Adobe has recently released a beta of Flash Player 9 for Linux. This allows Linux users to view sites that make heavy use of Flash like YouTube, Yahoo Maps Beta, and InfoQ's own Flash based interviews and presentations. It also allows Linux users to run Flex and Laszlo based applications. The Linux player is supported on the following browsers and operating systems:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, Update 8
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Update 4 (AS/ES/WS)
- SUSE Linux 9.x or 10.1
- Firefox 1.5.0.7
- Mozilla Seamonkey 1.0.5
James Ward has put together a screencast building a YouTube video player on Linux to demonstrate the new player. On a related note the first book on Flex 2 development has entered rough cut status on Oreilly.com. Topics include:
- Managing Layout
- Working with Components
- Working with Media
- Using Transitions and Effects
- Working with Data
- Customizing Application Appearance
- Client-side and Remote Data Communication
- Debugging Flex Framework Applications
- Creating Application and Custom Components
Finally, Adobe's Christophe Coenraets recently published a tutorial for using Flex clients with a Spring backend:
...When writing Flex applications, you can access back-end systems using four different strategies:
In this document, we focus on the Remoting (3) and Data Management Services (4) approaches described above because they enable the tightest integration with Spring...
- You can use the HTTPService component to send HTTP requests to a server, and consume the response. Although the HTTPService is typically used to consume XML, it can be used to consume other types of responses. The Flex HTTPService is similar to the XMLHttpRequest component available in Ajax.
- You can use the WebService component to invoke SOAP-based web services.
- You can use the RemoteObject component to directly invoke methods of Java objects deployed in your application server, and consume the return value. The return value can be a value of a primitive data type, an object, a collection of objects, an object graph, etc. In distributed computing terminology, this approach is generally referred to as “remoting”. This is also the terminology used in Spring to describe how different clients can access Spring beans remotely.
- In addition to the RPC-type services described above, the Flex Data Management Services provide an innovative and virtually code-free approach to synchronize data between the client application and the middle-tier.
InfoQ previously covered the release of Flex 2. The SDK is free with the Eclipse-based Flex Buidler IDE costing $499.