61616");
Connection connection = connectionFactory.createTopicConnection();
Session session = connection.createSession(false, Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE);
// create our request and response queues
Topic topic = session.createTopic("discussion");
// and attach a producer to the topic
MessageProducer producer = session.createProducer(topic);
// and start your engines...
connection.start();
// now send our test JMS message
Message message = session.createObjectMessage(new String("Hello from JMS"));
producer.send(message);
//sleep a bit to make sure our message sent ok
Thread.sleep(10000);
session.close();
connection.close();
System.out.println("Sent message ok");
}
catch (Throwable e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
The new Flex 3.4 SDK has been released. Since Adobe still hasn’t gotten around to fixing this bug, I’ve again taken it upon myself to release my MonkeyPatched code for Flex 3.4 that allows you to use the Flex DragManager along side the Native DragManager in an AIR app. You can grab the code from SVN from my google code site.