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.

More Efficient Facebook / Flex API – using XML and e4x instead of ActionScript Objects

I’m a big fan of the e4x implementation in Flex. Elegant and powerful, it allows a versatile and dynamic way of passing data across components. In this post, I’ll describe how to access data in this raw XML format within the newly updated Facebook / Flex API.

If you’re a fan of the way Flex handles XML via e4x, you’re probably disappointed that all the new examples posted on the Adobe developer connection create new ActionScript objects to represent facebook instances. In this post, I’ll briefly describe how to work with XML instances directly and describe some of benefits of this approach.

Grails Scaffolding CRUD Templates for Google App Engine / Java

Update : This code has been merged into the Grails 1.1.1. release of the App Engine Plugin, please see the Spring Source Blog for a screencast and how to use this.

I spent a few hours trying to understand how JDO works on the app engine yesterday. I had some experience tinkering with the Grails templating system, and thought it would be a neat experiment to port the Templates into JDO / Persistence Manager. Here is a full working CRUD template for Grails based on JDO. The intent here is to rewrite the controllers to use JDO while retaining complete compatibility of the views.