In this article we’ll use the Adobe Collaboration Service components (codeName : CoCoMo) to develop a simple eLearning platform with following features:
1) WebCam
2) Audio on/off
3) User List
4) Text Chat
5) Shared notes
6) Shared whiteboard

The company i’m working for, GnStudio, released Na.Bi.Ro, an open source Flex framework that provides a lot of classes to help Flex developers in their daily work.
WHY DID WE CREATE NABIRO?
There are two main reasons:
1) When you are working on enterprise projects with a medium/big team you have to define some guidelines and methodologies that all developers need to follow to create flexible and maintainable projects and to avoid to lose the right way.

Reading RSS feeds from Flex or Flash often generate some security issues when the origin domain doesn’t contain a crossdomain.xml file to manage the policy settings.
A little workaround is create a PHP proxy to read the feeds and pass the content to the Flex script.

ActionScript 3.0 doesn’t manage all developers needs, so often they have to use other languages, as JavaScript, to accomplish some operations like open an HTML popup or get the userAgent property, useful to know the user Browser.
The AS3 ExternalInterface class allow to invoke Javascript functions directly from Flash.
Usually these functions are defined inside the HTML page but in this sample we’ll see how to implement them inside an ActionScript class, avoiding to edit HTML code.

A lot of Flex components support the itemRenderer property, to customize their item layout.
In this article we’ll use the List component to display the RSS Actionscript.it Last 5 Tutorial content and we’ll define 3 itemRenderers to switch 3 different content views at runtime.

Test online demo

In this sample we’ll use the Flex HTTPService class to make a PHP call and get the file list from a webserver folder. Then we’ll display them populating a List component and we’ll enable the mouse click on each item to save them on your disk (using FileReference.download() method)

Try the online demo

As often happens, i got the expiration to write this little post after an user request from an actionscript.it forum.
In few words, user asked how integrate a Google Search inside its Flex application to display the result always inside the flash app.
So I started to surf around the web to find a valid solution, and after founding many PHP solutions I found a cool AS3 library, developed by Boulevart.
This API provides a lot of classes to connect Flex (and Flash too) to Google services (Google Search, Translation, News, and so …

In this post I’ll show you how to create a form with a file attachment using Flash CS3/4, ActionScript 3.0 and PHP. The trick is use the FileReference class to upload a file from your own hard disk and at the same time send the input- field values.

The company where I’m working now, GNStudio, released a new open source service, called Snippet Repo Browser.
This wiki will contain a lot of ActionScript, Flex, Flash, Air and php snippets that you can copy/paste in your applications.
Snippet could be also used as repository for your own scripts, infact you can make a new registration, write and share your code and display all your scripts using a similar url:
Snippet personal link:http://snippet.gnstudio.com/user/flagers (this will show all my scripts)
Snippet personal RSS:http://snippet.gnstudio.com/rss2/user/flagers

OTHER INTERESTING FEATURES:
- an Eclipse Plugin to see all snippets inside your Flex …

I’m really happy to see that in Flash Builder 4, the next release of Flex out in spring 2010, a complete video player component will be finally available with a lot of integrated features: play/pause, progress bar, time and fullScreen button too.

See it in action (click on buttons to play videos)