May/09
Piping the Machine: PureMVC Multicore with Pipes and the Finite State Machine (FSM)
This is going to be a walkthrough of making use of PureMVC Multicore (AS3). To help in building a PureMVC Multicore application, we are going to make use of the StateMachine utility for initial setup and configuration as well as the Pipes utility for communication between cores.
Feb/09
Debugging your AIR/Flex application with Arthropod
Arthropod is an external Debug trace window for Flash/Flex/AIR. Drop a simple class into your project and it will accept logging from the application/swf. I’m using it for debugging around the office with our internal project management AIR application with great success.
Oct/08
Flex Date and Time (datetime) Picker Control
I saw one of these at some point, but couldn’t find it when I needed it again. Pretty simple, the control has a property called selectedDate that returns a date object represented by the selected date and time. You can also feed it a Date and it will adjust to that. It is on a 12 hour clock. It dispatches a change event (Event.CHANGE) as a new date/time is selected.
There is an Inspectable property called minuteIncrement to adjust the increment on the minute stepper. I couldn’t figure out how to have double digits on the 0-9 minutes. If anybody knows how I might achieve that, please let me know.
Sep/08
Django Authorization from Flex/AIR via PyAMF
Django views serve nicely as service end-points for Flex applications. Here are some notes on maintaining authenticated sessions between a Flex/Air/Flash application and your Django backend.
gateway.py
from pyamf.remoting.gateway.django import DjangoGateway import myproject.myapp.views as views gw = DjangoGateway({ 'login' : views.login_user, 'logout' : views.logout_user, }) |
views.py
import pyamf from django.contrib import auth from django.contrib.auth import authenticate, login, logout from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required from django.contrib.auth.models import User try: pyamf.register_class( User, 'django.contrib.auth.models.User') except ValueError: print "Classes already registered" def logout_user(http_request): logout(http_request) def login_user(http_request, username, password): user = authenticate(username=username, password=password) if user is not None: login(http_request, user) return user return None @login_required def registered_user_protected_function(http_request): return "You are a registered user." @login_required def staff_protected_function(http_request): if http_request.user.is_staff != True: return None return "You are staff." |
from flex
var netConnection:NetConnection = new NetConnection(); netConnection.connect("http://mysite.com/gateway"); var responder:Responder = new Responder(loginResult, handleFault); netConnection.call("login", responder, "username", "password") |
The http_request carries a reference to the currently authenticated user throughout the session. This works for web based Flex application as well as AIR applications on the desktop. Note that I am using a try/except on the pyamf class registration calls. Because this is session based, the classes only need to be registered once. Without the trap, it throws a TypeError letting you know the registration has already taken place.
Django User Authentication Documentation
All of the various things you can do with authentication in Django. It is, of course, based mostly on the use of the very nice Django HTML template system. While those bits aren’t handy to the likes of us, it is a good read either way.
pyAMF ByteArray example
This example shows the basic structure for setting up Django/Flex communication. It doesn’t cover authentication, but covers a good bit of territory with examples in Flash and Flex.
Aug/08
Integrating Adobe AIR, Cairngorm, PureMVC, LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS), MySQL and Hibernate
This post is going to cover the use of Adobe AIR, PureMVC, cairngorm, MySQL, LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS), and Hibernate. It utilizes these tools to create a simple image management system. The focus is on the configuration of the server to integrate Hibernate with LCDS and access that configuration from an AIR client.
Kickass Books
