Flex 2 and WSDL Overloading

On a project that I am currently working on, the team was having some issues consuming JBoss SOAP services. The root of the problem took a while to figure out, as apparently there are very few people that try to consume SOAP services experience the same issue we were encountering and The Google revealed few clues. At first we thought that perhaps the difference was between WSDL 1.1 and WSDL 2.0 and Flex’s lack of support for WSDL 2.0, as that is what the SOAP services were generating. After some initial investigation, we thought we eliminated that as a possibility. Then we discovered that the WSDL that we were consuming contained overloaded methods. Some reinvestigation at the W3C was done to see if perhaps a difference between the WSDL 1.1 or 2.0 specifications was support for WSDL overloading. It turns out the the specs are silent on this issue, so again we eliminated the difference in WSDL versions. Some additional searching after that determined that Flex definitely lacks support for WSDL overloading.
Read the rest of this entry »

AS3 + Make Controller Important Update (AKA Not Part 5)

As those of you that have been reading along with the series might extrapolate, this post is supposed to be Part 5. However, given some things that I’ve discovered in the Fwiidom AS3 implementation as well as some issues in the MakingThings AS2 classes, which I then ported to AS3 and in the process propogated those bugs, this is now an update on some progress made with some collaboration and refactoring.

Read the rest of this entry »

Flash Player + SSL + IE7 = WTF (and a solution)

Use Case
I’ve been working on a project with a team of some of our really talented Flash developers (props Ben, Leon and Gabriel) where a Flex app being served from a non-secure URL via plain HTTP needs to connect to and consume data from another server via HTTPS and have run into some issues and a workaround that I’d like to share. For that particular project, the other server is a SOAP service running behind SSL with a Flex app served over HTTP consuming those services. However, these concepts also apply to any external data consumed by the Flash Player. A simplified diagram of the system is below:

Read the rest of this entry »

Getting Started with AS3 and the Make Controller - Part 4

Doing Something “Useful” With Sensor Input

In Parts 1-3, we spent some time examining the basics of the Make Controller, OSC and how it works with (or in some cases doesn’t work) ActionScript 3. Now, we can start to do some things that might actually be construed as being useful for a project. To start, let’s get the hardware set up by hooking up a light sensor to analogin0. With that done, we can write some code to use the input from the light sensor as it detects ambient light levels to control the opacity of a sprite on the stage of our SWF.

Read the rest of this entry »