Marco Casario | RIAvolutionize the web

W3C MWI fugitive creates alternative Mobile Web Authoring Practices.

Luca Passani is well-known by mobile developers as the inventor
of WURFL , the primary open source tool for device capability recognition.
Recently, Luca has published a document about practices for mobile  development
(Global Authoring Practices for Mobile Development, GAP).
We used to know that Luca was involved in a similar effort in the
context of W3C Best Practices , so we wondered what on earth was going on.
We didn't need to remain curious for long.
We just went and asked him directly:

Question: Luca, what is this initiative of yours all about?

Answer: GAP is a document aimed at mobile developers which was long overdue.
The industry has produced lots of tutorials and developer guides, each and every one of which only contains part of the story (and, sometimes, even contradict one another). This is no surprise after all: why should Nokia cover the Teleca browser? why should Openwave refrain from promoting the valuable usability extensions in its browser? is there any business reason why the Opera guys should tell developers to create content for browsers less powerful
than their own? The reality is that covering competitors' products makes no business sense. This is why everyone ended up producing the documentation that makes the most sense to them.
Unfortunately, this situation creates a paradox: the audience of these guidelines, i.e. the developers, are the one left wondering what they should do to create decent mobile content that works acceptably well on all devices. There is a gap to be filled and this is where the Global Authoring Practices (GAP) document plays a role.

Q: This makes sense, yet you announced one year ago that you were going
to partecipate in the W3C Best Practice Working Group group.
By reading the group charter one walks away with the idea that the objectives of GAP and the one of the BP candidate recommendation are pretty similar....

A: You are correct. When I entered BPWG last year, I was animated by the
best of intentions. I believed that there was interest in delivering a set of practices that could help developers and I was eager to put my name on a W3C recommendation. Unfortunately,
things turned out to work a bit differently. I felt very strongly that developers voice had very little power in that forum. W3C agenda and the agendas of other companies were driving the show.
Also, there did not seem to be a will to clearly identify the scope of the project and everyone was happy with it.
When it became clear that adaptation was not going to be mandated and the group denied to honor the request to clearly identify whether it was web or mobile clients we were dealing with,
I decided to refrain from contributing. That was until a few months later, when I noticed that the mobileOK thing was getting pushed very hard by some of the partecipants. I consider MobileOK potentially harmful for my daily work and for the mobile industry in general.
That's when I decided that a passive attitude would not be enough and I had to move to action.

How to become a nasty girl

This is the first time I use my blog for a non technical issue.
But recently  a friend of mine started a cool blog to teach women in  becoming a real bit## and nasty girls:

http://scuoladistronze.blogspot.com/

Everyone can partecipate and join the community but so far they're all women !

How the Flex's measurement and layout strategy works

I'm developing a Flex 2 application and I'm playing with the LayouManager class (under the mx.managers package). I learned a lot of cool things.
The LayoutManager is the engine behind Flex's measurement and layout strategy.
Layout is performed in three phases; commit, measurement, and layou (as you can read on the Flex 2 Livedocs).
At application startup the Flash Player draws the contents (container and controls) on the client's screen.
At this time a single istance of the LayoutManager is created and stored in the UIComponent.layoutManager property.

A process called the Measurement/Layout phase has been executed.
It's made up of two different steps that use a  2 pass algorithm.
The first phase is the Measurement pass that has the role to calculate the size of each component starting from inside to outside.
The second phase, named Layout pass, fires after every components have been measured and it sizes and positions the components. The Layout phase lays out application from outermost container to innermost.
It's possible to trigger a Measurement/Layout pass, but you have to know what happens under the hood.

The commit phase begins with a call to validateProperties(), which walks through a list (sorted by nesting level) of objects calling each object's validateProperties()method.

The measurement phase begins with a call to validateSize(), which walks through a list (sorted by nesting level) of objects calling each object's validateSize() method to determine if the object has changed in size.

The layout phase begins with a call to the validateDisplayList() method, which walks through a list (reverse sorted by nesting level) of objects calling each object's validateDisplayList() method to request the object to size and position all components contained within it (i.e. its children).
When an invalidation occurs, it triggers the LayoutManager.

Working with the LayoutManager class permits developers to better customize the layout and style of Flex 2 applications. As soon as I'll clean up  my code I'll publish some examples on my blog !

Flex Team is about to release Flex 2 components

Flex Team announced the first of a long (hope) series of Flex 2 components :

AutoComplete TextInput

(via their blog) Each component will be released individually on the Exchange, and can be used in your application simply by adding the pre-compiled SWC into your library path. Samples and documentation will be included as well. Finally, we will include the source so that you can modify the component as you see fit. It should be noted that we consider these components to be at Alpha quality. This means that we consider a component to be feature complete, but we may not have worked out every use-case and there may be some bugs. For example, while the components are written to support styling and skinning (in the same model as the Flex 2 framework), these areas may be less tested than others. As we see how customers are using the components and gather feedback we may release additional versions that include bug fixes, or expose more properties, or even behave differently. Of course we may also determine that the component is not useful for our developers and that we should focus on different ones.

We will be releasing these components under a license similar to the Flex SDK. In essence you will be able to use and modify these components within the context of a Flex application, module, or library for no charge.

Apollo presentation at Yahoo Hack Day

Tomorrow Yahoo's first open Hack Day, a weekend festival of hacking, camping (yes, the tents-in-the-outdoors kind--we have really, really nice grass!), music, and good times.

Mike Chambers, Danny Dura, Christian Cantrel, and Ted Patrick (all from Adobe) will be attending and participating.

If you'll be there you'll see Apollo demos and presentations.
See the Agenda of the event !

Understanding the Digital Rights Management (DRM) for mobile phones

Great article  from the latest Sony Ericsson newsletter for understanding what the DRM  stands for :

Getting the hang of the music industry
Part 3: Understanding licensing and the importance of DRM

Don't miss the first and second part of this topic :

Part 1: Understanding the players, market trends and service definitions>>
Part 2: Understanding codecs and bandwidth issues>>

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is perhaps the most hotly debated subject in the media business today. To truly understand Digital Rights Management is to understand that the key word is "rights".

A piece of music can belong to more than one party such as a songwriter and a composer, and they in turn often assign the management of their interests to an agent such as a music publisher, a record label or a Performing Rights Organization (PRO). Those companies in turn, are responsible for managing the rights of the owner of the work and ensuring that a piece of music is not used in a way that is not covered by a license. DRM simply adds software automation to this process.

Adobe Flash Security and Adobe Enterprise Solutions

I found out this great white papers on Flash Security and Adobe Enterprise solutions to understand how to develop and deploy Flash and Flex applications securely.

Adobe Flash Security and Adobe Enterprise Solutions abstract :

With the Flash technology, organizations can develop, deploy, and distribute with confidence RIAs, enterprise and mobile applications, and communications to employees, partners, and customers.
Flash Player and the Flex product line leverage an organization’s existing security infrastructure (which means they are security independent) are based on existing accepted standards, and use secure technologies.

According to an independent security assessment by @stake, Adobe has developed a strong
information protection model against client-side threats. “[The Flex] architecture mitigates many common client-side attacks such as cross-site scripting, denial-of-service [attacks], SQL injection, man-in-the-middle [attacks], and session hijacking.” In addition, server-side security is maintained by leveraging J2EE security to mitigate common attacks against infrastructure components, such as buffer overflows, heap corruption, and cross-site scripting.

Flex 2: Rich Internet Applications Videos published on Developer Center

More than 8 minutes of James Talbot's Flex 2 Developing Rich Internet Application Video course by Total Training were published on Adobe Flex Developer Center :

In these videos from Total Training, James Talbot, an experienced trainer from Adobe, teaches you how you can use Adobe Flex 2 to to develop effective, interactive RIAs. In chapter 1: Introducing Adobe Flex, you will learn about:

• The Evolution of the Rich Internet Application
• Introducing the Flex Product Line
• Introducing Flash Player

Designing Loosely Coupled Flex 2 Components

The new WebDeveloper's & Designer's issue is out.
In this issue I wrote an article on Designing Loosely Coupled Flex 2 Components tecnique. Moreover they published a post on my blog on their BlogoSphere section :  Flex-AJAX Bridge and the Unsupported setAttribute() method By IE.

The whole TOC of this issue is rich of interesting topics :

Using Resource Bundles in Flex
Voices from the Community: Blogosphere
Putting RSS Content into Your Dreamweaver Web Pages
E-Commerce 2.0
Understanding Classpaths
New Develpment Strategies for New Markets
Getting Trained with Total Training’s Flex 2
Designing Loosely Coupled Flex 2 Components
End-to-end Rapid Application Development
Chapter 6 of Rich Internet Applications

Using Flex for next-generation mapping services

The new TheEdge issue is out and it's full of cool articles. One new feature of this issue is an interview with Edge managing editor Julie Campagna  that  introduces  the September/October edition. Unfortunately I can't see any article on Flash Lite, but there's an interesting Flex 2 article that shows how ESRI provided next-generation mapping services using flex!
This is the TOC of the magazine :

• Flash back, Flash forward
  by Jenny Carless
• Producing Flash Video with Premiere Pro and After Effects
  by Dr. Woohoo & Brad Wolfley
• Building your first CSS site
  by Michael Koch
• Tips for integrating Photoshop and Flash
  by Michael Ninness
• Flash pros ponder the future, discuss creativity, and share tips
  by Jenny Carless
• Celebrating ten years of Flash community
  by R Blank
• Using Flex, ESRI provides next-generation mapping services
  by Lauren Paul Gibbons
  

Great job Adobe !