The spirit sustains the stone  

Jeeps, how hard is it to keep up with all the projects Adobe have on the go. When I first heard about Cocomo and then saw on Labs ‘Build real-time social Apps’ I just saw the word ’social’ and thought it was some sort of API for facebook, made an mental note, put in on the ‘backburner’ and never gave it a look. OOops!

It wasn’t till Nigel Pegg from Adobe (I still remember his AS1 Tree Component with fondness back in the day) left a comment on my last post that I’ve eked out some time to look into it.  All I can say is WOW.

Cocomo has the abilies to be used an alternative approach to developing/deploying multi-user applications/games  as opposed FMS. This has the potential to address a lot stumbling blocks I’ve had with multi-user development. You don’t have to write server-side code and handle all the stuff to do with connection fall-backs, load balanced servers etc. so hopefully a lot of the pain is removed ;)  delagating all that chod work away is a god send for me ;)

After 2 Days I’ve got a pretty good understanding of how it works and have most of the demos hooked up and working. I can now happily start thinking about developing mulituser projects with a lot more confedence (hoping Adobe sort out a business model that isn’t cost prohibitive ;) ). Nigel and the team have done a really outstanding job with the API, it’s very thoughtfully implemented.

The links below have the best debates, some of which look quite delicate for the FMS Dev community. As Adobe roll out more and more services; Cocomo, Stratus, Connection Pro, Live Cycle… It’s going to be important that they explain and define the services a bit better as there looks like quite a bit of crossover, making me wonder if there could be one service that rules them all? It’s going to be interesting to see how this goes; If the service can give enough control to devs, if it remains robust with 20,000 connections, how secure it is (I wonder what info can be garnered like ’Account Shared Secret’ using Charles proxy?) … As I move from the demos to my first app I hope it stands up to scrutiny. 

If, like me, you haven’t given Cocomo your attention I recommend you take a look.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cocomo/

http://www.flashcomguru.com/index.cfm/2008/11/17/cocomo-public-beta

http://blogs.adobe.com/collabmethods/2008/11/of_referees_and_wrenches_cocom.html

As Adobe announced plans to Open Flash Platform Messaging Protocol I’m interested to understand what that means for FMS? With the latest 3.5 release of FSM I’ve been disappointed we still need to use AS1 for server-side code when creating multi-player games and the fact there’s no AS3 components ;( I get the impression time and money has gone into streaming video as opposed the interactive server? I’ve had a Red5 sticker on my laptop now for about 6 years and it’s still only at 0.8 release preventing us using it on client projects. Colin Moocks Unity server has always interested me but as far as I know it’s only AS2. With RTMP being open-sourced can we expect some quick developments in the area of AS3 server-side code and Interactive Servers???  multiplayer seems to have taken a bit of a back seat of late so this could be good news? The Plot thickens…

PureMVC has been ported to Objective C for the iPhone! ;)

http://puremvc.org/content/view/121/181/

I just discovered this PureMVC Debug Console. A great tool to add to your debugging arsenal! it’s also worth checking Kap Inspect

Does what it says on the tin. swffit is super easy & v.useful. It gives browsers scrollbars if the window does not meet minium required dimensions.

swffit

Having well conceived Application State management is a really useful feature. Looks like Cliff and pals over at PureMVC have been hard at work. This PureMVC Finite State Machine Utility looks great!

http://puremvc.org/content/view/104/1/

After 2 years in the making, a few weeks ago we have finally released www.voiceyourself.com. After all the voting that’s gone on of late I hope people continue to voice their concerns. This ones for the eco warriors, enjoy - yes you can ;)

Myself and our flex team have helped develop this site:

http://www.nokia.com/headsetdesign

We were privileged to be able to work with some great designs and 3D assets supplied but other agencies. The site has only been live for a week and already there are 1,428 designs!

For anyone who’s interested it was built using: flex3, puremvc, amfphp, papervision

The competition ends 31/12/2008 so there’s still time to submit your funky designs…

Although using MXML can be quicker to code up it appears that using it for itemRenderers is a lot more CPU intensive than coding itemRenderers in AS3. The Repeater component also seems to hog a lot of memory.

MXML vs AS3 for itemRenderers

this is an ItemRenderer memory profile using MXML

this is the same itemRenderer recoded in AS3

Example of Memory usage for a Repeater component vs AS3 (based on the Paginator Component we built)

Profile of Paginator using a Repeater Component

Profile of Paginator using a good old fasioned for loop:

Advice:

try and always you an AS3 Class for itemRenderers rather than MXML. I wonder if Gumbo is going to be any better?

Here’s a little paginator component we put together. There’s plenty of room to improve it - add css styling support, etc.. but thought I’d throw it out there in case someone finds it useful.

Source

Component Source