Christoph Rooms

The Dutch Flex user group - Flugr - is doing great and organizing their first event on June 13. For the first meeting they’ve got a few interesting speakers : Stephan Janssens (parleys.com), Benjamin Dobbler (parleys.com), Nicolas Lierman (Google AIR app)  and Christophe Herremans (Prana framework).  Check out the details on flugr.nl and looking forward to meet you guys there ! 

Mark van Hedel has joined the blogosphere with his blog on Flex, Air, Blaze & Coldfusion. Mark is a consultant and he’s also a trainer working for prisma-it … one of the Adobe training partners. Check out his blog ! 

This releases has got some great improvements on performance of the messaging platform and now support Flex 3 SDK and Flex 3 Builder … You’ll notice the SDK isn’t any longer default installed at the server side … which is a good thing. Best practice should be anyway that you compile the swf on the client. 

You can see a list of new features + download at Adobe Labs.  

The prerelease of the new version of the LC ES is available on the LiveCycle developer center. One of the most impressive new features is that you can now debug your processes by using record and playback. It allows you to run through a recorded process step by step,  and evaluate process variabeles for each step … Huge improvement !

The Adobe onAIR tour is coming to Brussels on April 7th ! It’s a great way to get your mind “upgraded” to support Adobe Flex 3 and AIR. 

Looking forward to see you there !

ps : You probably already heared but MAX is coming back to Europe, this year we’ll have MAX Europe in Milan (Italy) early December.  

Got this question last week and found out you can get the windows user information into your Flex application. I’m not sure why you would wanna do this But just for anyone trying to figure this out … here is how to do it.

Through javascript you can get the user Id (This only works through Internet Explore !), so by using ExternalInterface in Flex you can call the javascript function that will get you the user id.

So first you wanna add the javascript to your index.template.html (in html-template folder of your flex builder project). Add the script to the script tag just below the body tag.

var wshShell = new ActiveXObject(”WScript.Shell”);
function getUserName()
{
return wshShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings(”%USERNAME%”);
} 

Then you can add to your MXML application this code to get the user id …

           try {
                    var name:String = ExternalInterface.call(’getUserName’);
                    Alert.show(”name = ” + name);
                } catch (error:SecurityError) {
                    Alert.show(”A SecurityError occurred: ” + error.message + “\n”);
                } catch (error:Error) {
                    Alert.show(”An Error occurred: ” + error.message + “\n”);
                }
            } else {
                Alert.show(”External interface is not available for this container.”);
            }

 } 

 So as I said … it will only work on Internet Explore. Through the wshShell object you can also get the domainname if needed.

It’s that time of the year again ! Javapolis is up in 4 weeks and Adobe will be attending again ! The exiting news is that one of the keynotes will discuss the use of Flex with Java. Besides that you can see Flex/AIR in a universtity session, a conference session, 2 quickies and 1 BOF session.

We’ll also have some Flex specialist at Adobe booth : James Ward, Christophe Coenraets, Marc Meewis and me. We also have invited Bruce Eckel to talk about his view on Flex and Java.

Ofcourse we’ll also try to have some fun by organizing the “Adobe Quest” … A cool way to get your hands on some cool Adobe gadgets … More on this later on …

And … just like last year I have 2 full conference passes to give away … How to win ? Post a comment to this item and tell me why you think Java and Flex/AIR are the perfect couple … The 2 most original posts will win a conference pass.

See you at Javapolis ? I’m looking forward to it !

Persons that did attend the Bootcamp session at Max probably have seen this component. It’s a Livecycle ES component that will allow you to upload a file to your Adobe Share account.

So Livecycle ES has got an orchestration tool that allows you to build functionality by linking ”services” together. Each services stands for a specific piece of functionality. The product comes with a library of these services. (Generate PDF, Secure PDF, Read LDAP info, Send email, SQL, …) Livecycle ES Workbench, a tool build on top of eclipse, allows you to draw the orchestration in and configure it.  

By building a custom components you can extend the Livecycle ES functionality by creating your own services. A custom component is a Jar file that excist out of a java object, a configuration file and an icon which defines the visual representation in the Workbench. I have created the LC ES Share component, by building a java object that would call the Share Java API.
After writing the component, the component developer would hand over the Jar file to the Livecycle ES administrator so it can be deployed into the Livecycle ES platform. After deployement, it will become available as a service and will be visible in the Workbench. From this moment on you can drag and drop the service into the orchestration you would be building.

The image above shows a sample orchestration. In this orchestration I will first generate a PDF file, then I’ll upload it to Adobe Share and finally I send out an email with the notification. The Generate PDF and the email component are in the LC ES product, the Adobe Share component is the one I have build.

You would configer the Adobe Share component by defining it’s properties in the UI. Check out the screenshot below. The fields I have to define here, are the same as defined in my java object and configured in the xml configuration file.

Another advantage of the Livecycle ES platform is, that from the moment i deploy my Adobe Share component, it will not only become available as a service to my orchestration designer.The service containerr also automatically makes the functionality availabe as a SOAP service, EJB service and a Remoting endpoint. The Remoting endpoint allows you to interact with this piece of functionality from with a Flex application.
You can even add watched folders or email endpoints, to make the Share functionality available when dropping a file in a folder or receiving a file by email. Find more information on the service container in the Livecycle documentation. 

I have made the source available, and also the component which you can deploy directly into your LC ES platform. Find here how to deploy components. You can download Livecycle ES trial version if you don’t have it installed yet.

One nice extra  is that I added an ANT build file to the source,  that will build the java source, create the jar file and deploys it automatically to the Livecycle ES platform as discussed in this post.

Arrived in Barcelona yesterday … First night here wasn’t great fun … Had to finish up one of the presentations i was doing …

The Share guys have released Java and Actionscript API’s. So i guess it’s not going to take a long time now before we get the first  drag and drop Share application I’ll try to make a Livecycle component that connect to share, using the Java API.

Back to Max now … First session done, went pretty well … and had a full room. Let’s go we’ll keep this up ;). I have been taking some pictures with my new camera … I got a Canon Ixus 860 IS and am pretty happy with it … i’ll post some of the Max pictures so you can judge for yourself.

Back to Max now …

At Max Barcelona we will host a Livecycle ES Bootcamp session. In the bootcamp session a number of product specialist and Livecycle developers can share experiences, code samples, best practices, etc … So it’s a great session for every Livecycle developer to get to share and learn together with the community.

The way it’s setup for Barcelona is that a number of Adobe LS ES product specialist will spend the first 1.5  hour presenting a number of topics we’ll prepare. The audience can choose 3 sessions out of a list of 6 sessions … You’ll be able to choose from :

• Integrating Flex with Adobe Livecycle
• Using Events in LC ES Process management
• Customizing LC Workspace
• Building custom components
• End points in LC ES
• Prepopulate a form in LC ES Workspace

The last hour we’ll go into an interactive mode which means we’ll have 2 options …

• Have you guys present stuff you have build on top of LC ES.
• Answering specific “how-to” questions from the audience.

I’m sure this will not only be a great knowledge share opportunity, but also a great way to get to know some of the LC ES specialist in EMEA.

We are looking forward to meet you guys !