Christoph Rooms

The Benelux Presales team is starting from June on with the “dr Flex & dr LiveCycle” events. The idea is to be available 1 day a month for general questions on Adobe LiveCycle ES and Adobe Flex. It’s not about answering typical support questions, but to give advice on general questions like how to implement Adobe LiveCycle and Flex into an enterprise architecture.  

“During these sessions “Dr Flex & Dr LiveCycle”, observe your common Flex & LC symptoms. They advise on how to implement Adobe Enterprise Software and work in a healthy IT environment by giving you a FREE ‘health check’ session.” 

They also setup a blog where they will post all questions and answers so the community can benefit from this iniative ! Check it out : http://www.drflex.eu

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 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 …

So if you are coming to Max Barcelona, prepare yourself for 3 days of great content and networking

Here is a list of some sessions i saw in Chicago and certainly can recommend :

• Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) Security by Lucas Adamski : Great technical session that explains what’s the security model for AIR, but also will give you an insight on the why.
• Flex Roadmap by Ely Greenfield : Get some insight in the Flex teams brains … It was interesting to see what might be the next steps …
• Fifty Reasons Why ActionScript 3 Rocks by Grant Skinner : Very technical but certainly not boring
• Optimizing Search for Rich Internet Applications by Craig Hordlow : A question that pops ups quite a lot … Craig tells you what approach to take, and also will give you background on why to take that approach.

A session which is new for Barcelona is the “Flex/AIR & Java integration for Parleys.com” case study by Stephan Janssen. This one is interesting if you are a Java developer. Stephan is the founder of the Javapolis conference.

I’ll be presenting these 2 sessions :

• Hands On: Building an Application Using LiveCycle ES
• Advanced LiveCycle Data Services for Flex Developers

And also will be hosting the “Livecycle Bootcamp”.

I’m certainly looking forward to meet you all ! Don’t hesitate to ping me or say hello

ps : only 18 registrations away from sold out … so you might need to hurry up if you haven’t subscribed yet