Flex on Grails Book Update: Making it Free!

I’ve decided to share what I’ve written about Flex on Grails as a book online under the Creative Commons License.

http://sites.google.com/site/flexongrails/

Right now, only the preface and the hello world chapters are online. In the coming weeks, I’ll update the content on my hard drive, write new content and post them online. Feedback is highly appreciated.

This book will target Flex 4 and either Grails 1.2. or Grails 2.0, depending on it’s release schedule.

A Cooliris CMS for the Google App Engine: Manage and Host XML-based Flash and Flex Components with Grails

There is an incredible wealth of amazing looking Flash components in the market today. Tools like Cooliris and the 3D Wall provide visually stunning components that can quickly make any website come alive. With Grails and the Google App Engine, we can build simple, secure and powerful content management engines for these components with very little effort.

In this post, I walk you through all the steps you need in hosting, deploying and securing a Cooliris CMS for the Google App Engine using Grails.

Tip: Flex is also XML friendly, so you can use this technique to add CMS-ed apps on Flex.

Book Review: Grails 1.1 Web Application Development

I received a free review copy of Grails 1.1 Web Application Development from Packt Press. They asked me to provide a review for it. Unfortunately, this review will be less than glowing ( sorry Packt ).

Pixel Bender and Alchemy Links from London Platform Flash User Group

Just came back from the LPFUG talk on Pixel Bender by Michael Chase and the Alchemy talk by Thomas Vian. Lots of good links shared – thought I would compile them so I don’t forget:

Pixel Bender

Pixel Bender lets you build Photoshop-like filters and apply them to Flex/Flash movies on runtime without affecting the image.

[Adobe Labs sayz] The Adobe® Pixel Bender™ technology delivers a common image and video processing infrastructure which provides automatic runtime optimization on heterogeneous hardware. You can use the Pixel Bender kernel language to implement image processing algorithms (filters or effects) in a hardware-independent manner. The Pixel Bender graph language is an XML-based language for combining individual pixel-processing operations (kernels) into more complex Pixel Bender filters.

Grails on The Google App Engine: Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask

I’ve been playing with Grails and the Google App Engine for about a month. Overall, I’ve been very happy about the experience. There seem to be a few questions and misconceptions about the app engine and Grails, both on forums, blogs and the Grails mailing list. I thought I would put together a quick summary for those looking for more information about deploying on this platform.

Flex on Grails: Building an image transformation tool with the Google App Engine, Flex and Grails

In this screencast, I show how to use Flex, Grails and the Google App Engine’s image service to quickly build an online image resizing and rotation tool.

• Part 1: Application introduction and walkthrough of the Flex Front End.
  

• Part 2: Embedding your swf into your Grails project for Deployment.

• Part 3:Introduction to the Google App Engine Image Service and the implementation of the Grails controller wrapper.

-LINKS-

• Link to the application: http://tomaslin.appspot.com/transformation/ ( right-click to view flex source )
• ObjectHandles: http://code.google.com/p/flex-object-handles/
• SpringSource Quickcast: http://blog.springsource.com/2009/05/14/grails-111-released-with-google-appengine-support/
• Source for Tranformation Service:http://tomaslin.googlepages.com/TransformationController.groovy

Please send any feedback or comments to tomaslin@gmail.com

5 Reasons for Flex Developers to consider a Grails / Google App Engine Backend

Today, Grails 1.1.1. was released with support for deploying applications on the Google App Engine. Here are five reasons why I think Flex Developers will fall in love with a Grails / GAE backend.

Flex on Grails: An one line Groovy proxy for cross domain communication for Flex

When trying to access external websites like the Flickr API or Google domains with Flex, we often run into the dreaded #2148 Security Exception error. . In this post, I show you how easy it is to solve this using Groovy and Grails ( it’s one line ).

Google Sets Haiku Generator

Here is a small App I built for the Google App Engine in Flex – It generates Haikus based on Google Sets suggestions:

I can haz cheesburgers now
emotional smile impact mirrors mirror’s can’t flatline
shine negative breathe lowlife dreams

Who says computers can’t poetry?

Calling FQL with the Facebook / Flex API

FQL is the query language used in Facebook to access tables and relationships. All the top level calls available within facebook APIs ( such as getFriends() ) are simply wrappers around FQL calls. In this post, I will show you how to use the newly released Adobe Flex / Facebook API to invoke FQL commands.