Steven Diomampo

So I ran into a little snag today, and I’m sure this isn’t the only post out there related to this issue, but if one of my two readers lives under a rock, this might help…

Short Story: Make sure you have an import of the object you want to serialize as, within the class that receives the data. To do this create a marker variable (aka: var vo:SomeVO;) somewhere in the class, so that cmd+shift+O does not remove your import.

Long Story: I was just finishing up refactoring a Command class in Cairngorm by moving all of my data manipulation into it’s own class, when I realized that the objects being returned through BlazeDS were no longer serialized. So I checked my VO on the Flex side to be sure I setup the RemoteClass(alias…), and that was all good. Then I checked the Java side of things to be sure it was all good. Then I started to scratch my head and wonder what in the world I did wrong. Well it turns out, with a little bit of magic, the mystery was solved (read the Short Story above).

k thx bye

I just want to say a few big thanks to some important people.

• John, Tom, Nicole for the free ticket and for hosting the best conferences!
• Paul Taylor for letting me room with you. I enjoyed our morning walks to Starbucks and catching the VTA around town.
• Amy and Steve for lunch and laughs.
• Ben, Jacob and Tyler for Reflex.
• Ryan for the free sushi. (Or should I thank Adobe?)
• Doug for being the “Conference Crasher”.
• Greg for the heads up.
• Mike for getting me to the airport.
• Jon for chillin at the airport.
• and everyone else that showed up to the conference!!!

360 Conferences offer everyone the opportunity to sit with the big dogs, learn a ton, get free stuff and meet tons of people in the industry. I highly recommend going to a 360 Conference for anyone who is passionate about their work. See you at the next conference!!

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Jeff Tapper – Ouch, it hurts when I do that.

I only got to stay for the first half of the day, so that’s the only session I went to. Which means I also missed Nate’s revenge…ugh.

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Paul Robertson – Building iPhone apps using the Flash Platform

Jacob and Tyler Wright – Reflex: Rethinking Component Design

Elad Elrom – Building Applications using Test Driven Development (TDD)

Anthony Franco – Panel – How to Speak To Executives To Get What You Want

Pics below:

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Keynote

Deepa announces that all Flex Data Viz components are now packed within the Flex open source SDK. Meaning, no more watermark for open sourcers.

Michael Labriola – Apocalypse Soon? The remaking of Flex Components

Drew McClean & RJ Owen – Obey: Building a Rules Engine with AS3 and the Hamcrest API

Huyen Tue Dao – Greenthreading in Flex

Pics below

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Fortunately enough I sat down to eat dinner next to Justin Mclean the night before. So I also got the inside scoop on what he was going to discuss (Flex + Hardware), as well as an open seat to join in since I wasn’t signed up. During the break I jumped into the Robotlegs session with Joel Hooks. Both sessions were great, but because Justin was giving away free Arduino kits, I felt indebted to him and spent most of the day in there.

Here are some photos from the sessions. To say the least, it was awesome, I also got a free Arduino kit, enough said…and thanks Justin!

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Let me preface this by saying, this approach is certainly not the final say. Any tutorials, demos or information shared on my site should be taken for what they are worth. I love feedback, so feel free to leave a comment below.

[Update: As Amy mentioned in the comments, this is not specific to the Robotlegs framework.]

I have recently been tinkering with the new Robotlegs framework and wanted to share a quick gotcha. It’s really not a gotcha, and really more something I forgot to do. Click here to see the post that helped jog my memory on this one. Hope this will come in handy for someone.

View Demo | View Source

If you can’t read the white print on the demo it says:

I intend on repurposing this title “At This Moment I Am…” as a series of mile markers about myself. I’ll be breaking it down into two different sections: Working On, and Moving Towards. Both categories are pretty self explanatory, Working On will list what I am doing now in order to get to what I am Moving Towards.

Working On

• An Android application
• A modular Flex application
• Optimizing as3 code
• Meeting new people

Moving Towards

Mobility

The future is mobile, and at least two of the items I am Working On will get me there. In the world of Mobile Phones, for me it’s all about Android, and if you haven’t heard of Android, something is wrong. Check out this market share prediction. At any rate, the signs are there, and Google as well as the community is really pushing the Android Platform.

How about developing for Android? As a Flex Developer, I’d like to think the learning curve for Android development is slightly reduced. When you start your first project in eclipse, you’ll notice that the xml layout files(located in res/layout/) give two tab options, Layout and someFile.xml. You’ll find these in the bottom left corner in the image below.

Think of the Layout tab as the Design tab in Flex Builder. In this case it is giving you the visual representation of the xml file (registration.xml) versus MXML in Flex, which would be like seeing the Source tab.

On the surface I was able to pick up on some of the similarities, but I was fortunate enough to have some good discussions with Faisal Abid about everything under the hood. He has a strong Flex background and has been working on some heavy Android apps. At some point I will put together a good post on bridging the gaps of Flex and Android.

Another item I’m working on that falls under Mobility for me is, meeting new people. For me to be more mobile in 2010 it will require breaking out of the shell and meeting more people in more places. It’s amazing how much seven days on a cruise ship with complete strangers can really change your perspective on things. See my Stop Encapsulating Yourself!!! post for more on this. At any rate, traveling is a top priority for me this coming year, so meeting people around the world is a big deal. I’ve compiled a list of where I will be traveling in 2010:

• San Jose, CA (early March) – It’s conference time! This time I get to meet back up with the gang and a couple hundred other members for 360|Flex.
• Breckenridge, CO (mid-late March) – Snowboarding and friends!!!
• _____, LA –  Wedding, Congrats @ogreen32!
• Las Vegas, NV (summer time) – WSOP! I’m looking to get into one of the smaller events like the $1k, we’ll see.
• _____, VT (October) – Yet another wedding, Congrats Gonzo!
• Japan (65% chance) – Meet new people, be in a different country.
• NY and Canada (80% chance) – Visit friends

Be sure to stop by http://www.nowandthere.com/ for some great travel/lifestyle resources (thanks Sam).

To start, I’ll explain the inspiration behind this post. I recently had the pleasure of being onboard the RIAdventure conference cruise. Being that it was my first Flash/Flex conference, I could tell after day one that I had been missing a really, really big piece of my life as a developer. I feel ashamed to say it, but my time prior to this was spent hacking away from the sidelines. Here is a small Q/A I came up with…

• Do I browse every forum and blog searching for an answer, but don’t find one, then when I finally solve it, do I submit the solution?

  • Express your gratitude with a simple response. It’ll go further you think.

• Is there a limited history of my work available to the public?

  • So you write top secret code, but still find time to update your twitter status with useless information. The top dogs in our industry gain a following, because they have something to follow. If you have nothing, recycle, and try throwing a link to a good article every once in awhile.

• Have I ever been to a conference?

  • For super introverts, find your local user group, and get involved. For curious introverts to total extroverts, book the next conference possible!

Meet Some Of My New Developer Besties (in no particular order)

• Lee Fernandes

• John Wilker

• Tom Ortega

• Sam Rivello

• Doug McCune

• Joshua Cyr

• Greg Burch

• Paul Taylor

• Ryan Stewart

• Faisal Abid

• Ash K.

• Nate Beck

• Amy Blankenship

• Minnesota Scott

• Steve Howard

If you’re not jealous, Stop Encapsulating Yourself!!!

So I am just starting to wrap my head around the Mate concept. I did my first little HelloWorld app, just to get my feet wet. In just an hour of tinkering, the separation of the framework from the application itself is very apparent. Having spent most of my time in the PureMVC world, I have grown accustom to writing my code around a frameworks api, but I do appreciate this clear separation.

I’ll update this post with a link to my simple app, but for now I’m gonna dive back into some code. Right now I am trying to figure out how to trigger multiple handlers to a single event, something like multiple mediators interested in the same notification (Observer Pattern) in PureMVC. For example, I have a simple button that triggers a custom Event, my EventMap  currently handles that event using a CallBack tag, so I am only able to trigger a method on the Event target…guess I’ll keep digging : )