Category: Flex
Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 08/25/2010
Before I start, let me introduce this new series of blog posts/roundups I am starting by saying that if there is such a thing as too much reading then I read too much. In keeping up with hundreds upon hundreds of blog posts and other resources, I tend to see some pretty amazing stuff being created by the Adobe developer community. Luckily, part of my new role as Web Community Manager for Flash Platform within the Learning Resources group here at Adobe is to keep up with how the community is using and writing about Flash Platform products. This is the first in what I plan to become a regular series of posts covering some of the recent posts or articles that stood out to me (as in these were my personal favorites, not necessarily endorsed by my employer). Please, if you have something you’d like me to share, feel free to email me, post in he comments or dm/reply to me on Twitter.
I had a great time presenting an introduction to Flex 4 for ColdFusion developers at this year's CFUnited. I think the presentation went really well with the only issue being that there was too much to cover in just one hour. I knew this might be an issue, so I was prepared for it but it meant I had to gloss over some important issues. Nonetheless, the feedback I got from the presentation has all been good, so I think people got a lot out of it anyway.
For those of you who did not attend, essentially this was more an introduction to Flash Builder 4 and its new data-centric development features. The thing is, if you are unfamiliar with Flex, you are unlikely to pop open a text editor and start banging out MXML and ActionScript. However, you are likely to open Flash Builder and try using the built-in wizards...and I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The simple application that I showed was built almost entirely with the data-centric features and code generation built into Flash Builder 4 (and a lot of design view usage). As you get more experienced with Flex, you can begin to do more in straight code but don't be embarrassed to use the wizards and other features to help you get started - that's what they are there for!
The other day someone asked me whether you could use ColdFusion Builder extensions and/or snippets in Flash Builder. The answer is yes. When you have ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder installed together in the same Eclipse environment, which you should, many features of the IDE can carry over including things like RDS dataview, RDS fileview, snippets and more. However, when it comes to things like extensions, there are some limitations based on my experience. Still, there's enough added value that even you straight Flash/Flex developers who got a copy of ColdFusion Builder with Flash Builder Premium may want to install it. Here's what I've found.
Spell checking in Flex with Squiggly - Part 2
In part 1 of my Squiggly for Flex tutorial, we discussed how easy it is to use the check-as-you-type spell checking for any TextInput or TextArea. This works great for most scenarios. However, sometimes you're requirements may ask for more customized spell-checking behavior. For example, perhaps you need to persist user custom dictionary items to a database or you need to build a custom spelling suggestion UI - these were just a couple of the requirements I faced. Thankfully, Squiggly provides most of the tools you will need to get these tasks done...with some caveats.
Spell checking in Flex with Squiggly - Part 1
Last year Adobe released their Squiggly spell checking engine for Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR and on December 18th, they updated that library to work with Flex 4 Spark components. (UPDATED: Shortly after this was posted, adobe released a third prerelease of Squiggly that contains support for additional languages and a number of significant code changes. The code samples in this post have been updated to work with the latest version. Most of the more significant code changes apply to the examples in the upcoming part 2.). Where I work, spell checking is a core requirement for our application, and as we are looking to rebuild the Flex portion of our application in Flex 4, I decided to put Squiggly through some some basic testing to see if it could meet our requirements. In the end it mostly met them with some key drawbacks that hopefully are addressed in future releases.
In this post I will discuss the previously available options for spellchecking, how to get started with Squiggly and how to implement it using the provided SquigglyUI class. Part 2, which will be posted next week, will delve into the SpellingDictionary and UserDictionary and how they can be used to create custom spellchecking functionality. Keep in mind, this is all based upon a proof-of-concept that is still to be considered a "work in progress" - so feel free to share your ideas, suggestions and experiences.