The first day was simple amazing. Great people, sessions and food ;) Berlin is a wonderful place. These are my impressions of the second and last day of the conference.

My second day at the Ruby on Rails conference 2007 in Berlin, was very intresting and I've learned about how to improve webapp in Europe, Slingshot and some testing tips.

Building WebApps in Europe: Economy, methodology, tips
In this session Nicolas Paton (Bloogk) describe some tips and methodology for people intent do build a webapp. They sostain that a webapp dont have to be a new Google to bring wealth and happiness to their creators, so invite anyone to open your mind to new markets. Another important point of view is the Design, not only the graphical design but technical design through tests, and economical design

Creating Hybrid Web and Desktop Applications with Rails and Slingshot
During the session of Luke Crawford (Joyent) i have said how to implement a synchronized online and offline application with Slingshot. Slingshot provide an ActiveRecord transport layer allowing easy customization of the data that gets synced to an online application. With the addition of about thirty lines of code, a Rails application can sync data from client to server. With another thirty lines of code you synchronize have file-based data. The framework also provides an extensible drag and drop abstraction layer.

Browser-based Testing of Massive Ajax-using Rails Applications with Selenium
To create a web application mostly similar to a normal desktop application we need a very good testing framework for the client side and not only for the server side. Till Vollmer (Codemart GmbH) spoke about Selenium, an open source framework that allows running acceptance tests in the browser directly. Recorded or scripted scenarios can be played back and the expected result verified. While this is very straight forwarded with normal page-based applications, without dynamic Ajax calls it is relatively tricky to implement tests for Ajax-based applications with a lot of dynamics and user interaction like drag and drop.

Continuous Validation: Pursuing Error-free Apps
Another important session about testing and validation has taked by Dane Avilla. He discuss the importance of output validation and demonstrate how to use WATIR and Rails filters along with a number of helpful open source tools -- JSLint, OpenSP, the W3C's CSS Validator -- to be sure "rake test" catches output errors long before they reach a client browser.

Unfortunately I had the flight sceduled at 5.35pm so can't see the last sessions.

I am totally convinced that the next 360Flex conference in Milan (7-9 April) is a fantastic chance for a profitable full immersion into Flex and Flex related themes, there including Adobe AIR.

Besided the fact that the previous editions which took place in the States have been tremendously successfull, this is the only event in Europe with such a strong focus and such a big concentration of interational technical expertise on Flex.

Who should really grab the opportunity to attend the 3 day conference (for just 360 euros)? Here is a synthesis from the 360Flex website (http://www.360flex.com/360flex_europe/):

- Flex developers (of course!)

- ColdFusion, COBOL, .NET, LISP developers, looking to move more into UI and RIA technologies.

- Flash developers, looking to leave timelines and keyframes behind

- AIR developers (or would-be ones)

- Those who think that Flex might be the technology direction their company will want to take

Don't miss out, only €360. This includes over 35+ speakers/sessions and free hands-on "Getting started with Flex" training. More details can be found at http://360flex.com/360flex_europe

To register http://360flexeurope.eventbrite.com/

If you're a FlexGala members there is a discount code to use during the registration phase. Register to FleXGala (http://www.augitaly.com/flexgala/index.php?cmd=register) and you'll receive it via the FlexGala newsletter.

Comtaste has just launched its new training courses on Adobe Flex3 and AIR for late spring-early summer 2008.

First courses to be scheduled are:

"Flex 3 and Flex Builder 3: Developing Rich Internet Applications with the new Flex 3 SDKs" (Milan and London 26-29 May, NYC-Manhattan 2-5 June)

"Developing desktop applications with Adobe AIR, Ajax and Flex" (Milan 14-17 April, NYC-Manhattan 9-12 June, London 23-26 June).

Our educational proposal, designed and set up by Flex expert Marco Casario, is mainly the result of our strong experience in real world enterprise projects.

Our courses reflect our clients' training needs that our consultants have encountered in the day by day running of enterprise-class projects, where Flex and AIR are also connected to backend applications under robust and rigid JEE architectures or other server side technologies.

Training programs and other details on company's website www.comtaste.com/en/training.htm

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.

When you need to define binding based on different custom events you have to use the ChangeEvent metadata tag. The ChangeEvent metadata keyword generates one or more component events when changes are made to one of its properties.

The ChangeEvent metadata keyword has the following syntax:

[ChangeEvent("event_name"[,...)]
property_declaration or a get/set function


You can register multiple change events in the metadata so that more than one event is generated when the property changes, as the following example shows:

[ChangeEvent("change1")]
[ChangeEvent("change2")]
[ChangeEvent("change3")]


Any one of those events indicates a change to the variable. They do not have to occur all to indicate a change.

So lets have a look on how to create different bindings based on different events:
First define the bindable property through the ChangeEvent metadata:

[ChangeEvent("change1")]
[ChangeEvent("change2")]
[ChangeEvent("change3")]
public var myVar:String = "";


Now we need to define some change cases:

Case 1: Change myVar and dispatch the 'change1' event

<mx:Label text="Change myVar and dispatch the 'change1' event:"/>
<mx:TextInput change="myVar = txtArea.text; dispatchEvent( new Event( 'change1' ) );" id="txtArea"/>


Case 2 Change myVar and dispatch the 'change2' event

<mx:Label text="Change myVar and dispatch the 'change2' event:"/>
<mx:TextInput change="myVar = txtArea2.text; dispatchEvent( new Event( 'change2' ) );" id="txtArea2"/>


Case 3 Change myVar and don't dispatch any events:

<mx:Label text="Change myVar and don't dispatch any events:"/>
<mx:TextInput change="myVar = txtArea3.text;" id="txtArea3"/>


And finaly use a TextArea to bind the text property to myVar:

<mx:Label text="Bind text property to myVar:"/>
<mx:TextInput text="{myVar}"/>


You can see the full, working example (right click for source) here.

SpringSource and Comtaste have organized a free event where the new Spring 3.0 will be presented for the very first time in Italy and the integration with Flex and BlazeDS will be explored (all the detailed info here).
The event has been scheduled on Monday, November 30, 2009 from 2:45 PM - 6:00 PM (GMT+01h). The location is the awesome Link Campus - University of Malta, via Nomentana, 335 - Rome, Italy 00162.

The agenda will see two different sessions presented by SpringSource and Comtaste:

Session 1 (english) - Spring 3.0 and the new REST support, Speaker: Rossen Stoyanchev (SpringSource)

One of the major new themes of Spring 3.0 is the support for REST in Spring MVC. This talk will investigate these features from the perspective of a web application developer and discuss them in the context of JAX-RS, the Java Standard for RESTfulWeb Services. If you're familiar with JAX-RS you can relate your knowledge to Spring MVC. If you're an existing Spring MVC user can learn about major developments in the areas of data binding, validation, and type conversion as well as how Spring MVC compares to JAX-RS, a topic that's likely to come up in your organization.

Session 2 (in lingua italiana) - Integrare Spring con Flex 3, Speaker: Marco Casario (Comtaste)

SpringSource announced Spring BlazeDS Integration, a new open source project to provide tight integration between Spring and Adobe BlazeDS, Adobe’s open source server-based Java remoting and Web messaging technology.

This open source project will make it easy for Java and Spring developers to create enterprise-class rich Internet applications (RIAs) using Adobe Flex software, a cornerstone of the Adobe Flash Platform, and Spring, the de facto standard for enterprise Java.

The partecipation is free but you need to register in order to get the ticket.

Today we just released a brand new company video showcase on our site. The introduction of this video is the first step of a progressive whole site-redesign. We, in Comtaste, think it's a good habit keep our website up to date and in line with the direction we are aiming at.
Now it's time for you to have a look at this great video.
To enjoy the video properly, remeber to turn the sound up.
Keep in touch with us, other improvements will come very soon!