One word: cooperation.
This was the lait motif of this Adobe Max conference held in Milan this year.

The Adobe strategy is to create just one big set of tools (software) for designers and developers, that will really help them to be fast and effective doing their job. That’s why software as Illustrator, InDesign really talk to each other now. The new Adobe CS4 collections have inside everything we need to create 2d, 3d, video, animation projects. But the really good news is that designer and developer will really work together in the future and this is a big thing, believe me!:)

Adobe new technologies will help to fill the gap between the two worlds, with Flash Catalyst and Flex Gumbo designers and developers can create RIA with a different approach and this will streamline the project workflow. Designers can now create an entire interface using Illustrator, Photoshop or Fireworks and import the project into Flash Catalyst, so that every single element will be part of the skin and it can be customized with all possible effects. The generated code can be easily modified by a developer, they will have FXG file in common to work with. Flash Catalyst is only a preview version, but we can already use it to simplify the skinning procedure in our projects and to start to really coop with developers speaking a common language, so let’s try!

Another big thing was the use some company did of Adobe Air technology to reinforce a brand of a client creating animated widgets, the idea is that those widgets can implement a website traffic bringing contacts to it. A widgets must be more like a game you can play with and it has to be really good looking, that’s why icons, effects, colors and graphics in general play a key role in creating an Air application that people will want to install on their desktop and use constantly.

It has been a nice surprise to find out that 3D tools now are even inside Photoshop and Flash and that they are working more and more as they do inside 3d software, so a designer can create really nice graphics and effects for a project with all this new functionalities. In flash there are other interesting changes as the Bone tool that will help a lot to create animations and the motion tween function that now is so simple to add.

Costumers and users nowadays are really demanding and we must pay more attention to details when we work on projects , all these tools and software can help us to create effective applications, adds, videos or every kind of work we are supposed to do, the common aim is to work faster and to spend more time in creating than in trying to understand how to use the tools we have, Adobe has always been really good in designing their software interface and now they are trying to do more to help all of us to produce high quality works and I think they are doing it the right way;)

I was at MAX Conference in Milan last week and I had the opportunity to attend a lot of interesting sessions and labs. As a RIA Engineer I attended only purely technical sessions, for reports about the creative ones you can read Kira's last blog post.

One of the first sessions was "Advanced PaperVision 3D". I had no experience with flex and 3D apart from some screencast on the web, I wanted to know something more about architecture, performance and limits. Carlos Ulloa presented two projects currently in progress in which Papervision was involved and described the problems they were facing during development; moreover he explained various parts of the framework such as lights, cameras, materials, shadows and physics (with box2d).
On his blog you can find some videos http://blog.carlosulloa.com/, for more information about Papervision: http://blog.papervision3d.org/.

I also attended a pair of sessions about Flex 4/Flex Builder 4 news and I discovered a lot of exciting new features. Of course a part of the session was dedicated to Flash Catalyst and the new workflow of flex skinning and styling. They showed us some examples of FXG, the new XML-based graphics interchange format, a bridge between designers and developers: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/FXG+1.0+Specification
An important change has been made to the structure of user interface components in Gumbo: the component layout is completely separated from its business logic; if you want to see something similar in Flex 3 you can use OpenFlux: http://code.google.com/p/openflux/
Another interesting improvement is the so called 2 way binding inline: now using the syntax of "@{expr}" you obtain something that in flex 3 you would obtain with a little more work. A small example can be found here: http://www.johncblandii.com/2008/06/flex-3-twoway-form-databinding.html.

Even the flex compiler got some attention from the developers: a lot of commits were targeted to compile speed optimizations; in some big applications you can get a speed boost of 2x.

If you want to follow closer the flex 4 development you can download the latest build here: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4.

Flex builder 4 has a lot of big and small changes aimed to make the developer's life easier; among them there is a new "Data/Services" view that helps to speed up connection to remote services, a new package view with library class exploring (so that you can explore the content of imported swc), an event handlers automatic stub generator, and last but not least the return of the network monitor (disappeared since flex builder 1). Probably I'm forgetting something, I'll make a tour of the Gumbo preview that Adobe distributed during MAX to check.

I participated at a lab with François le Droff about Flex and Maven; during this Lab he introduced a new project from Adobe Consulting: Fna.
From the project home page (http://code.google.com/p/fna/):
"Fna is a set of samples, mavenized flex open source contributions (flex-contrib-spring and event-source, a flexunit extension for testing cairngorm event dispatching) and maven archetypes that uses open source tools/frameworks built on the Java and Flex platform to help you develop RIA applications quickly and efficiently.."

This MAX Europe was a really nice experience just like the last year in Barcelona: interesting sessions, a lot of news and a lot of nice people; I think that here in Italy we will see a great increase in Flex and AIR usage next year.

Between October and November we held a couple of events for the italian Flex User Group (FlexGala) and Adobe Italy (Adobe TechConnection events).
These are the urls to some of slides and examples showed at those events:

• Architecting ActionScript 3 applications using PureMVC, by Emanuele Tatti (RIA Engineer at Comtaste)
  
• Designing Flex and AIR applications, by Kira Garfagnoli (Creative User Experience Designer at Comtaste)
• Applying the DAO design pattern withing AIR applications, by Marco Casario (CTO Comtaste)
  
• A PureMVC example that invokes a Java remote object using the RemoteObject class and BlazeDS (zip file)
  
• JMS Java Producer (zip file)
  
• JMS Messaging (zip file)
  

We are proud to announce the release of our web solution for online sales of our client Studioarch.com. At the beginning of this project we had to choose the e-commerce solution that could fit our needs at best. This is a common situation for many web engineers and we know that there are plenty different solutions out there. In this post I will show you Magento Commerce and start with some pro and cons about the platform:

Pro:
Free and opensource platform
Feature-rich solution
Based on Zend Framework
Good SEO
Good support for localization
Fast-growing community
Easy update
Easily manageable extensions
and much more...

Cons:
Not much documentation (there is a growing wiki and a nice forum, but it is still difficult to find the answer you are looking for)
Importing products not yet fully supported (import script needs some tricks and workarounds to be used)
European tax system not fully supported (VAT, B2B, B2C..., check first if what you need is supported)
Internationalization may not be complete (depending on your language)
Still many bugs (but development and bug fixing is on the go, the last release is from 1.1.8 November 26, 2008)
and maybe some more...

And now some tips to the ones that want to use this platform:

Read the designer and user guides, they are good starting points to understand how Magento works.
Choose a base template that is as much similar as possible to what you want to achieve. You will then have to do much less work to reach your goal.
Use Firebug to help you modify and test your CSS without deploying every time.
Learn how to use the layout XML files.
If you want to modify the Magento Core code, learn how to override methods and classes, this will really help you and you will not have to throw away all your modifications when you will update Magento to a newer release.
If you need to insert a lot of products you should look into the import feature. It can really be a timesaver: in example you can build a script that queries your inventory database, writes a CSV file with all your product data and loads it directly into Magento. If you only have simple products, that's all you need to do. Problems arise when you have something more complex such as configurable products, so you will have to load configurable and related simple products first, then execute a few queries to link the configurable attributes and to relate each simple product to its configurable one (check Magento forum for further help).

We are happy to have chosen Magento for this project and I think we will use it next time also.

A few days ago Comtaste has released a new version of its library that includes several improvements coming from our clients' feedbacks.
The Flex library has been released on the Assembla repository public web site:

The Flex Dashboard Panel (ver 0.2) is a library developed by Comtaste to create and manage easily a multi panel applications. The library is totally free.

All the Comtaste's clients that are using the library in their projects can now download the new version of the library and implement it on their project. overriding the older version.

Comtaste is about to release by the first months of 2009, a new version of the library with powerful brand new features, under a open source license (probably LGPL).

2008 is almost over and here at Comtaste we would like to wish all the best for the New Year, and dedicate a warm THANK YOU to all of our clients and partners who allowed us achieve these outstanding goals in 2008:

- More than 1,500 days of consulting delivered
- About 10,000 hours of development activity
- More than 70 training courses delivered
- A fantastic, motivated team of more than 20 consultants specialized in RIA technologies
- Active all over Europe and overseas
- Dozens of participations as speakers in events and conferences in Europe and Worldwide
- 4 of our books published by O’Reilly and Apress

Once again, THANK YOU SO MUCH for your support! And a really wonderful 2009 (despite all the crisis echoes)!

I've created a project to explain how to use the "Flex Dashboard Panel library", here the link of the live application complete of source code.

The principal component of the library are:

1) DashPanelContainer
A canvas Container where we place all the DashPanel window.

2) DashPanel
The window container where you can put all your content.

3) DashLayoutManager
A static multiton manager to control the dashboard.

4) DashPanelEvents
Control your panel programmaticaly using events.

DashPanelContainer properties:
1) dashed:
All DashPanels inside will be tiled to fit on the container and panels can be only switched with each others and not resized.

2) snapped, snapSize:
All DashPanels can be moved and resized constraint to the guide drawed on the background and the snap size can be changed trough the snapSize propeties

3) Nothing:
All DashPanel can be moved and resized without constraint.

DashPanel properties:
1) closable, minimizable, maximizable, draggable, resizable
Control what the panel can do

2) titleBarHeight="20" default 35
Set the height of the title bar if your skin need this.

3) icon, iconXOffset, iconYOffset
Set an icon property an control the position with the offset

4) title, titleColor, titleXOffet, showTitleText
Set the panel title and decide if you want to show or not and where with the offset

5) status
Return the current status of the panel. This status is defined trough constants property of the DashPanel

DashLayoutManager methods:
1) getManager(container.id)
Retrieve the pointer of the manager by passing the container id instance

2) getManager(container.id).tile();
All DashPanel elements will be tiled to fit the space.

3) getManager(container.id).cascade();
All DashPanel elements will be cascaded.

4) getManager(container.id).bringToFront( dashpanel )
Set in fron the element if this is inside the container.

5) getManager(container.id).getOpenedPanelList()
Return the list of current opened panels.

DashPanelEvents:
Using the events you can listen what happen at your panel, but also you can dispatch an event to force panel do something.

1) MAXIMIZE, MINIMIZE, RESTORE, CLOSE
Listen or dispatch this events to control your panel

2) PANEL_MOVING, PANEL_RESIZING
This events can be only listened and inform when panel is currently moving or resizing

3) STARTLOAD, STOPLOAD
Dispatching this events you will freeze the panel and a progress bar will be shown

That's all! Now you can create a fully dashboard application.
Flex Dashboard Panel library Example