Monthly Archives: March 2008

Session 4: Data Providers

Post – Lunch:

Communication with Server-side scripts by Sujith.
- gave an example using JSP.
- gave an introduction to BlazeDS.

Announced that there would be a elimination round during the tea break because there are more than 250 teams who’ve registered and they can only accomodate 100 teams.

The elimination round would be objective type and one of the team member (2 members form a team) has to write it.
Wrote the test, placed 2nd among all the teams :) (got 13/20). An informal quiz was conducted to all those who weren’t writing the exam and my partner Abhilash won “Programming Flex2″ book answering one of the the questions.

have the hands-on sessions now.

Controls, Navigation, Styles, Effects by Jyoti Kishnani

11.45: talked about Button component, Image component, how to embed icons, the difference between embedding an image in Image component and giving just the path to the image. Used the component browser and Flex Builder to show the examples.

The component browser has tiny fonts, the guys at the back are having trouble looking at the code. You can adjust the font size in builder, but not in the component browser application. i wonder if you we can somehow increase the font size in a Flex application when increasing the size in the browser (using Ctrl + ‘+‘).

Best practice: whenever you create an application make sure you minimize nesting. Make the application simple.

12noon: Styles – she’s using Flex Builder’s CSS editor (in design view) to show all the changes she made to the common components (button, datagrid) and created two instances of the same component with different styles to show the difference.

12.10pm:
Effects: used the component browser application to show different effects available in Flex.

Mr. Ananth showed an example code to explain event dispatcher and event listener. One of the line had “e.currentTarget.id” and a doubt that i always had but never bothered to look up just came back to me. what’s the difference between “e.target” and “e.currentTarget”?, found a good explanation here.

This session’s on Event management in Actionscipt 3 by Mr. Anantharaman (Director of Engineering, Platform Technologies – Flex,AIR,Coldfusion).

events and data management are central to a typical Flex application.

What is an Event?
- signify something happening within the Flex application that can be acted upon by the application. The application acts upon an Event through a Event Listener. Event listeners are the functions or methods that respond to specific events.

Some system events: creationComplete, initialize.
Some user events: click, change, mouseDown.

How to use an event?
-components generate and dispatch events and can consume (listen to) other events.
- register an event handler with the object.
- when an event occurs, the target object dispatches the event to all registered listeners by invoking the event listener that was registered.
- event listeners can be registered either through mxml code or through actionscript.

Object heirarchy – from the events perspective
-all visual objects, including Flex controls and containers are sub classes of DisplayObject class – they are in a tree of visual objects that make up your application

EventDispatcher class
- every component in display list can participate in the Event model.
- every object in the display list can trace its class inheritance to DisplayObject class.
-it’s not just a “dispatcher”, it implements the complete event model

Commenlt used methods to create a custom events:
-addEventListener()
-removeEventListener()
-dispatchEvent()

noted down some points from the presentation.

i need to ask someone if the ppts are being hosted anywhere. if so i’ll stop posting the points from the presentation.

10.35: break. part 2 of this session will start in 20 mins.

11.00: the next part of session 2 has started.

update: was told they would arrange for the hosting of the ppts.

blogging directly from the bootcamp.

had to rush as soon as i woke up. we were told registration will be closed at 8.30am, so drove as fast as i could to reach kmit. reached here at 8.25.

abhilash and i were the last team to register :) . but they said people can register during the break and also during the lunch. should have slept for some more time.

9.40am : tech session by Ramesh (started at 8.45) on the basics of Flex, Actionscript 3, Flex Builder 3 is going on.

update 10am: Technical session 1 just ended.

PS: didn’t expect an open wifi network here. i though i would take notes on the laptop and post later. will keep you posted with everything going on here.