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Author Archive for Rolf Vreijdenberger

introducing the amfserver, a zend based drupal 7 module

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 16 May, 2011
in actionscript3
. 9 Comments

After the release of Drupal 7 last januari there has been a lot of work done on integrating Drupal 7 with flash, flex and air.

We released the amfserver module about a month ago which is a drupal 7 module which allows you to integrate all your actionscript clients via the amf protocol to drupal.

The DrupalProxy classes from our opensource actionscript 3 library have also been upgraded and they now work with both Drupal 6 (amfphp module) and Drupal 7 (amfserver module) even though the underlying implementation has changed.

For you as a programmer, nothing will change and you can use the DrupalProxy as you would have done in D6.

We’ve added some pretty exciting features, like the zend framework as the underlying amf engine. Classmapping is implemented and configurable. It also works for standalone flash clients; you can login and keep your session via low level amfheaders if cookies are not enabled.

It makes use of the services 3.0 module and has much more configuration options than previous amf based integrations.
There’s a lot of information on the amfserver page on drupal.org, so check it out! There is info on how to use it, how to install it and demo code is included in the module itself.

Another step forward for integrating our favorite content management system with actionscript based clients.

cheers!

Article on DrupalProxy featured in webdesignermagazine.nl

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 26 February, 2011
in dpdk
. 4 Comments

We recently published part 1 of a 2 piece tutorial on integrating drupal 6 and flash in the march edition (nr 34) of the Dutch leading web design magazine webdesigner.nl.

The second article will feature in the may edition and is an advanced tutorial on how to use drupal services with the DrupalProxy. Handling authentication and security, views, the cck, custom modules and some more.

The tutorial is supported by a demo site where you can download the full source code and other info.

check out our facebook page for more info and we’ll keep you posted on the next article.

dpdk opensource package now available for download in zip format

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 18 November, 2010
in dpdk
. 4 Comments

We have now posted a link to a zip file containing the latest iteration (currently 505) of our opensource package. You can find the link in the source code page.

There is no more need to check out the source code via subversion (svn), although you can still do that. The svn version might be a more recent one if we add new features so be sure to check out the revision number of the zip file download against the revision number of the svn repository.

presentation and code of the adobe user group xl (augxl) 2010 online

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 18 November, 2010
in cms
. 8 Comments

Yesterday we presented a session at the adobe usergroup xl 2010 event about integrating drupal and flash via the drupal services module, the drupal content construction kit (cck) module and our opensource library with the DrupalProxy. On the accompanying website for the presentation you can find the demo, the demo source code and a download of the presentation itself, click here to get it.

We also introduced the new DrupalInvokeTask which makes it enormously easy to use all calls to core and custom service call in a sequence of tasks that execute asynchronously. Read up on how to use sequencing with our very powerful sequence package in this earlier blogpost about them.

The demo code of the presentation that you can download gives you an excellent insight in how to use sequencing and the power of it, with some tasks (including the DrupalInvokeTask) of our library.

DrupalProxy as a bridge between flash as3 and drupal via amf

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 27 July, 2010
in cms and dpdk
. 39 Comments

Drupal is a multiple award winning opensource content management system. With the drupal services module, it’s possible to consume data from drupal in flash. Drupal is a very powerful tool to provide data to flash movies and with the community investing much time in drupal services, now is a great time to be using drupal to power your flash websites. Services will be part of the drupal 7 core release.

We decided to UPGRADE our nl.dpdk.services.gephyr package, which is a drupal as3 service which acts as a bridge between drupal and flash. It has all the functionality of the drupal services built in, including the ability to connect to existing core services and any custom service implemented, out of the box. There is no need to extend it or customize it. Furthermore, it makes use of all drupals’ security mechanisms via key and session based authentication.
It has more features and packs more power than any other opensource actionscript 3 based drupal package out there at the moment, inluding our now obsolete DrupalService, so be sure to check it out from svn and start using it today.

It has a well thought out and consistent api, very tight and tested code, is easy to use, and features the ability to use the security mechanisms that are used for the drupal services backend module.

We feel that this is the implementation that ends it all and provides no more need for any other package for communicating from as3 to a drupal backend via amf and the services module. If you do however need to alter or add code, you can either subclass the class and implement some of the protected hook methods we have put there just for that purpose, OR, you can write an adapter for it. As stated before, that should not be necessary.

The architecture of the nl.dpdk.services.gephyr.DrupalProxy class is based upon using our drupal code extensively in commercial projects and from user feedback from the drupal community. It is based on the proxy design pattern as a remote proxy to the drupal services module.
Continue reading ‘DrupalProxy as a bridge between flash as3 and drupal via amf’

Soundex algorithm for indexing strings by sound in Utils package

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 13 March, 2010
in actionscript3
. 0 Comments

We’ve just released a Soundex class which enables you to get an output string from an input string that represents how the input string sounds. This enables you to find string and words that sound alike.
As an example “Ralph” and “Rolf” and “Rolph” have the same soundex output. This class might be very handy when doing a phonetic lookup on a search string, when you don’t know the exact spelling of a word or when you’re interested in getting results ‘near’ your search query.

You can find more information on the soundex algorithm here on wikipedia
The usage is very simple:

//outputs the soundex string "r4l0"
var output: String = Soundex.create("rolf");

There’s lots of other useful little tools in the utils package, so be sure to check them out

multiuser as3 framework for flash media server and red5

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 10 November, 2009
in dpdk, fms and red5
. 3 Comments

Multiuser programming is a hard thing to do. Not only does it involve a different way of approaching a problem, it also means you have to learn to program the server and communicate with it and all of it’s connected clients.
The flash media server and it’s opensource variant red5 give us two perfect platforms to do complex multiuser interaction. While they differ in the way you write server code, they are the same when it comes to writing client side code for flash/flex.

Because there are no client side abstractions to multiuser programming out there, we wrote our own and share it with you here. In our nl.dpdk.services.fms package you can find a number of classes that abstract the gory details of interacting with either the flash media server or red5, making it easier to code, easier to maintain, easier to understand cleaner and less error prone. It still allows you to use advanced features and hack away at a low level, but makes it a breeze to setup a complex environment in a short time. The classes we present in our package focus only on data exchange and not on doing streams.

Since multiuser programming is extremely cool, gives you loads of possibilities to do fun stuff and does not need to be hard, we’ll try to get you up and running with fms in this post.
Continue reading ‘multiuser as3 framework for flash media server and red5′

On using sequences and tasks with the DrupalService

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 12 October, 2009
in dpdk
. 6 Comments

UPDATE: the DrupalService has been updated by the DrupalProxy, a much more powerful implementation. The 17th of november will see the release of a new Task for the DrupalProxy (DrupalInvokeTask) that will replace other Tasks for Drupal.

An example of how you can use custom tasks in sequences is demonstrated by the use of some Tasks in the DrupalService. This post will demonstrate how two very easy to create Task subclasses give you a general solution to handling a specific dataflow from Drupal. We will show you how you can abstract the repetitive flow of connecting to a drupal backend and getting a specific set of nodes from a certain view.
 Continue reading ‘On using sequences and tasks with the DrupalService’

running tasks in order with a task based sequence manager

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 29 August, 2009
in actionscript3, desing patterns and flash
. 14 Comments

The job of running a certain sequence of logic where the next task is dependent on the completion of the previous one is a recurring thing in software development. An example of this is an asynchronous queue of which we wrote in an earlier post right here. Sequence management is something that is invented time and time again by lots of developers but there is hardly any good complete sequencing solution out there. We have fixed this by releasing our nl.dpdk.commands.tasks package which features an incredibly powerful solution for managing sequences of virtually anything in actionscript.
Do you want to make your life simpler? Then read on…
Continue reading ‘running tasks in order with a task based sequence manager’

DrupalService as a bridge between flash and drupal

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 9 August, 2009
in actionscript3, cms, dpdk and opensource
. 44 Comments

THIS POST IS OBSOLETE, the DrupalService has been replaced by the much more powerful DrupalProxy. You can read about it here: DrupalProxy as a bridge between flash as3 and drupal via amf.

Drupal is a multiple award winning opensource content management system. With the drupal services module, it’s possible to consume data from drupal in flash. Drupal is a very powerful tool to provide data to flash movies and with the community investing much time in drupal services, now is a great time to be using drupal to power your flash websites. Services will be part of the drupal 7 core release.

We decided to release our nl.dpdk.services.gephyr package, which is a drupal as3 service which acts as a bridge between drupal and flash and features all the power of our as3 flash remoting package. It has the core functionality of the drupal services built in and is very easy to extend and to adjust to your needs. Furthermore, it makes use of all drupals’ security mechanisms via key and session based authentication.
It has more features and packs more power than any other opensource actionscript 3 based drupal package out there at the moment, so be sure to check it out.
Continue reading ‘DrupalService as a bridge between flash and drupal’