The AFLAX Blog

I created a quick demo of Aflax combined with Google Gears.

This combination enables access to Flash and Gears’ offline capability all via JavaScript. This is a simple demo which will store the text you type into a local database and renders it all with Flash:

http://www.aflax.org/examples/gears/aflax_gears.htm

I’ve slowing starting work on version 2.0. As a start, I am revamping the site and have also added a forum for help and disussions. The forum can be found at http://www.aflax.org/forums

Stay tuned for more updates.

What is Aptana? Aptana is the company I founded and the
awesome team there has created the Aptana IDE. With that said…
I’m proud to announce the public beta of the Aptana IDE. The Aptana IDE
focuses on ‘Web 2.0 / AJAX’ development. This release has tons of features
including an AJAX library wizard, an Outline View across HTML, CSS, and
JavaScript, and numerous bug fixes from prior betas. Aptana IDE is free and
open source.You can now quickly access ‘Code Assist’ on your favorite AJAX JavaScript
libraries by creating an AJAX library project. You can use any JavaScript
library with Aptana, but we’ve included project wizards for many of the
popular libraries including Yahoo UI, Dojo, JQuery, MochiKit, Prototype,
Rico, script.aculo.us, and, of course, the AFLAX library.

All objects, functions, and properties in HTML DOM Level 1 & 2 now contain
browser support information (which also includes browser support for HTML,
CSS, JavaScript Core, and HTML DOM Level 0.)

If you don’t know about AFLAX, first on that. AFLAX stands for Asynchronous
Flash and XML. Defined simply, AFLAX is a development methodology which
combines Ajax and Flash to create more dynamic web based applications.

The AFLAX technology is available as a library that enables developers to
use JavaScript to fully utilize all of the features of Adobe’s Flash runtime
– including graphics, networking, video and camera support.

I’ve created a screencast to show you an example of how the Aptana IDE makes
development with AFLAX easier as well as showing how you can get real-time
previews of your movie as you work!

View the AFLAX Library screencast at:

http://www.xamlon.com/movies/aptana/AFLAXDemo/AFLAXDemo.html

Download Aptana IDE at:

http://www.aptana.com

I’ve just placed online a sneak preview of the new AFLAX.Canvas project. AFLAX.Canvas is a cross-browser, cross-platform “canvas” tag that degrades. That is, if running on FireFox or Safari it will use the integrated Canvas tag support. If Flash 8 is available it will use it. If nothing is available, it will render the graphics using DIVs!

Check out a live demo, try it across various browsers including Opera, Safari, IE, and FireFox!

http://www.aflax.org/canvas.htm

It talked to Darryl K. Taft of eWeek the other day about Adobe’s new AJAX bridge library and how AFLAX relates to it all. Here’s the story:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1935475,00.asp

AFLAX v1.0 has been released. The prior version, 0.41, had been stable for a while, so it was time to make it official.

Next for AFLAX is Flash 8.5 support and Flex component support! Stay tuned.

I created a demo which uses Dojo’s very cool widget system. I created a ‘VideoPlayer’ widget that enables you to very easily embed a video into your page using just a single, simple tag. Here’s an example:

<dojo:VideoPlayer
  aflaxRef="aflax1"
  videoFile="/examples/video/autocross.flv"
  width="300" height="225"
  onCueEvent="onCue" />

Check out the demo:

  http://www.aflax.org/examples/video4dojo/video.html

I wanted to create a demo what used another third party AJAX library, this time, I added Rico to the mix. I already have demos that include ajaxslt, MochiKit, Slider, and XML-for-Script. I used the Rico Accordion to show two different videos. It behaves a little differently on different browers, but seems to work fairly well across the board (IE looks best). Here’s the demo:

http://www.aflax.org/examples/video3/video.html

Using AFLAX, you can now easily perform asynchronous file uploads. You can control the filters that are used to allow users to select files and your code can receive events (all in JavaScript) for the progress of the uploads. Check out this simple demo and the source code, and be sure to download AFLAX and try it out!

Demo: http://www.aflax.org/examples/fileupload/fileupload.html

I’ve updated the AFLAX socket chat demo to now use a much simpler perl-based server, thanks to Shengdar Tsai. You can try out the demo at http://www.aflax.org/examples/sockets/sockets.html .