Web Development Central

How to pass values from HTML to Flash

2011-08-17T07:01:00.005-04:00

There have been a number of ways to do this over the years and over different versions of Flash, but the way to do this today is with FlashVars. What are FlashVars you ask? FlashVars is the name of a parameter that you can pass into your Flash movie, via the 'param' tag.The value of the parameter is a URL encoded string that contains the name-value pairs you would like to pass in. So, for example

Creating Custom Components with MXML

2008-02-11T19:16:00.002-05:00

When you start building applications in Flex, it won't take you long to find that you need to build your own components. Flex makes this process relatively painless. Here is how you can create your own components in a few easy steps.Usually, when you're building your own components in MXML, you start off by extending an existing component. As an example, let's create a customized menu bar

Using Favicons

2008-01-01T19:26:00.000-05:00

Most web sites (or web pages) have an associated icon. Called a 'Favicon' (short for 'favorites icon'), browsers display this icon in the address bar, along with your tab (if you are using a browser with a multi-tab interface) and in your favorites (or bookmarks) list.Invented by Microsoft, Internet Explorer would make automatic requests for this 16x16 graphic called favicon.ico in your web

Building An AS3 Project Without MXML

2007-12-30T20:07:00.000-05:00

Usually you'll find yourself using MXML to quickly build Flash applications. There are times, however, when you really just want to work with the underlying ActionScript and not use MXML at all. Here's how.The best way to do this is to subclass the Sprite class. So you would create a class that looks something like the following:package{ import flash.display.Sprite; class TestApp extends Sprite

An Overview of Acid2

2007-12-27T18:48:00.000-05:00

Acid2 is a test case designed by the Web Standards Project to identify web page rendering flaws in browsers and authoring tools. We'll take a brief look at the standards-based test.In 1998, a grass roots coalition of web designers started the Web Standards Project. According to their web site, "The Web Standards Project (WaSP) fights for standards that reduce the cost and complexity of

Using Variable Length Arguments With ActionScript

2007-12-22T10:06:00.000-05:00

There are times when you simply don't know how many arguments a function will be receiving. Some languages handle this sort of problem with function (or method) overloading-defining a function multiple times with each function definition containing a different number (or type) of parameters. With ActionScript, you can code one function that can dynamically handle different function definitions.

Client Side Cookie Handling

2007-12-22T08:04:00.000-05:00

There are many times that you'll need to handle cookies on the client (i.e. the web browser). Here's how you can use some simple JavaScript to provide all the cookie manipulation you'll ever need.A Cookie OverviewYou're probably pretty familiar with cookies, but in case you aren't, cookies are essentially pieces of data that are sent back and forth between your browser and a web server; usually

Introducing Caitlyn Ferris!

2007-10-16T15:08:00.000-04:00

It isn't too often that I use this space for anything personal-but I'm definitely making an exception.I'm happy to announce the birth of my daughter, Caitlyn Mai Ferris on October 1st at 2:30 AM!!! Caitlyn and mom are doing fine! Pictures can be found at the website above.

Aye Laddie, It's Cairngorm!

2007-07-02T09:37:00.000-04:00

Cairngorm may be a mountain in Scotland, but its also an architectural framework for Flex from Adobe. Cairngorm is based on the MVC model and is especially concerned with data synchronization between client and server.A few months ago I was lucky enough to sit in on a presentation held by the New York Flex User's Group on Cairngorm. My friend, Kevin Pechin, has written a review of the meeting,

Using Variable Length Arguments With JavaScript

2007-06-13T15:13:00.000-04:00

There are times when you simply don't know how many arguments a function will be receiving. Some languages handle this sort of problem with function (or method) overloading-defining a function multiple times with each function definition containing a different number (or type) of parameters. With JavaScript, you can code one function that can dynamically handle different function definitions.

Introduction to AJAX

2007-06-12T19:44:00.000-04:00

AJAX is an essential tool in any web developer's toolbox. We'll take a quick look at the history of the technology, and how you can use it in your web applications.The computer industry thrives on acronyms. AJAX is no exception. Short for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, AJAX has actually existed in one form or another for nearly a decade, although it's only seen a surge in popularity for the

XML: A Basic Overview

2007-06-11T13:49:00.000-04:00

We'll take a basic overview of the language that's increasingly powering the Internet: XML.XML stands for Extensible Markup Language, and was standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium, who were obviously poor spellers. XML is a language that is mostly used to transfer data between systems. Since XML is a markup language, if you've seen HTML, XML will look familiar. It uses tags(elements) with

Building Windows Classic Menus in Flex

2007-05-22T20:33:00.000-04:00

Looking to give your Flex based applications a more native look and feel? To that end we'll show you how to go about creating 'windows classic' menus.First, let’s examine how menus work in Flex. We’ll create a simple menu using the mx:MenuBar component. Then we'll move on to styling it to match the 'windows classic' skin. Lastly, we'll inject some ActionScript code to fix some deficiencies in the

It's the End of Luminis As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

2007-03-27T15:28:00.000-04:00

Prior to Summit, on the eve of the release of Luminis IV, there were rumors spreading that Luminis' future as a portal built on a uPortal architecture was seriously in doubt. The rumors indicated that Luminis was going to undergo a radical transformation and be rebuilt on Oracle portal.At the UDC kickoff session at Summit, this seemed to be confirmed; Brian Maddox, Sungard CEO, announced that

The Future of ComCenter

2007-03-25T22:02:00.000-04:00

I've released the first .5 versions of ComCenter to both RiaForge.org and osflash.org. Halfway to 1.0, this seems to be a good time to consider where ComCenter is and where its going.For starters, the release schedule is going to slow down slightly-the first 5 point releases were completed in less than two months. As the code gets more complex, and more complicated features get added, I can't see

Flex Image Viewer: ComCenter 0.5

2007-02-24T08:56:00.000-05:00

I'm pleased to announce the release of ComCenter 0.5. ComCenter 0.5 features the ability to zoom in on images, basic help, the ability to print images, some basic search capabilities, and the ability to paginate the thumbnails display.Once you have brought up the image in the image window, clicking on it will increase the zoom and ctrl-click will zoom out. There is some basic help text included

Flex Menus In Context

2007-02-21T09:45:00.000-05:00

There's one point in the Flex livedocs language reference on Context Menus that reads:"In Flex, only top-level components in the application can have context menus. For example, if a DataGrid control is a child of a TabNavigator or VBox container, the DataGrid control cannot have its own context menu."Then how would you give sub-components their own context menu?The way to do this is to track

Is E4X Strong Enough to Obviate the Need for an Object Layer?

2007-02-11T11:04:00.000-05:00

In many applications, a common task is to load data as XML, and then translate this into 'objects' that are used by the program. You can see this kind of behavior in ComCenter, but I've also used it in many programs that use XML over the years.Part of the reason I've done this is because using standard XML access methods whether it be through SAX, DOM, or some other method was awkward-it was much

ComCenter Demo

2007-02-04T09:37:00.000-05:00

I'm keeping this blog entry to contain the current demo of ComCenter:document.getElementById('sidebar-wrapper').display = "none";

Flex Image Viewer: ComCenter 0.4

2007-01-30T19:34:00.000-05:00

I'm pleased to announce the release of ComCenter 0.4. ComCenter 0.4 features the ability to rotate thumbnails (so you can align them to their proper orientation), a slightly more native look, and each thumbnail shows a placeholder until its ready for display. There were a couple of other miscellaneous changes as well. You can now associate an event (such as "Our Florida Vacation", or "Uncle Joe's

Flex Image Viewer: ComCenter 0.3

2007-01-14T22:46:00.000-05:00

I'm pleased to announce the release of ComCenter 0.3. ComCenter 0.3 features an improved layout, the ability to set a description or caption for each image, and the ability to alter the thumbnail dimensions. ComCenter can be downloaded here. A demo of it can be found here. There were a couple of other miscellaneous changes as well (for example, the image properties window now displays the image

Building An Image Viewer in Flex: Part 2

2007-01-12T10:37:00.000-05:00

The last time, we saw how to build a very simple image viewer in Flex. But the code we developed(outside of the 'About' window) was the bare minimum to get something like this working. In this article we'll flush it out a bit more and walk through some of the code in ComCenter 0.2.First of all, the code that was developed wasn't that flexible. Images were actually embedded in the swf. This was

Flex Image Viewer: ComCenter 0.2

2007-01-05T07:26:00.000-05:00

I'm pleased to announce the release of ComCenter 0.2. This is a Flex image viewer I had been working on while learning Flex. ComCenter 0.2 features basic keyboard control and the ability to associate properties with each image. Images are now loaded externally. ComCenter can be downloaded here. A demo of it can be found here. Needless to say, this is only a 0.2 release so there is a long way to

Flex Image Viewer: ComCenter 0.1

2007-01-01T20:31:00.000-05:00

A couple of months ago, I had posted about an image viewer I had written in Flex. Last month I set up a project and posted the code on osflash.org. There's not much there at the moment(outside of the original code), but I'll be making updates soon.

Open Source Rules

2006-11-29T21:22:00.000-05:00

A couple of major developments have occurred during the past few weeks in the world of open source.First, Adobe has open sourced portions of the Flash player. Specifically, they've donated the ActionScript 3.0 virtual machine to the Mozilla Foundation. Now listed as Project Tamarin, the foundation intends to use the code to accelerate JavaScript. Since ActionScript and JavaScript are based on the

Building An Image Viewer in Flex

2006-11-21T09:55:00.000-05:00

One of my earliest experiments in Flex was to build a simple image viewer. The image viewer would display a series of thumbnails that would give you the full image when it was clicked on.Building something like this in Flex takes all of two seconds. Here's how. We'll create a sample application called ComCenter.General LayoutFirst we start off with an mx:Application tag. This is usually the first

AD&D Channels 2nd Edition

2006-11-18T00:59:00.000-05:00

This post is my third, and probably last(at least for a while) on drag and drop channels in Luminis. If you haven't read the first two, "D&D Channels" and "AD&D Channels", make sure you read them first, as this post builds off of them.Making the AJAX ConnectionWe're going to replace the location.href line at the bottom of the DragChannel.js file with some AJAX code to make the call back to

XML Error Reporting: AS2 Trumps AS3

2006-11-16T11:32:00.000-05:00

Perhaps I have a unique way of using XML, but it seems to me that AS3 has superior native XML error reporting while simultaneously removing your ability to improve upon the error reporting even further like you were able to in AS2.In AS3, you have two ways of parsing an XML document-either through the new e4x API or through the DOM, which was the way you parsed XML in AS2.In an ideal world, all

AD&D Channels

2006-11-14T13:58:00.000-05:00

Advanced Drag and Drop ChannelsLast time we saw the basics of drag and drop channels. But it wasn't something I would recommend going into production with. Yes, you could drag. You could drop. You could even integrate the drag and drop into Luminis's layout architecture-but there were several deficiencies that were noteworthy. Its these deficiencies we'll address now to make this a more robust

Web Developer Extension

2006-11-12T18:49:00.000-05:00

The Web Developer Extension is an indispensable extension for Firefox that provides a wealth of tools for debugging your webpage. It allows you to disable Java, JavaScript, CSS and cookies. But this just scratches the surface. One of my favorite features is 'View Generated Source'-this allows you to view the source of the page after any changes made by JavaScript during page rendering. You can

D&D Channels

2006-11-10T06:46:00.000-05:00

A little earlier this year, a group of people here at Hofstra sat down and made a wish list of all the things we wished our portal could do but didn't. This wish list was based to some extent on our own experiences with Luminis, but also based on focus groups that had been run with faculty and students. I'll get back to the wish list in a future post-but one of the items that we listed was

ActionScript 3 NaN: Not a No-brainer

2006-11-08T01:35:00.000-05:00

In ActionScript 3, you can no longer assign null to specific native data types. If you try to do this with 'Number' for example you'll receive a warning that 'null used where Number type expected'. Take the following code snippet for example:var MyNumber:Number;MyNumber = getNumber();if (MyNumber == null){ // do something}If you try to return 'null' from the getNumber() method you'll receive

Better Casting Through ActionScript 3

2006-11-06T15:19:00.000-05:00

In ActionScript 2, you could cast an object to a type by using:ClassName(ObjectToCast)This syntax is somewhat different than what you have in other languages. Usually in C-like languages you'll use something like this:(ClassName)ObjectToCastIt doesn't seem a lot different, does it? But there is a problem with the way casting is done in ActionScript 2. ActionScript 2 also contains global creation

Resolving URLs: AS3 Bug?

2006-11-04T20:24:00.000-05:00

A common task I've often run into is resolving URLs. Given a base URL and a relative URL, how do you obtain the resultant absolute URL? I've written routines that do this sort of thing in AS2, but AS3 makes it much easier on you. You can simply do this:var AbsoluteURL = URLUtil.getFullURL(BaseURL, RelativeURL);This is great-but it seems to fail resolving local URLs. Often when testing your

Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2

2006-11-02T20:01:00.000-05:00

Within the past couple of weeks we've had two major browser releases, Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. Microsoft originally had no plans to release a new browser until Vista came out, but then suddenly reversed course and announced IE 7 about a year ago. Popular conjecture at the time was that it was due to the fact that Firefox was slowly eating into its overwhelming market share. Internet

Blogger Beta

2006-10-30T09:48:00.000-05:00

The end of this month marks the one year mark since this blog was started. In the past couple of months I've overhauled the templates so that its geared to a 1024x768 resolution, added the title graphic (a picture I took from the leeward coast of Oahu last year), adjusted the individual item pages to carry story summaries, and signed up with Feedburner so the feed can be carried by RSS-only feed

RIAForge

2006-10-27T20:36:00.000-04:00

Recently, Ray Camden announced the release of RIAForge. RIAForge, the brainchild of Adobe senior evangelist Ben Forta, is a website that will host open source projects that utilize Adobe technologies in creating rich internet applications(think of it as a primitive SourceForge that is Adobe specific).RIAForge offers services that include blogs integration with Subversion, etc.Of course, there

FlashDevelop 2.0

2006-10-24T20:03:00.000-04:00

FlashDevelop 2.0, an open source ActionScript editor, was released a couple of weeks ago. It has long integrated with MTASC and been primarily used for ActionScript 2 development, but FlashDevelop 2.0 now supports ActionScript 3 and MXML auto-completion, and provides a way to tie into the Flex 2 MXML compiler. Outside of FlexBuilder, FlashDevelop is probably the best ActionScript editor around,

The Secret of Mims

2006-10-21T06:21:00.000-04:00

At the last NYC Adobe User's Group Meeting, there was an excellent presentation by Mims Wright(yes, that's his real name) of Schematic. He covered some general questions about Flex 2.0 for people who hadn't been playing with it yet and with the help of one seriously bipolar bear(um...you'll just have to see it) also demonstrated how to use the state pattern. States are of critical importance in

MXNA

2006-10-18T20:19:00.000-04:00

I am pleased to announce that my blog is now being carried by MXNA! This is so unexpected, I didn't even have a speech prepared. But I would like to say this: being aggregated by MXNA is not something you can do all on your own. Many, many people contributed to my aggregation. I'd like to thank Daniel Taborga at Adobe, for taking a chance on an unknown blogger; Google, for finally giving me the

ActionScript Design Patterns

2006-10-15T06:38:00.000-04:00

Recently I attended a seminar by Danny Patterson (co-author of "Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns" and "Macromedia Flash 8 ActionScript: Training from the Source") on ActionScript design patterns. It was part of the monthly NYC Adobe User's Group meeting hosted by Schematic.Design patterns have been all the rage in software development the past couple of years, but in case you've been

Flex Data Services

2006-10-12T07:26:00.000-04:00

Recently I blogged about attending a seminar by Ben Forta where he discussed Flex and ColdFusion. During the presentation he gave a little background on Flex and its various components. I had seen this before numerous times, but the one thing that caught my attention (and that I had previously somehow missed) was that there is a free version of Flex Data Services called Flex Data Services Express

Ben Forta Presents: ColdFusion and Flex

2006-10-09T07:01:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I attended an Adobe seminar in New York that spoke about how Flex and ColdFusion could be integrated. The presentation was given by Ben Forta, the well known Adobe evangelist, and if you've ever seen him speak before, you know that his presentations are usually excellent. This time was no different.Ben's presentation showed how ridiculously easy it was to tie Flex into

Generics in Java 1.5 - Is it Too Late to Go Back?

2006-10-06T16:59:00.000-04:00

Ok-I admit it. I've been falling behind in the world of Java. It was only a couple of months ago that I sat down and began playing around with 1.5 and some of its new features. Even if you don't plan on using any of the features available in 1.5 the one feature you probably will be unable to avoid is generics.Compared to many languages, Java is strictly typed. This doesn't mean Java is completely

Extreme Ironing

2006-10-03T09:37:00.000-04:00

This should win bizarre website of the year award. According to the site, Extreme Ironing is "the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well pressed shirt." They've had world championships and there are people who are pushing for its inclusion as an Olympic sport. (Judging by some of the other sports that are in the Olympics at

CF Studio: Back From the Dead?

2006-09-27T05:16:00.001-04:00

ColdFusion Studio hasn't really been updated since ColdFusion 5 (although you can download new tags definitions and help files for Studio from Adobe) According to Adobe, there are several features of the upcoming ColdFusion 8 that would really benefit from having an IDE. So they are faced with three choices: enhance ColdFusion support in Dreamweaver, resurrect ColdFusion Studio, or do what other

dojo

2006-09-24T13:18:00.000-04:00

Last time I blogged about YouOS, an operating system-like interface that you could run in a browser. YouOS is an extremely impressive demonstration of what Web 2.0 is suppose to be about and is largely built on top of dojo, a JavaScript toolkit. I've recently finished stage one of a project using Scriptaculous (which I'll detail soon) - but if I could go back and start over, I might consider

YouOS

2006-09-21T20:15:00.000-04:00

With the recent Web 2.0 focus on rich user interfaces, we've started to see software that has historically been desktop-centric (such as word processors and spreadsheets) begin to migrate to the web. Web-based operating system-like interfaces like YouOS seem to be the next logical step. Although I suspect this isn't by far the first attempt at something like this, it seems to be one of the most

Scriptaculous

2006-09-18T10:46:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been playing around with Scriptaculous. Scriptaculous is a free JavaScript library built on top of Prototype, a popular JavaScript library that's bundled with Ruby on Rails. It supports all kinds of Web 2.0 features such as drag and drop, animation, AJAX and various screen effects. I think the documentation could be a little more thorough (docs on Scriptaculous are available as a wiki

Web 2.0

2006-09-15T04:57:00.000-04:00

"Web 2.0" is a reference to the next generation of the web and has usually focused on sites that provide rich user interfaces or novel user interactions such as social networking. The problem with the phrase-just what is or isn't "Web 2.0"-has often been somewhat ill defined. One of the best articles to try to pin down the definition has been this one over at O'Reilly (from the people who

New Hofstra Website

2006-09-12T15:17:00.000-04:00

I'm pleased to announce the unveiling of the new Hofstra website. The website features a new design which was created by TellArt and implemented by Hofstra's Interactive Media department. The new website went live on September 1st, but there's still much work to be done (only a couple hundred pages have been converted over to the new design). My department has provided technical support

Goggles: Google Map Based Flight Sim

2006-09-09T09:57:00.000-04:00

This was pretty clever-using Flash and Google Maps, this site has built a 2d flight simulator. I actually tried landing at an airport, but there doesn't seem to be a way to safely land :-)

Flash Projector Bug - No Notification On Local File Access

2006-09-06T18:39:00.000-04:00

The other day I was doing something pretty standard in Flash-building a preloader. The project I was working on was a projector and I didn't think that most of the code I had written would be much different. Boy, was I wrong.In my preloader, I had created a pretty typical status bar that used MovieClip.getBytesLoaded() to calculate how far along it was in loading some video off of a DVD. Except

Flash Animation vs. Creator

2006-09-03T20:43:00.000-04:00

Someone pointed this animation out to me the other day-I had seen it a couple of months back, but it still seems pretty cool. One of the nice things about it is how it shows off the Flash IDE. The bad thing is it doesn't say who the author was.

ColdFusion Online Seminars

2006-08-24T20:23:00.000-04:00

Adobe is running a handful of free online ColdFusion seminars featuring, amongst other things, many great features available in CF 7. You can read more about it here.

Adding Methods to Native HTML Elements

2006-08-21T19:24:00.000-04:00

We recently developed a function that returned all of the sub-elements of an element that used a specific CSS class. If you remember, one of the parameters passed was ElementRoot(the element to search from).The built in method getElementsByTagName also works in a similar fashion, retrieving all sub-elements of a specified root element. But the syntax is somewhat different-instead of passing

Safari and Non-Anonymous Function Passing

2006-08-18T11:40:00.000-04:00

In JavaScript, you can pass functions to other functions as a parameter-the same way you would any other object. So you can do something like this: function getName() { return (name); } function addFunction(MyFunction) { ... } var GetNameFunction = getName; addFunction(GetNameFunction);In the above we assign a variable to the function getName and then pass it as a parameter to an

Retrieving Elements By CSS Class

2006-08-15T20:22:00.000-04:00

Recently, I needed to retrieve all of the DIVs in an area that used a specific CSS class. Although browsers allow you to retrieve HTML elements in a variety of ways, such as by identifier or by tag type, there is no way to retrieve elements by class.So, the best bet is to roll our own. An easy way to do this is to use the Element.getElementsByTagName() function call. Just like it sounds, it

XML Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye

2006-08-12T17:04:00.000-04:00

Luminis uses nested-tables.xsl to style XML that its spits out. Although you can get into nested-tables and make all kinds of alterations, I've seen a couple of people ask what the original XML file that nested-tables is actually transforming looks like. I was kind of curious myself due to a project I was working on. Here's how you can get it.I take no credit for this-I dug it up off the net and

Happy Birthday Flash!

2006-08-09T22:18:00.000-04:00

The other night, Kevin Pechin & I went to a birthday party-for Flash! Flash's 10th birthday party was being held by the NYC Adobe User's Group. They even had ice cream cake(something that everyone appreciated twice as much since the temperature was in the upper 90's).During the meeting, many of the atendees spoke of their favorite flash sites of the past decade. Here are a few of them:http://

Flash Tenth Anniversary Seminar Series

2006-08-06T03:50:00.000-04:00

Adobe is holding a series of online sessions celebrating Flash's 10th Anniversary. You can see more details here. I've signed up for most of the sessions and I'll talk a little bit about them in a later post.

Blackboard Jungle

2006-08-03T09:38:00.000-04:00

It used to be the case that as a new major version of Blackboard came out, your CPIP connectors would break. So when Blackboard 6 came out, Blackboard 5 connectors no longer worked. This was annoying; yet hardly surprising.Then Blackboard started making changes on point versions; so if you try to migrate to 6.3, your connectors that worked fine in 6.2 no longer work.Now, things have gotten so

Congratulations Kevin!

2006-07-28T09:35:00.000-04:00

I just wanted to offer my congratulations to my friend Kevin Pechin who recently got married. Congratulations Kev-everyone here is soo happy for you!!!

Welcome Howie Hamlin

2006-07-24T09:30:00.000-04:00

I'd like to welcome Howie Hamlin to Web Development at Hofstra. Howie is our new Web Development Technology Coordinator and is a long time ColdFusion programmer(since 1.5!). Welcome to the team, Howie!

Everybody Was Popup Blockin'

2006-07-20T23:21:00.000-04:00

Over the past couple of years popup blockers have become a standard part of the web browsing experience. And now they're starting to impact the world of Flash. Most popup blockers work by only blocking popups that are launched without responding to user events-so if a user clicks on a link that launches a popup, that's fine. But if a popup tries to launch on page load, it gets blocked.After popup

Great News From Apollo

2006-07-16T23:21:00.000-04:00

If you haven't been keeping up with all the news in the world of Flash (a difficult task considering how many exciting things have been happening lately) Apollo is an Adobe project aimed at allowing developers to better utilize Flash(and HTML and PDF) in desktop environments in a cross-platform fashion. Users will install a runtime that they can then use to run applications written for

Adobe and Macromedia: So Happy Together!

2006-07-12T21:50:00.000-04:00

It's been over half a year since Adobe and Macromedia completed their merger. At the time it was announced I remember there being some angst in the development community. Adobe wasn't a 'development' company-people were afraid that they wouldn't understand developers or would unintentionally ruin what Macromedia had worked so long to build.After half-a-year, not only has it become obvious that

NYC Adobe User's Group

2006-07-08T10:25:00.000-04:00

The other night I went to the first meeting of the NYC Adobe User's Group. It's graciously being hosted by Schematic. It was a small crowd, smaller than the Long Island Flash Users Group meetings were. What there wasn't in numbers was made up for in the sheer expertise of the speakers & attendees.There were two great presentations, one by Alec Cove who discussed Flade, his open source 2d physics

Flash 9 Released

2006-07-04T16:38:00.000-04:00

Surprisingly, Flash 9 player and Flex 2 were released last week. In addition, as promised, an alpha of the Flash 9 authoring tool is also available for download via the labs.adobe.com website. Its been less than a year since Flash 8 was released, so I guess its time to really get up to speed. I've reviewed most of the great new features in Flash 9 (back when it was Flash 8.5) here.

Loading Stylesheets in Firefox

2006-06-24T09:17:00.000-04:00

I ran into an odd issue with loading an external stylesheet with Firefox recently. Using a regular import style command( @import URI;), the stylesheet failed to load, but only in Firefox-Internet Explorer had no problems. This turned out to be because Firefox requires the stylesheet to be served with a correct mime-type from the web server(text/css). Although I haven't tested this out, I think

Parsing URL Variables With JavaScript

2006-06-20T12:38:00.000-04:00

URL variables are variables that are passed in as part of the address(URL)of a page. Typically they are a series of name-value pairs that are separated by an ampersand and are delineated from the page's URL by a question mark. Normally you grab these vars with a backend language like JSP or PHP and act on them there. There are times though when you either don't have access to a backend language

How the Eolas Lawsuit Effects You

2006-06-16T10:57:00.000-04:00

Some time ago a small company called Eolas announced that they possessed the patent on browser plugins. As you can imagine, the web basically freaked out. Eolas tried to reassure everyone by saying it only wanted to go after Microsoft. The web wasn't reassured because Microsoft announced they might have to drastically alter Internet Explorer's plugin architecture. A couple of years later the

Adobe Developer Week

2006-06-12T12:45:00.000-04:00

This week, Adobe is holding Developer Week - a series of online sessions dedicated to exploring up and coming Adobe technologies such as Flash 9, Flex & Apollo. I've already signed up for a bunch of sessions-(mostly ColdFusion and Flash related ones). You can check it out here.Update- 07/07/06The sessions from developer week are now online here.

Getting the BODY flush

2006-06-08T10:57:00.000-04:00

Most browsers place a bit of space at the top of your page and in the left margin. This space exists even if you have code right against your opening BODY tag. Using CSS, you can force your content to be flush against the top left of your page.BODY{ margin: 0px; padding: 0px;}

Congratulations Henry!

2006-06-04T09:32:00.000-04:00

I just wanted to offer my congratulations to my friend Henry Wagner who got married this past week. (Obscure Trivia: Henry set up Hofstra's first webserver about 12 years ago :-).

Flex 2

2006-05-25T08:54:00.000-04:00

A couple of years back, Macromedia announced Flex-a developer centric approach to creating Flash. Flex takes an XML-based layout-language called MXML(XML layout languages seemed to be a trend in the industry now-see everything from XUL to XAML), added Actionscript and with Flex (a Java app) you compile this down to SWF. When it came out, I found it very interesting, but couldn't quite bring

Apache 2.2

2006-05-20T15:49:00.000-04:00

Apache 2.2 has been released. What I'm very glad to see is finally a way to tie authentication into LDAP (this has been in alpha release on Apache 2.0 for a while-but its production quality in 2.2 and the 2.0 version of this module should be out soon). You can download it from http://httpd.apache.org/.

Firefox 1.5

2006-05-15T13:37:00.000-04:00

Firefox 1.5, one of the newest releases of the Mozilla based browser has a number of important new features. Better pop up blocking, stronger support for AJAX and my favorite, the ability to finally reorganize your tabs (long overdue and previously only available through a custom Firefox extension). Firefox seems to still be the best browser at there-especially from a development standpoint with

Noodles on My Back

2006-05-10T10:23:00.000-04:00

If you haven't seen this animation about a hippopotamus who loves to wear noodles-its kind of strange and yet undeniably catchy. The impressive thing about it is that the animation, music and all the voices were done by the same guy.

Introducing Corwyn Ferris!

2006-05-05T10:34:00.000-04:00

It isn't too often that I use this space for anything personal-but I'm definitely making an exception. I'm happy to announce the birth of my son, Corwyn Kai Ferris yesterday at 10:40 AM!!! Corwyn and mom are doing fine! Pictures can be found at the website above.

Back from Summit

2006-04-24T10:54:00.000-04:00

I got back from Sungard Summit a couple of weeks back. This was by far the best summit yet-probably thanks to Jon Wheat. He convinced Sungard to set up a developer's lounge-where they featured cutting edge stuff that many of the schools were doing with Luminis. In previous years, demonstrations at Summit while interesting, had rarely been innovative or exciting. The presentations given during the

Valkyrie's Password is About to Die (Tying Luminis into Novell Password Expirations)

2006-04-18T10:01:00.000-04:00

Someone had asked me about this at Summit so I figured I would finally get around to putting it up. We're using EAS to Novell LDAP for our Luminis logins and last year we were asked to find a way to notify users if their password was about to expire.Novell eDirectory is nice enough to store some of their password related fields in LDAP (the ones you'll need are passwordExpirationTime and

Creating Categories in Blogger

2006-04-12T13:32:00.000-04:00

One of the irritating things I found when switching over to Blogger was the lack of categories. There are a few hacks out there to get around this, but my favorite is a post by phydeaux on using del.icio.us to implement Blogger categories. So far its worked out pretty well here. (Thanks phydeaux3!)

Mnemonic Conflict with Swing Actions

2006-04-06T08:31:00.000-04:00

As I've stated in previous postings, I haven't played with Java in a long, long time. So I decided to take a look at some old code that I had lying around. One odd thing I ran into with Swing actions was a mnemonic conflict. There are times you may assign the same mnemonic to a JMenu and a JMenuItem(one that immediately springs to mind is the 'File' menu and a menu item on another menu that

Goodbye, Lanny. We'll miss you.

2006-03-21T09:00:00.000-05:00

Many people don't like their bosses. They believe that its just one of those facts of life that their boss has been put on this earth for the sole reason of making them miserable. Although this seems to be a widely-held opinion, over time it has only confirmed to me what I've always believed-that I have been truly lucky because I've had nothing but not only competent, but exceptional

Accessibility at Hofstra

2006-03-14T08:27:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks back I went to an excellent presentation by Frank Bowe on electronic accessibility at Hofstra.He's provided it online here.

Moving to Blogger

2006-03-07T08:09:00.000-05:00

After trying to keep my blog up on people.hofstra.edu for almost six months, I've decided to finally make the move to Blogger. Currently, the people server doesn't have any automated tools to support blogging. Its difficult enough to keep a blog up-to-date without having to replicate the work of blogging software. Hopefully, when the people server is rebuilt sometime this year, we'll be able to

MARQUEE Is Back

2006-02-20T09:52:00.000-05:00

Early on in the history of the web, each time a major new browser was released, it invented new HTML tags. Browser releases were pretty exciting then as you were given great new capabilities with each new release(and this was before HTML became bogged down in standards over at the W3C).The downside to the innovation though was a lack of compatibility between major browser vendors (stuff that

Overview of Java GUI Frameworks

2006-02-10T16:50:00.000-05:00

When Java first appeared on the scene in 1995, it featured a GUI component library. Its easy to forget now how incredible this was. Languages that existed then (C, C++, Pascal, etc.) didn't have any graphics that were defined as part of the language standard. Instead, language extensions were added to handle graphics and GUIs on a per-platform basis. Even on a single platform, graphics libraries

New Position

2006-01-15T16:49:00.000-05:00

I've recently been promoted to Internet Technology Project Leader. I appreciate the promotion and am looking forward to the challenges it provides in the days ahead.

Granular Control of Targeted Channel Content With JavaScript

2005-12-08T16:35:00.000-05:00

In Luminis, there is a specific channel type called a 'targeted channel'. This channel type allows you to create content that will be seen by a specific role. Typically, you create a targeted channel and then create subchannels that are assigned to different roles in your portal. So if you had content for a channel that should appear if you're an alumni and other content that should appear

Building SSO to Groupwise With Luminis CPIP GCF

2005-12-07T16:18:00.000-05:00

One of the more challenging CPIP connectors to build for Luminis Portal using the Generic Connector Framework was the connector to Groupwise Web Access. This is basically how we did it.We found that Groupwise web access was setting two cookies JSESSIONID and NJSCN - one of these cookies had the user's IP address encoded in it. These were set at the Groupwise login page(before the user logs in).

Bypassing the External Systems Error Screen in Luminis

2005-12-06T13:33:00.000-05:00

If you have EAS (External Authentication Service) configured in Luminis, and you change your password in the external system, Luminis will give you an error screen telling you it doesn't match the password that it has on record.Jon Wheat of the Luminis Developer Network pointed out recently that since Luminis performs the password comparison in a case sensitive matter, it will give you this

Making the Generic Connector Framework Even More Generic

2005-12-05T12:37:00.000-05:00

Sungard SCT's Luminis way of connecting to other external services is called CPIP (Campus Pipeline Integration Protocol). For each external service you want to connect to you develop a CPIP connector. To make the task of developing CPIP connector's easy on their client, Sungard has created something called the Generic Connector Framework. The GCF is a CPIP connector that connects to a

St. John's Hosts NY SunGard SCT Clients' Day

2005-12-02T12:36:00.000-05:00

A few weeks back I attended and spoke at a get-together of area schools that were either Banner schools or schools that were implementing Luminis. It was great, because you had a chance to see what everyone else was doing. Many schools were still in the evaluation or implementation phase of Luminis. There's still much I would love to explore with the product;

The End of an Era

2005-12-01T12:33:00.000-05:00

Adobe announced today that they had received regulatory clearance to complete their merger with Macromedia. They are estimating that it will be completed on Saturday. More info can be found here. Although hopeful for the future, I'll miss Macromedia.

Page Defaulting in WMX

2005-11-30T12:21:00.000-05:00

In the old days, every time you created a page in the content management system, there are certain things you would *always* have to do, such as add a top-left image to your new page, or a menu on the left side. This was tedious, as the top left image is essentially the same on every page in the section. WMX can take care of doing this for you with a new feature called 'Page

Surveying the Browser Landscape

2005-11-29T12:13:00.000-05:00

Even though what was known as the 'browser wars' have long since ended, there are still a number of different browsers in existance today. We'll rundown the top ones in this entry. Browser Browser Hits Visits % Visits 1. Microsoft Internet Explorer 382,363 22,160 87.10%

Spark Online

2005-11-28T12:12:00.000-05:00

The Flash Conferences are coming fast and furious. Spark, a Flash Conference in Amsterdam just wrapped up, and they've posted some of the sessions online at fabchannel.com. For a good overview of where Flash is going, I'd recommend checking out Kevin Lynch's keynote speech which covers everything from AS 3.0 to Flash Lite & Apollo.

32K - Say It Ain't So!

2005-11-23T12:11:00.000-05:00

One odd thing that I only ran into when I started working with ActionScript seriously is that classes in AS 2.0 can be no larger than 32K. This limitation makes AS development more complicated than it should be. I've seen some postings that suggest that this is due to limitation of the SWF file format. Apparently this was a problem even is the AS 1.0 days