Marco Casario | RIAvolutionize the web

User Experience on RIA cateogry in our company's blog

Comtaste is continuing to grow.  Our development team gained a talented and experienced JEE and Flex developer and our blog has a new author, Kira Garfagnoli, that will publish articles about  user experience in the RIA world.
Her first post has been published two weeks ago :

Flex rich interface design: why big companies choose Flex

and many others will follow.
I'm so enthusiast to be part of this growing !

Pistach.io is now accepting advertising

The Pistach.io project was launched and everything is now ready.
The Flash Pack is comprised of top influencers in the Flash, Flex and RIA communities:

* Andre Michelle
* Aral Balkan
* Chad Udell
* Flash Magazine
* Grant Skinner
* Keith Peters
* Marco Casario
* Mario Klingemann
* OSFlash
* Peter Elst
* Seb Lee-Delisle

Although we serve millions of impressions each month we're not about impressions, or CPMs (however we'll guarantee you 5% of impressions for each ad you place with us). We're about influence, and cost per influence.

Your ad displays prominently with no other advertising to compete for your audience's attention.

Get the information and contacts on Pistach.io site.

MultiMania 08 is over but I had awesome time !

Unfortunately I know I won't have the time to prepare a detailed summary post about my visit and partecipation at the Multi-Mania Conference 2008.
I just want to say that it was an awesome experience and I had great time with the rest of the speakers (Koen, Peter, Aral, Ralph, Serge and many others).
Everything worked great and was well organized by Koen and the other stuff of the crew. Thanks for your support.
I want to point out a detailed overview post of the conference made by Peter Elst that published some videos with also some minutes of my presentation :

Marco Casario - Flex with AJAX

Adobe Flash 9 vulnerability found ?!?!?

I've just read it and reported. It seems that Symantec found a bug on the Adobe Flash Player  ( include 9.0.124 .0and 9.0.115.0)  and it says web sites hosting Adobe Flash Player content can be compromised by an exploit in the newest version of Flash. Embedded JavaScript can redirect users to a Chinese malware server :

(From CNET News)Symantec says that under certain conditions embedded JavaScript within the player will redirect users to dota11.cn. In an alert on Tuesday, Symantec said specific details about the vulnerability exploited were unknown, and initial testing of the in-the-wild exploit showed it to be unreliable. Nonetheless, Symantec said it had identified at least one commercial site, www.bridgettwalther.com, which is a horoscope Web site, but that the embedded malicious code has since been removed.

Read more on securityfocus.com (Adobe Flash Player SWF File Unspecified Remote Code Execution Vulnerability)

Do I need to sign a redistribution license to deploy AIR in an enterprise setting ?

At least someone has given a clear answer to the  question about the redistribution license of AIR application in an enterprise setting from a centralized server. Oliver Goldman wrote a clear post talking about the AIR's enterprise support where he pointed out what you can  do in AIR 1.0:

• You can deploy AIR and AIR-based applications via enterprise deployment tools like Microsoft SMS and IBM Tivoli,
  
• You can disable auto-update of both AIR and AIR-based applications, and
  
• You can configure which applications, if any, AIR will permit to be installed.

So the end of the story is that if you're not using the Adobe's download servers fr deploying AIR applications but  your enterprise AIR  is deploying  from an internal server (IBM Tivoli, Microsoft SMS)  that means that you're redistributing  it.

Have also a look at the AIR Runtime Distribution FAQ.

Grails plugin for Adobe Flex, Livecycle DS and BlazeDS

Grails is growing more and more and it's gaining an important role over the Java community. Grails is an open-source web application framework that leverages the Groovy language (a cool dynamic language) and complements Java Web development. The Grails framework is built on top of  Spring , an establised enterprise framework. 

The community is huge and you can now find a lot of interesting and useful plugin system  to speed up andintegrate integrates Grails with technologies Java people care about like GWT, DWR, JMS, IntelliJ, search operations are based on Luceneand and others.

Recently a new plugin for Adobe Flex, Livecycle DS and BlazeDS  is available for the Grails framework:

Grails Flex Plugin

the installation of the plugin is very easy. It's enough to launch it using this command line :

grails install-plugin flex

And you'll be ready to specify a Grails service as a remoting destination for Blaze DS or Livecycle DS using the expose property to your service class :

static expose = ['flex-remoting']

Grails is a framework for which I'm very eager to know more. I hope this summer I'll find the time to write some tutorials about the use of Grails plugin for Adobe Flex, Livecycle DS and BlazeDS.

Grails plugin for Adobe Flex and BlazeDS features

* Automatic configuration of Flex related web descriptor elements - For Flex to work configuration of servlets etc. are required in the web descriptor. This plugin automatically does this configuration.
* Eposing Grails services as Flex remoting destinations - When using Flex remoting services each Java service need to be configured within Flex using xml configuration. When exposing Grails service classes with this plugin this configuration is not needed anymore. The service class will automatically be registered within the Flex message broker.
* Participation in reloading of exposed Grails services - This plugin participates nicely with the reloading facilities of Grails. When creating new services or exposing existing services, they will be registered in the Flex message broker without restarting the application
* Embedded BlazeDS libraries
* Embedded Flex Webtier Compiler - When installing this plugin it will automatically install the Flex Webtier Compiler to your web application (within the WEB-INF folder). In development mode this Webtier Compiler is automatically enabled.

James Ward's interview about Flex, AIR, LiveCycle Data Services, the AMF protocol and much more !

In this interview from QCon San Francisco 2007, James Ward discusses Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), Flex and AIR, how Flex helps in the development of RIAs, the changes in ActionScript 3, the Tamarin engine, desktop and offline capabilities, Flex Builder, the Flex developer community, LiveCycle Data Services, the AMF protocol, RIA development trends, and the Flex component model.

One  of my favourite James' answer is the one about Livecycle Data Services. It's the same answer I use to give to customers who ask me about that :

To really build a Flex application, do I have to have LiveCycle Data Services or are there other options to me in terms of integrating with the backend?        

That's a great question. LiveCycle Data Services is something that is optional, but it's something that does a add lot of value. It adds the AMF protocol which is a great serialization protocol to more efficiently move you data across the wire, it adds publish and subscribe messaging, data synchronization capability, PDF generation, WSRP provider support, a bunch of things that people may need or want, but it's not required. You can connect any Flex application built with all the free stuff, the free SDK, to your web services, SOAP web services, RESTful web services, JSON, so there's lots of different ways to do that. There's also open-source products that provide some of the functionality of LifeCycle Data Services that people have looked at too.

Has James got the beard ? Hey man you look so serious with the beard ;)
See you soon !

Multi-Mania is about to kick-off and I'm arrived in Belgium

Everything is ready for the kickoff of  Multi-Mania 2008. And Koen wrote that the conference is fully booked with more than 1000 regitered users !

I was transported from the Brussel airport by car together with Rob Chiu, Susanna (his girlfriend) and Dave from Indianapolis. It was a long trip but I had a lot of time with them :)

This year we have over 30 speakers  in 4 simultaneous tracks on topics like design, development, video, audio, 3D and game development and also have 3 workshops on Adobe AIR, Flex,  Flash Media Server and Microsoft Silverlight.

Thomas has released the conference mobile guide developed using Flash Lite. You can download it via his blog : www.thomasjoos.be

This is my agenda :

- Ruling the web - Aral Balkan
- SQLite in Adobe AIR - Peter Elst
- Having fun with Flash and AIR - Wim Vanhenden
- Design Challenges, Standards Solutions - Stephanie Sullivan
- Flex with AJAX - Marco Casario
- Flash 2D and 3D Effects - Ralph Hauwert
- The Pixel Whisperer - Mario Klingemann

But I'm curios to follow the Rob Chiu's session.
My session will be tomorrow at 3 PM. See you there guys !

New support for JavaScript in NetBeans 6.1

Ok I have to admit it. I'm a fan of NetBeans. And with the new features added on the recent next release, NetBeans 6.1 is nearer to AJAX and RIA development.  The famous IDE introduced the support to JavaScript, PHP scripting language, support for embedded CSS and  HTML.

NetBeans TV has published an interesting webcast to show the new JavaScript Editor in NetBeans IDE 6.1 :

NetBeans IDE 6.1 contains a completely new JavaScript editor which provides many advanced editing capabilities such as intelligent code completion, mark occurences, instant rename, on-fly analysis of JavaScript libraries, support for many Ajax frameworks and more. Watch this screencast to discover the new and exciting JavaScript-related features.

Now I'm waiting for the Flex 3 support :)

Flex Cookbook site re-skinned and a new search/commenting feature for the Flex Developer Center

The Flex Team added some awesome features to the Adobe Flex Developer Center. First of all the Flex Cookbook site has been re-skinned in order to improve the readibility of Flex 3 code.

Moreover two new great features have been added: a community-powered search and a post's commenting feature.
The community-powered search is designed to help people to find the best answer to their questionsearching thorugh the expert’s blog in the community, other than the Flex Developer Center.

The latter, the commenting feature, allows users to add comments to Flex Developer Center content.