My Journey into using efflex

As I tried to introduce powerful animations to personal RIA project, I came across this project called Efflex. The demos showed a lot of potential. I was very impressed with some of the nice features to improve ViewStack selection (particularly the Flip3D and Cube3D demos). As my excitement drove me to use it, I found so many problems integrating to it, particularly with the following:

1. There were no SWC files to use (the 2 provided never worked). 
2. Building the source required FlexBuilder as well as to understand the project layout.
3. Some of the code was not committed, hence the compilation failed in so many ways.
4. There were dependencies that were not documented.

I took this as a personal challenge and I can happily report that I made it work. I'd like to describe what I had to do to make it happen in case others go through this problem (as I suspect it's the case based on some of the postings I read on the site).

Alternate Tooltip for <mx:List /> items

I spent sometime trying to understand ways to add tooltips for items within a <mx:List ..> component. As I naively used the dataTipFunction(), it was pretty evident (at least in my case) that I needed something whereby I can have more control, a more robust solution than the out-of-the-box solution. This is when I decided to use the itemRollOver and itemRollOut events and corresponding handlers.

My Review on Spring-Roo

So I gave a presentation about Spring Roo recently. Hopefully this means I'll get a kangaroo.  I felt it went pretty well. I decided to share some of my remarks as I think I learned more by presenting than by trying it. As I can not put a presentation on my document (yet), I'll show the text of my slides and will explain some of the things I discussed while presenting.

Lessons learned at 360Flex

It's time to reflect a bit about the latest 360Flex. This was a good time to learn about Hardware integration with the Flash Platform. Here we have integration with Arduino boards (via as3glue or merapi).  Also, I learned a bit about JComm as well as how these sensors can send Event objects whereby one can react and listen (think credit card readers, robots, etc). Nice possibilities that make so much sense for thick client applications using Adobe Air... Very exciting.

Monkey Patching in Flex

I recently attended 360Flex. It was an excellent conference. I thought I knew some Flex, but I was certainly not aware of how much others are doing with Flex, Actionscript and the Flash Platform in general. Very interesting concepts. One of the nice concepts I recently learned while at San Jose was "Monkey-Patching".  Fortunately, I had the chance to practice how to use it after the conference and learned so much about the internals of some Flex components.  Here is what I did.