In this 90-min hands-on lab you will be building data-driven front ends that connect to either PHP, Java or ColdFusion … yeah we prepared materials for all these back-ends. I can’t wait to see how this will work live.

Plus you will add some advanced pieces of functionality like paging through large record-sets and client-side data management. If I got you interested then you can already  book your place in the room using Adobe MAX scheduler.

And if you have not registered yet for MAX, please take a look at the following two entries from Andrew Shorten and Serge Jespers. There are great discounts available!!!

And I wasn’t wrong. After just two hours since their first encounter with the PixelBender language and PixelBender Toolkit here is what they did with my poor face … using only numerical algorithms that PixelBender runs in parallel:

You can take a look at the PixelBender kernels here.

The first question that I asked myself was: Why wasn’t the browser enough for them? Why do you need a desktop app for viewing some pictures and text?

Then something popped into my head. I asked myself: When do I read the newspaper? Well, I read the news in the metro, when waiting in line for something, when sitting on the … well toilet … and sometimes on weekend mornings while still in bed. Except for the weekend mornings (when I read it on my laptop) at all other times I use a mobile device. And the experience on the mobile device is less than stellar.

Now one thing that I immediately noticed about TimesReader was how easy it is to navigate and how nice it resizes (The resize is way tooooo cool). And that is when ‘that something’ popped into my head: This is perfect for devices that are NOT standard PCs. I mean it is cool for PCs too but it might not justify the effort when the browser might be good enough (except that you can also download a week’s worth of content and read it offline). But if you have something that you can hold in your hand and read it on the metro, this kind of interaction is just PERFECT.

I think this piece of software could be the beginning of a revolution. If you take this reader, add reasonable cheap tablet PCs or capable phones and a runtime that can run consistently on all these hardware … well it sounds like a revolutionary way to deliver a newspaper in a digital way. (I know Adobe AIR is not yet on my phone, but I urge the engineers to hurry up). Why? Because this way a digital newspaper can really pass the hardest test of all: Can you read it easily when sitting on the toilet?

So if you think that you’re a black belt programmer then come and measure your Kung Fu skills against Flex Framework bugs (yeah you can do this because Flex is an Open Source framework). Killing these bugs does not harm the environment and the entire Flex community will benefit.

So on the 17th of may we will attack them again in an organized manner. You can participate from wherever your are. Find more about the Bug Quash at bugquash.com.

So now the state of the application needs to move between Flex and AIR and it would be nice if you could move the server session from the browser application to AIR.

For this example I will use PHP as a server side technology but it will work very similar for other server technologies as well. Basically I want to:

• get the session ID/cookie in the Flex Application
• send it over to the AIR application
• use the session ID in the AIR application to make requests that will access the same session as in the browser

Getting the session ID in the Flex Application

First I need to get the the session ID from the Flex App. One simple way to do that is to just grab the whole cookies string. This can be done through the ExternalInterface mechanism. So I inject a little JavaScript function that gets the cookies string from the browser and then call it:

ExternalInterface.call('eval','window.cookieStr = function () {return document.cookie};')
var cookieStr:String = ExternalInterface.call('cookieStr');

Communicating with the AIR App

To communicate with the AIR app I use LocalConnection. In the AIR app I register to an inbound connection:

var inbound:LocalConnection = new LocalConnection();
inbound.allowDomain('localhost');
inbound.client = new Object();
inbound.client.notifyMe = function (cookieStr:String):void {
    //add Code here to use the Cookie String
}
inbound.connect("session");

and in the Flex App I register to an outbound connection and call the notifyMe() function

outbound.connect("session");
outbound.send("app#phpSessionAIR:session","notifyMe",cookieStr);
//outbound.send("app#phpSessionAIR.F0B3F68E1857B8A07069FED1D0638CAF200F76EB.1:session","notifyMe",cookieStr);
outbound.close(); 

Please notice that when launching from Flex Builder, the AIR Application has no Publisher ID so the connection name is “app#phpSessionAIR:session”. After packaging and installation, the AIR app will get a Publisher ID and the connection name will be something like this: app#phpSessionAIR.F0B3F68E1857B8A07069FED1D0638CAF200F76EB.1:session

You can get the publisher ID of the installed AIR App by looking into META-INF/AIR/publisherid file within the application install directory.

Use the session id in the Air App

Now all that remains to be done is to use the cookies string when making the next request from the AIR app:

var myService:HTTPService = new HTTPService();
myService.url = "http://localhost/phpSessionFlex/sessionGet.php";
myService.headers.Cookie = cookieStr;
myService.send();

Here are the source files for the AIR and the Flex App

So she did that! And it’s going to take place on 19 May at Hotel Intercontinental. Here is the schedule (it might change a little but not too much):

Oh … and there’s more. We have some bootcamps (you can call them hands on seminars if you like) also:

Ah … still more, Digby Horner, the man who was behind the InterAKT acquisition and the opening of the Romanian campus will be there too. And also some guys from management, they call themselves “upper management”. And they are open for questions about our campus too.

I hope you are convinced by now to book 19 May for Adobe Developer Day.

Here’s a lovely picture with me and Mihai.

Make your own picture here. You can download the sources here.

I personally believe that this is unacceptable way of doing business.

Because of that it might take some time to get all the posts back (we have some back-ups and long live Google Cache). If anyone lived that before and solved (without paying a ton of money to GoDaddy) … or can help us in some way we would be more that grateful!

You can see a more romanced post at Mihai’s Blog as he dealt with them on the phone.