How the Flex community in Brazil really works

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Filed under Conferences, Flex, Personal, Web 2.0 with Flex

Simple, we enable dream’s of others with all we have in hands. It’s good when you’re capable of doing such thing for helping others to achieve their dreams with less pain.
The Flex for Kids is a first glance on-line event made for individuals and notable Flex stars in Brazil to collect money donations to help a institue called “Cotolengo” that helps Childrens with mental disabilities.
The hole event gonna be on-line in Portuguese only where I was fortune enough to talk about “Face off your jee application with Flex”. And other great crew of community members that really like to help.

I’m pretty happy with all speakers that donate their time for a noble moment in the children’s life.

Watch the Video preso we did to help you understand why we did this event. And what’s the brick wall that we have in dayly basis.

Visit the Flex for Kids website. Sorry but doesn’t have English version.

Flashcamp Brasil was awesome

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Filed under Conferences, RIA

Wowa! I’m so lack on this blog. Reason is I’ve been quite busy on other things. Happy new year for you my reader.
This year we had in Brazil the Flashcamp Brasil, where we could put together 380 attendents and many killer presentations.
I was fortune enough to talk in the event called by the organizer and friend Demian Borba who had to manage all the event.

Lee Brimelow, Daniel Dura, Sam Rivello, Guys of Influxis and all the members of Flex/Flash community down here was an amazing company. For sure was awesome to meet all those guys from all over the world to the Brazil.

My title session was about “The marvelous Flex 4 ” – 40 big changes in Flex 4 to learn it.

During my presentation we talk about the next big features in Flex 4 and some complains against Flash Catalyst that is subject for another post later on this year.

Thanks a lot for Demian, and the sponsors of FlashCamp Brasil. Loved the shape of event and excited for next year.

Flex Component Kit CS3 not working on Flash CS4, how to fix?

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Filed under Flash, Flash CS3, Flex

If you’re like me right now dealing with this problem. you might take a look bellow to to fix this annoying problem. Specially if you’re running Flash 10.0.2.

When you upgrade to Flash IDE 10.0.2 the Adobe Flash Team has a bug that doesn’t really shows even on Bugbase I searched there and found nothing.

How to fix that?

1. Open up Flash IDE CS4
2. Go to menu Help > Manage Extension
3. Search for the Flash Component Kit CS3.mxp instalation file, even if you’re going to look at CS4 will not find, but it works with CS4 version.
4. Install and activate.

But if you already installed the FCK and didn’t workout do the same as steps above except number 4. To work just mark the installed FCK.

Simple as that, It toked me an our to figure out that.

Techcrunch bastards!

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Filed under General announcements

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Pretty close to in beging of september 2009, a techcrunch writer Sarah Lacy wrote a bad article about us Brazilian and his not well done way to get the visa.
The fact is the problem that happened to her need to get close verification and see what really happened. But what I blame due to is my beloved contry is the way of she put the Flag of a nation in epic-fail due to a little process of getting a visa.
The wrost thing ever is that Michel the owner of site accept her view and still get the flag of Brazil on the article. We know that freedom of speech need to ensure, but not in disrespecting on that manner.
It’s a shame for the guys of Tech Crunch support such initiative of her.

Particular problem of mine happened in 2002,2003,2004 and 2005 when I’ve tried so many times to get a VISA in to USA and never got it so far. By for now I have one in my last tentative to attend to MAX 2008. But for family reasons I couldn’t get part of the MAX.
Even with so many tries I didn’t blame or screw up USA country, due to they have to control kind of it. And I do all respect for the country but blame the guys of Embassy that doesn’t know when someone wants to get a visa to be part of event.

Sarah with no respect you pissed off.

Little trick to speed up FB and to wont use clean project

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Filed under Flex Builder, Personal

I was having problem in Windows Vista Ultimate due to lack of my flex project getting bigger and every time bigger seems that Flex Builder delays the compilation and/or eclipse wont work okay.
Problem was time consuming and didn’t figure out how or what to do. I’ve searched on Google and didn’t came up on any trick or tip to do that so.
Anyway luckly in same day I was cleaning machine processes to release some memory to Flex Builder in the main time I executed the CCleaner , a Windows utility tool to clean up craps on your windows.
So, I clean up things that was annoying to me and re-start my windows. Magically my Eclipse didn’t came out with any lag or delay to recompilation and don’t need no more clean this project to get last swf compiled.

Anyway. Didn’t know or still don’t know if this is just a lucky day or happen with somebody else. I ask to my readers to do the test if this is happening with your PC after you do this process and let me know if it cutts off the time in half.


BTW So sorry to not been so activity on this blog. Working hard as a Flex dev is getting me too much time and when back to home just want to relax and hang out with wife. Real life buddies.

What kind of developer do you fits in?

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Filed under General announcements

Found this interesting article talking about a 10 types of developers you will find in the field of development.
The only one I didn’t see yet in my career is the Gandalf type. After reading this I feel myself #2.

Flex Mania 2009 The Loud voice from Brazil

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Filed under Conferences, Flex

Yes. After 5 years working hard, teaching people, spreading the word and trying to share code, samples, passion about a technology we’re going to have our first ever Flex/Flash Event in Brazil.

Flex Mania is a Brazilian developer/design event for those who works with Flash Platform and specially Flex and speaks Portuguese.
It’s an open and free conference for Brazilians or people who speak Portuguese to participate. Even with a little slot for 300 capacity. All sessions will be in Portuguese and three in English. In total will be 20 sessions mostly of them for Flex and some for Flash.

I would love to share with you the aspects evolved in organize such event.

Isn’t easy to organize a event even if it’s on-line. You have to delegate many tasks and keep track of little details. And this is getting me very excited and happy. I’m learning a lot and for sure this is going to be a calendar event for next years to come.

The Challenge:

The Supporters

The Adobe presence in Brazil isn’t equal in US, Europe and India. Where they have a big budget, evangelists and a team to take care about the RIA aspect. For lucky in life I met people that can help out me a lot in this field. From US I have Matt Chottin, Rachel Luxemburg, Stacy Sison, J. Randy all crew from Adobe. And I must say to them a HUGE thank for supporting me in this event. They are for sure the bigger suppliers.

The Economy:

We’re living a economy crisis, and in Brazil we’re not different from other countries. In this field We would like to have sponsors and more companies evolved. But thinking a little bit, the first cuts in companies are sponsors and marketing things, all over the world. And this couldn’t fit well in the event. We had the guarantee from our supporters that I could arrange the event and the infra-structure was complete. Why do i need for this first time a sponsor? Who knows on the next edition.

The Location and geographical aspect:

Brazil is huge, a country with so many different locations, cultures and behaviors. To arrange a event in presence mode we had to create a local community big. Mostly city in Brazil to organize IT events are in São Paulo. But São Paulo is so suture about events that become expensive enough to anyone who lives outside to participate in a event. Then the most sense decision was to include the event on-line and free. Where no matter where you are in Brazil or outside in Brazil and you can understand Portuguese, you can participate.
Two rabbits killed on one shot. We did.

The Sessions, content:

I’ve get so inspired about 360 Conferences and Head Conference that I dream to include the same content in sessions spoken from brazilians communitiers. I’ve search a little bit to find out some that have a high capacity on those Flex fields. And to include more speaks on the list and give a thank for those who visit this blog. I invited some gurus of World Flex community to speak. I’m pleased to have Stephen Downs(Tink), Laura Arguello, Iiley Chen and Mrinal Wadhwa. They had contribute to the community since I met Flash player and so long. Thank you guys you rock.

Those three speakers are going to speak in english where is good enough for those who want to learn more about their sessions titles.

The last but not Least:

Everything not come to free or easy. Become this event true, is a high emotion for many people, for Brazil, for participants, for speakers, for me. We brazilians deserve such event. Even with all those limitations I’ve wrote above. I love challenge and this is a excited challenge. Because what motivates us keep going is the passion about a community. Happy enough.

RIA with Flex and Java using Weborb for Java

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Filed under General announcements

What fits better? LCDS? LiveCycle Data Services for real Java enabled logical business and keep you pushing the limits of your RIA?

I got this question earlier this month after my involvement in a medium scale application built-in Flex front and Java on server side.

Doing the right decision requires you as much as needed and comparing a lot of products available in the market and see those features I decided to use WebOrb for Java due to some comparatives that are really awesome.
One of them is the native DTO/DAO code generation and CRUD, which saves a lot of time doing repetitive tasks.

And who did or are doing kind of Application, might knows what I’m talking. The only -2 points of credit for WebOrb is the JMS integration and Datapaging documentation. Not good so far and you have to discover yourself how it works.

Aside this problem the product works smooth in only CPU and uses 20% of PC. Nicely done.

If you wanna to compare with others, I found in my researches at Midnight coders blog a list-base comparation features that let me to test the weborb and see if I could use in the App.

Check out!

Doing Flex 3 components in actionscript the right way

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Filed under 3.0, Flex, Flex 3, Flex Components

One of the big problems I had in the past was developing kick ass components in actionscript format, where you see by proven simple basic component done for Google Maps.
Most of applications I did before was using only mxml format and this is straight forward way that 9 of 10 Flex developers does in usual ways.
I was doing pretty well, but for sure if you’re trying to get better and better as a developer you see that a long way to do and write stuffs like bytearray.org, mchambers, gskinner. Most of theses developers love and breath the development process, respecting the framework and the way they flow.

Six months ago I had this as goal, achieve a development senior level for custom components in actionscript format. The best way to do that was reading the Flex SDK source code, and see how I could learn from them. I must say you to not do that right now if you don’t have a big experience in Flex development, has a lot of way to go.

It’s hard enough to learn this path and get a level of that. The pursuit of happiness was very clear for me after three months of study and internal tests, samples. I personally don’t like read I most enjoy see in action examples of some framework then I read later the docs.

In fact was hard months, because I just got 3 or 2 hours a day to study. I needed as anyone needs to work and put grant the food for home. And some times I would think in give up and keep going doing mxml code and some little utility classes. But when everytime I saw a bug logged in the Flex bug base and example of work from those guys I mentioned earlier. I draw back and keeping fire to learn theses process.

There’s a bunch of information out there today after those 5 years of working with Flex framework and for sure this might be one of the best time to learn Flex and even getting deep to learn from the source. Many resources, slides, samples you can find on internet that are better worth then the livedocs, where today in my point of view are getting better and better with days to come.(Randy is doing a great job there).

But you’re very lucky today after I saw a simple, direct to point white paper to learn the process of doing components in Flex. Kudos to James Polanco and Aaron Pedersen . They’ve released a documentation that is worth to read for any developer that reads this blog or works with Flex development, with simple words any dummy developer that has a minimum of 6 months of experience in Flex framework can learn on the component live cycle in Flex.

Here’s the direct link for the PDF file where you can print and read in home even if you’re not in front of PC or MAC(who knows?!).

For others document I’ve collected before when I was learning this is the comprehensive list of sources I’ve got to kick ass in as3 components for Flex, in a TOP of 10 resources sites:

1. Slide share collection of slides that get you ahead in this field.
2. Live Docs on Advanced Flex Components
3. For who without free time to learn and want learn fast.
4. Like a to-do-check-list for any developer who wants to check your component before use it.

5. A nice review that was my second text on learning.
6. A nice diagram and complete diagram of workflow where you can print and never forgot.
7.Implementing accessibility on to your flex components.
8. How to write non-visual Flex components.
9. A nice one read for non-visual flex components.
10. And the last but no least a great white paper of doing Flex 3 Components int he right way. (This is recent and didn’t had the lucky to read in that time).

Enforce your development skills with this little list, has a lot of other resources like Jessen Warden blog and gets a lot of boiler list of tips and tricks for flash platform developers, google code, with a 1.333 projects tags as Flex and you save time in light up new ideas of components, check that before.

Hope you enjoy.

Hacking asDoc

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Filed under General announcements

I found a very utility undocumented params to be used in asDoc before itself generate the docs format for you.

Hacking asDoc
If you intend to learn more about your generated docs this will be a plus to understand how to approach to it.