what do I know

Ok, I need help. I’ve been able to discover the coolness that is getQualifiedClassName() and getDefinitionByName() and describeType() when it comes to working with introspection/reflection in ActionScript 3. I am stuck however. I want to get a hold of all the class names available in the compiled Flash movie at runtime. I’m writing a library that will look for custom metadata on classes and associate functionality with the classes (or possibly objects) if they are annotated in a specific way. Right now, short of asking for a list of those classes from the developer, I don’t know of a way to build a bootstrap function/class that will introspection into the Flash movie and get me a list of them. I was thinking maybe if I could find a way to programmatically access the manifest file that would work, but again I can’t find a way to do that.

Does anyone know how to do this or am I doomed to introspecting on objects and programmer declared references rather than classes?

UPDATE: I found a feature request in the Flex 3 JIRA database. Basically it’s not in Flex yet, nor is it supported by the Flash movie, but 4 people have voted for the feature thus far. That being said, please vote for this feature so we can get one of the final pieces to reflection built into Flex. BTW - If anyone wants questions answered with regards to Flex, check out the flexcoders mailing list over on Yahoo. Everyone probably knows about it but I’m slow.

Peter Armstrong, author of Flexible Rails, gave this presentation which focussed on how Flex and AIR can consume REST’ful resources. Peter unfortunately had a hard drive crash about an hour before his presentation so needless to say his presentation didn’t go as planned. Although he didn’t really have any slides (because they were all destroyed) he was able to borrow the laptop of a fellow conference go’er and show us some code examples.

The code examples were geared towards introducing MXML and Actionscript to Rails developers. I feel pretty comfortable with both, but it’s always good to see different approaches to coding in Flex, especially code using HTTPService since I spend more time using RemoteObjects. I would have liked to seen, if only mentioned, the topic of component development (visual and non-visual) and data binding, but I can understand why it was omitted since most Rails developers aren’t familiar with UI practices other than your standard web stack.

Towards the end of the presentation, Peter revealed Ruboss, a Flex framework built specifically for consuming REST’ful resources. Ruboss uses a controller to expose an Actionscript interface to translate CRUD operations to their REST’ful equivalents. He said he’s going to be releasing it over the next few weeks under his new company, so watch Ruboss.com for more details.

We’ve asked Peter to give a Connect presentation at an Adogo meeting later this year on Flex/AIR and Rails. The Orlando community can definitely benefit from Peter’s work with Flex/REST and we hope to pimp that to its fullest … j/k Peter, keep up the great work.

For those who aren’t following the Adogo blog, the January meeting promises to be a good one as we have been chosen by Adobe to be the only stop in Florida for the Flex 3 Pre-release Tour. For our leg of the tour we are extremely fortunate to have Ben Forta, Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe, as our guest speaker. We’re going to be giving away tons of schwag as well as some pretty nice software licenses. We’re getting to use a conference room at Westgate Lakes thanks to the Porges and are going to have Pizza Hut cater most likely.

I’m really proud of all the work we’ve done at the Adogo (Adam, Max, and myself) and getting Orlando as a stop on this tour helping to affirm that. In the few months since last August, we have been able to create the beginnings necessary to revitalize the Adobe community in the Orlando area. We still have a lot of work to do to get the word out, but we’ve got a good foundation to build on.

Hope to see everyone at the next meeting (January 21st @ 7:00 PM at Westgate Lakes near the Smokehouse)!

If anyone in the Orlando area hasn’t heard yet, the Adogo has announced its meeting schedule for the next few months as well as its meeting location. Check out the announcement for more information. We’re really excited to start the user group and can’t wait to reveal all of the details of the next meeting.

Stay tuned to more information to come …

Nothing much here, but it was cool to see how crazy Adobe.com really was in terms of setup. They has “tons” of applications effectively running uniquely in multiple JRun instances, load balanced across multiple Solaris machines, accessing a very simple database layer with some fail-over in mind. I think he said about 75-80% of the content for the site was static. Everything in terms of languages was mainly ColdFusion. They has some Flash and some Flex. What was really crazy, was to see an actual service layer modeled out which is used by each application. The service layer had other abstractions, like hooks into JMS, but it mainly was used with CFCs in the backend.

The session overall was very informative. It motivated me to realize that if you work towards the goal of SOA, it is possible, especially for a company like WestGate. We’re gonna hit Sean Corfeild up for some good JMS suggestions later this weekend as a result of a tangent from the session, so that should be cool too.