Build iPhone Applications With Flex Builder
It always excites me when I'm able to find a new little gem on the internet. I think this could prove to be interesting as a way to develop for multiple mobile platforms. Not just for the iPhone or any other one offs. Today i was made aware of Elips Studio 3. You can register for the developer beta here. It'll be interesting to see how well it works at compiling to multiple platforms and the differences between all those platforms.
From the site:
"ELIPS Studio 3 cuts through the complexity of the fragmented mobile market by providing a single development toolkit for the world's most popular handsets. It includes a sophisticated simulator, and the code it generates is compact and rapid enough to run even on low-specification, mass-market handsets."
How does it work?
- Develop in Adobe Flex/Flash Builder
ELIPS Studio 3 is available as a plug-in for Adobe Flex / Flash Builder, a popular IDE for the development of RIAs and RDAs using the ActionScript and MXML languages.- Use our mobile Flex Framework
The product comes with a mobile-optimized version of the Flex Framework and a wide range of Flex extension libraries, including mobile device features and UI components. These provide additional capabilities beyond those found in the 'standard' Flex, such as making voice calls, accessing the phone's address book, sending SMS or MMS, taking snapshots or videos with the camera, and more. You can also import open source ActionScript Web 2.0 libraries.- Build and deploy for the mobile platforms you want
ELIPS Studio 3 automatically mobilizes and packages your Flex-based applications for industry-leading platforms, including iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, plus proprietary mass-market devices that run Real-Time operating systems (RTOS).
And because Open-Plug has a long track record of creating optimized code for cellular handsets... you’ll get amazing performance with your new Mobile 2.0 applications!
Adobe AIR 2.0 Web Server
I found this cool example of an HTTP based socket server over at Christophe Coenraet's blog. Basically he setup a socket and made it listen for incoming HTTP connections and server data based up the requests. Very neat stuff. It's always interesting to see people push the uses of AS3 in new directions.
This should also be possible under older versions of AIR too. since those versions supported sockets too. the only difference is in AIR 2.0 we now have UDP sockets.
You can view the code and examples here.
Manage your AS3 Libs in Eclipse / Flash Builder
One of the things I hate doing is managing all the different libraries I may use in a project. Luckily Dennis @ rozengain.com has made a plugin for Eclipse / Flash builder that works like a charm called the ActionScript Framework Downloader. All you need to make it work is:
- Eclipse 3.2 or greater
- SVN Command line tool
Once you have SVN all setup you can download the JAR file and place it in your Eclipse plugin folder and restart Eclipse .
To use it up first go to Preferences > ActionScript Framework Downloader and add the libraries you want to use. Then close the preferences window and navigate to the folder you want to download the libraries to. Right click on the folder and click download ActionScript framework here. Select the libs you want to download and then click finish.
That's it. A very easy and slick plugin to manage all your library files. I've used it with the latest Beta of Flash Builder and it works great!
My 20 Most used AS3 Libraries
Because I work full time developing primarily in AS3. I have come across a lot of very useful libraries that I like to use in my day to day work. So today I present you with a list of the top 20 libraries that I have come to use on a more regular basis. I hope you may find and discover something here that may be of use to you. If you have a library that you use a lot please let me know.