OpenFire is an opensource real time collaboration server that use XMPP (also called Jabber) to create istant messaging applications.
The official web site also says “Openfire is incredibly easy to setup and administer, but offers rock-solid security and performance” and I can confirm you that it’s really true!

As Adobe Developer I’m trying a lot of solutions to control external devices from my Flash, Flex and AIR applications but using Arduino Microcontroller (my favourite one in this period ; ) I got some issues and limitations.
In this article I have extended the ActionScript 3.0 XML Socket Class to send messages from Flex 3 to Arduino and viceversa and even if it works well for simple stuff it seems far from the final solution.

In this sample, we’ll connect a joystick to a Flex application.
Using Firmata 2.* and as3Glue library, your Arduino board can then communicate with your Flash/Flex/Air application.

Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery - creating a mixed reality.
The augmentation is conventionally in real-time and in semantic context with environmental elements, like for example sports scores on TV during a match.

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