feisley » Flex

Hydra Preview

Jacob Feisley — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:06:34 +0000

With the public announcement of Hydra EMS being announced any day now, I thought I would give those of you that have been following its development a sneak preview of the UI and some of the new features we have added recently.

The most noticeable addition to Hydra recently has been the addition of the Flex UI. Flex is an open source Flash framework from Adobe that allows for rapid development of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Behind the Flex UI is the powerful Twisted framework that powers the data back end. Communication between Flex and Twisted is handled by the PyAMF library. PyAMF is an implementation of Adobe’s Action Message Format (AMF) for Python. This library allows for data to be exchanged in a binary form which is many times faster than the traditional XML mechanism.

Enough talk, lets get to the show! Here is a shot of the CPE LiveGrid module from Hydra. LiveGrid handles adding, searching, modifying, and deleting of CPE’s and assets withing the system. This module was originally based on an XML API, however, after changing to PyAMF speeds over doubled when running:

The second example here is of the CPE LiveDiag module. This allows for real time graphing and analysis of a CPE’s performance in the network and will allow network administrators to make faster diagnostics when problems occur. This module was also a port from its original XML interface to the PyAMF library:

These are just a few of the new interfaces coming in the release of Hydra EMS.

Flex Builder 3

Jacob Feisley — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:29:55 +0000

Adobe Flex Builder 3 was finally released today following it’s successful 3rd beta release.

This release adds many new features including:

Improved Charting and Data visualization
Support for Adobe AIR
An Improved compiler with better linking support.
Caching of Flex Framework (Using RSLs)
And many more…

I just got my copy of Flex Builder 3 from Adobe and am impressed so far. The interface has undergone some renovations to improve productivity and allow for faster development and design. I have already found uses for many of these new features in many of my own projects, including Hydra. More details and samples in the coming weeks.

Flex: Word Tools

Jacob Feisley — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 06:51:18 +0000

I created a small utility in Flex designed to assist RA’s and others at Purdue when designing bulletin boards. This utility takes a string and returns a breakdown of all the characters contained therein. How is this useful you ask? Well, when it comes time to cut out letters it is very nice to easily calculate that you need 5 letter E’s, 4 letter C’s etc. Source and application will eventually be posted to my projects site.

Here is the application example embedded in the site:

[flash medium=1 w=370 h=500]

Note: This requires Flash Player 9 to run properly.

PyAMF

Jacob Feisley — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 02:45:35 +0000

Back in January I discovered the PyAMF project. This project’s goal is to create an implementation of AMF (Action Message Format) for the Python Programming language. Last week they released version 0.1.0, their first stable release.

So far, I have been extremely impressed with this project. The library offers integration with popular Python web frameworks including Twisted, Django, and Pylons. The performance is excellent and will only improve as the team intends to annex their Python code, with C for faster serialization of requests. In addition to an excellent library, the developers have also provided a number of examples which attempt to cover every major area of the library. I have already begun using it in various projects including Hydra, which will be released this month.

Look for more info and updates on the PyAMF project in the coming weeks.