PlayBook – HackIX

Daniel Freeman writes; In this final MadComponents tutorial we’re going to look at the third and final Flash Builder 4.5 tutorial (from here), and do it the MadComponents way. Adobe’s Flex Test Drive for Mobile: Build a mobile application in an hour, takes you through building an AMF web service, and then building a mobile client application that connects to that service. We’re going to build the same application using MadComponents.

AMF is a binary format used to serialise ActionScript objects. A binary AMF packet is usually significantly smaller than REST XML or SOAP packet. Hence AMF services are typically much faster.

This tutorial assumes that you have some expertise in building web services, using PHP, Coldfusion, or Java. But if you’d rather do a tutorial where the web service already exists, then have a go at building a twitter client.

We recommend that you first take a look at the first six parts of this tutorial series, which will bring you up-to-speed with using MadComponents.

Read the entire tutorial at MadComponents AMF Service Test Drive for Mobile « MobileAppDev.

Since Flex 4.5, you have had the ability to develop and export your projects as Android, iOS and PlayBook mobile applications that behave as native ones.

You can also export your Flex mobile project as AIR desktop apps. Just open Flash builder, open your project and choose Project > Export release build. You can then export a “Signed AIR package for installation on desktop”, which means a classic .air file. Yesterday, a customer wanted to know how to run a Flex mobile application in a desktop web browser. Of course, I answered “Why would you do this ?”, and he gave me some good reasons.

His mobile application is connected to a CMS on the backend. Administrators of the application will be able to edit the content of the mobiles apps in a web application. Wouldn’t it be nice to get a live preview in the browser ? When you think of it, a Flex mobile project exports a SWF, so we should be able to run it as a web app. Of course, all the AIR APIs such as the accelerometer, or the SQLite access would be disabled, but we could have a live preview.

And it’s always a challenge for a mobile developer to demonstrate their work. Usually, they just record and publish a video of their app.

We’ll see in this tutorial how to create a Flex mobile project with Flash Builder 4.5.1, and how to publish it as a classic web application. Just follow these steps:

via Flex mobile in the browser | RIAgora.