In this is a one of a kind boot camp, you will learn how to transform Flex components into configurable Xcelsius add-ons as well as learn how to maximize the Xcelsius SDK with your existing Flex development skills and create brand new components. Our bootcamp instructors will arm you with enough hands on experience and sample code to tackle custom component and connections for your organization’s Xcelsius dashboard initiatives.

At this Bootcamp you will receive:

• 2 days of intensive hands on Flexcelsius training
• Training material + labs source code
• 2 functional components with source code included
• Lunch is provided on both days
• Perfect San Diego weather!
• And more….

Unfortunately we only have a few seats left so Register Now!

Evan DeLodder is a Senior Software Engineer focused on the development and application of cutting edge Rich Internet Application technologies in the Business Intelligence space. To learn more about him, please visit our new FleXcelsius page.

Related Posts

• July 8, 2010 — Custom Component Style Preservation (3)
• May 19, 2010 — The Future of Flash in the BI Space (6)

The problem:

You may develop a button, canvas, list box, tree viewer or other UI component in Flex, apply inline styling directives, package it up for use in Xcelsius and view it in the Xcelsius designer without issue.  However, when you enter runtime mode in Xcelsius, your component may lose some or all of its inline styles, rendering it partially unusable or invisible. This is due to the parent Flex Xcelsius application inadvertently stripping away styles at runtime.

The solution:

For a generic solution to skinning and styling reapplication, you’ll need to reference in your project library path, the haloclassic.swc swc in the Flex SDK directory (a path similar to this C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks\2.0.1\frameworks\themes\haloclassic.swc). Once you have referenced the swc, create a CSS file for your component(s) that specifies all of the default skins and styles to their halo default or desired style as shown in the sample code below (full code here). This set of steps will need to be implemented as needed on a per-component basis if your components are experiencing style loss. Once you have defined your CSS file, the next step is to reference it in your component file as you would any other CSS asset.

.myButton {
backgroundAlpha: 1.0;
backgroundSize: “auto”;
bevel: true;
borderAlpha: 1.0;
borderCapColor: #919999;
borderColor: #B7BABC;
borderSides: “left top right bottom”;
borderSkin: ClassReference(“mx.skins.halo.HaloBorder”);
borderStyle: “inset”;
borderThickness: 1;

…..

<mx:Style source=”myButtonStyle.css” />
<mx:Button label=”My Button” styleName=”myButton”/>

There is an alternate to this approach, which would be to reapply styles with ActionScript code. However, this approach is more compact and has little to no impact on your actual component files. As a best practice for visual Xcelsius components, define your styles in CSS as opposed to inline to prevent the build up of redundant style specifications.

Evan DeLodder is a Senior Software Engineer focused on the development and application of cutting edge Rich Internet Application technologies in the Business Intelligence space. To learn more about him, please visit our new FleXcelsius page.

Related Posts

• May 19, 2010 — The Future of Flash in the BI Space (6)
• August 18, 2010 — NEWS: First FleXcelsius Bootcamp!! (2)

As the marketing and PR battle rages on between Apple and Adobe, blanket statements are being tossed around regarding the viability of both HTML5 and Flash technologies as if they’re competitors. So far, this debate has only served as a disservice the community in general as the misinformation train continues to board people in high places who don’t completely understand the technologies and begin to make decisions for their organizations that are driven by the general influence of external, biased companies promoting their own product interests, as opposed to properly assessing project technology needs based on other factors that have more, real world substance.

Many people have voiced their opinions on this topic and it’s certainly not breaking news though we thought it beneficial to speak directly on the future viability of Flash and Flex for enterprise Rich Internet Applications, specifically in the Business Intelligence space.

Flash and HTML have both been and are still going to be around for a long time for one very good reason: They both serve an indispensable purpose on the web and for supporting business applications that run on web based technology. Both of these technologies fill in unique gaps and should be used as complimentary technologies and not as competitors or as “one-or-the-other” choices.

With the new release of HTML5, some of the new and long awaited features included in the specification are: A new caching utility to support offline web applications, video and audio API’s with native video embedding, a drag and drop API, new form controls and validation utilities that don’t require custom coding, new online and offline data caching capabilities and a 2D drawing API for rendering vector graphics and images on the fly, just to name a few.

With much respect to HTML5 and the forward progress it is making with the aforementioned features, in the BI space of developing RIA portals, dashboards and data visualizations, I’m having a really hard time seeing where HTML5 could even come close to Flash or Flex technology, without a herculean effort, as many have suggested. I say this as an engineer who has years of experience in both camps. For the past several years, since the very first Flex Alpha release, I’ve been enthralled with the Flex technology, the API’s, the SDK and how rapidly one can develop a highly interactive and infinitely customizable application to solve even the toughest challenges and fill in the most demanding requirements. I won’t get into a punch-down list or table of comparisons between HTML5 and Flex/Flash for BI because it would be both unfair and irrelevant; rather provide a higher level assessment of these technologies and the value that Flash brings in the enterprise BI space.

When considering what technology to adopt and run with for enterprise BI projects, below are just a few of the fundamental categories that I consider to be compelling factors that set Flash and Flex far ahead of the HTML5 pack. For most developers, these go without saying.

OOP Rapid Development

Flex technology is simply and absolutely indisputably light years beyond what HTML5 can bring to the table in this arena and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Why? Because Flex is a highly adaptable software approach developed on top of a robust and comprehensive ever-expanding tried and tested SDK that leverages the powerful concept of Object-Oriented Programming with ActionScript. What does this mean aside from the fundamental benefits gained when comparing a full OOP approach to a scripting language? While HTML5 is getting up to speed and is only scratching the surface of Flash capabilities with its new list of features, Flex and Flash are evolving on a frequent basis with an impressive progress rate and evolutionary leaps of capabilities in each release of the Flex SDK which also happens to have release cycles much faster than releases of HTML (a year or 2 for Flex releases vs. years and years for HTML ). This advantage ultimately means a faster time to market/delivery, lower development costs (because so much is already baked in and easily extensible), much more flexibility and feature-rich applications that can continuously evolve in shorter cycles with much less effort.

Cross-Platform Compatibility

While HTML5 and browsers are constantly taking strides to reduce this gap, cross platform compatibility will remain an uphill issue for HTML5 and its new features for the foreseeable future because there are so many factors that come into play. This is nothing new; it’s the same sort of compatibility issues we’ve always had to deal with when using browser scripting technologies.

Flash has few differences between platforms, most of which are minuscule when compared to those found in HTML applications. Testing and developing for cross-platform compatibility takes a hit on developer productivity, which can have a significant ripple effect. Flash applications in general require exponentially less cross-platform testing, which is a big part of the draw for developers and organizations alike as it saves both time and money.

SDK and API Evolution

I was thoroughly impressed to see that HTML5 has snapped to with native access to a handful of very useful API’s and enjoyed thinking of the new mashup possibilities while browsing the some of the new features in action while taking the IE9 test drive. This is a great step forward for the web and is a direction that will certainly continue to grow.

Flex allows developers to build on a comprehensive SDK which is perfectly suited for BI and enterprise development, complete with a base charting framework, classes for data modeling, and an ever expanding arsenal of highly adaptable frameworks and 3^rd party open source BI technologies.

How fast the HTML5 direction and evolution of its tooling will grow is a good question, but one thing remains certain, and that is that Adobe Flash and Flex products will always be leading the way a good 10 steps ahead and setting the new innovative standards into the future of RIA technology and rich experiences on the web.

The State of Flash Mobile

Flash is alive and thriving in the enterprise and will continue to do so, especially with the imminent release of Flash support for many mobile platforms on the horizon. The mobile platform is another example of where these two technologies can co-exist and add tremendous value to one another. The prospect of having a mobile device with these powerful features combined opens a new world of possibilities and we’re absolutely champing at the bit to get a hold of the Flash releases for Android.

Conclusion:

Flash and HTML will always be a part of the web, serving as complimentary technologies that drive value and ultimately combine forces to provide for an optimal application and user experience. However, they should not be compared or pitted against each other for web dominance arguments, because it’s unfair, inapplicable and way off base. The “versus” argument has no merit when discussing these technologies for enterprise business applications, which is where a large disconnect of understanding around the argument is running rampant. In short, we need to be sure we’re always basing our technology decisions objectively, on technical facts and sound research and not on any particular media hype machine.

Evan DeLodder is a Senior Software Engineer focused on the development and application of cutting edge Rich Internet Application technologies in the Business Intelligence space. To learn more about him, please visit our new FleXcelsius page.

Related Posts

• July 8, 2010 — Custom Component Style Preservation (3)
• August 18, 2010 — NEWS: First FleXcelsius Bootcamp!! (2)

We wanted to reach out in advance to gather preferences on what you would like to learn and any particular SDK pain points that you would like to have addressed. Please leave comments on this post regarding a preferred agenda and please email me if you’re interested in attending.

Evan DeLodder is a Senior Software Engineer focused on the development and application of cutting edge Rich Internet Application technologies in the Business Intelligence space. To learn more about him, please visit our new FleXcelsius page.

Related Posts

• July 8, 2010 — Custom Component Style Preservation (3)
• May 19, 2010 — The Future of Flash in the BI Space (6)

My previous post regarding add-ons was based on a very simple column chart that I indicated we would be extending on in subsequent posts. As a long time Flex dashboard developer, I really missed a few things in watching people create Xcelsius dashboards that I considered to be foundational in dashboard charting. To start, namely:

• Dynamic series colors:  i.e. switching between series colors on-the-fly at runtime
• Dynamic series types:  i.e. switching between series types on-the-fly at runtime
• Dynamic series addition and removal at runtime
• Dynamic series position at runtime
• Dynamic series alpha at runtime
• Dynamic HTML tooltips

Custom Xcelsius Combo Chart

These small but powerful features can significantly reduce the amount of objects needed to traditionally compensate for the absence of these abilities in the Xcelsius environment.

I wanted to create a simple yet powerful representation of these concepts that would show people that are new to Flex charting how exactly they may go about coding up quick charts to fill feature gaps and enhance their Xcelsius design-time productivity. I created a Line/Area/Column type combo chart that fulfills the requirements called out in the list above and have included the full source code, including a functional Xcelsius XLF model to serve as a functional example here:

The property sheet is really simple and if you look at the example XLF, you’ll see how the data needs to be structured for the series and the chart data.

A few notes regarding this chart’s functionality:

1. You can switch series types at runtime
2. You can add or remove series at runtime by blanking out a given series type cell value
3. You can add and remove data dynamically at runtime
4. You can change the order that series appear at runtime i.e. bringing to front or sending to back
5. You can set the chart’s font color through a color picker in the property sheet
6. Chart series are added in the order specified, so if you put an area series on last, it will render in front of the other series present on the chart, etc.
7. All of the chart’s functionality barring colors, is completely data driven
8. HTML tooltips only support basic tags and do not support images or other more advanced features…yet.
9. Data and tooltips share cells separated by a :  See XLF for an example
10. Please refer to the XLF on how to properly structure your data for this chart

In my next post, we will further extend this chart, adding in very useful features such as drilling down in-place, without any Xcelsius logic.

Best Regards,

Evan DeLodder

Related Posts

• August 18, 2010 — NEWS: First FleXcelsius Bootcamp!! (2)
• July 8, 2010 — Custom Component Style Preservation (3)