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Archive for the 'dpdk' Category

DrupalProxy as a bridge between flash as3 and drupal via amf

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 27 July, 2010
in cms and dpdk
. 0 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’

Reconfiguring the Loader with custom load tasks

Published
by
peter
on 20 July, 2010
in dpdk
. 0 Comments

In a previous post about the loader package, we explained how it can be used to bulk load different files into your application. That post also mentioned the possibility of adding custom mappings and load tasks to the loader for any use cases that are not supported by the default implementation. This post will explore these features in more detail.
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a configurable, pluggable, thread safe prioritized bulk loader with object management

Published
by
szenia
on 20 July, 2010
in dpdk
. 3 Comments

To solve the problem of loading assets in flash for once and for all, we’ve decided to release our nl.dpdk.loader Package containg our Loader class.

We’re very proud to release this package since it solves all problems with bulk asset loading and object/data mangement, at the same time making it extensible by other users to write their own loading schemes if necessary. On top of that, it is prioritized so you can rearrange loading priorities (so you can decide which files will always be loaded first in an application, or even change that at runtime), you can instantiate multiple Loader objects and they are automatically managed behind the scenes making sure that the loaded files are queued up and managed centrally behind the scenes. Data that is associated with the file you want to load is managed for you and keeps it’s association with the file to be loaded, so that when it has been loaded you will have easy access to the associated data. Each module in your application can instantiate it’s own Loader object but because of priorities that can be managed, each module can make sure that it behaves as a good citizen and set their own priority, so that important files can be set with a high priority and will be loaded before lower priority files, without each module knowing other stuff is being loaded at all.

It features file progress statistics about how many files have loaded, the bytes, how many files to load etc.
You can load different types of files (xml, bitmap data, swf, binary data, sound, text etc) and if they are not available by default (eg: zip files) you can easily write your own task to do that and plug it in the system and it will work with all the functionality already made available through the loader.

There are lots of details to cover and to explore which we will do in this article, and if you want more details, take a look at the source code to find out about the full power of the Loader.

Continue reading ‘a configurable, pluggable, thread safe prioritized bulk loader with object management’

Sorting and custom sorting

Published
by
peter
on 20 July, 2010
in dpdk and opensource
. 0 Comments

In an earlier post we introduced the Collections package, which includes several ways of keeping track of objects in your application. The Collections package includes a number of very powerful features, such as search using the specification pattern and many ways of sorting your data. The latter will be elaborated upon in this article.
Continue reading ‘Sorting and custom sorting’

Wait for user input in your sequence

Published
by
oskar
on 25 February, 2010
in dpdk
. 1 Comment

We’ve been using the task based sequence for a while now and are very pleased with it. One thing we missed, was the possibility to listen to an event.

Besides the ConditionalTask (which waits for an other Task to be completed), we’ve now added the EventListenerTask. This task waits until an object has dispatched an event before continuing the sequence.

Here is a code example

//create a new sequence that will hold tasks
var sequence: Sequence = new Sequence();
//wait until the user clicked on the 'myButton' instance
sequence.add(new EventListenerTask( myButton, MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN );
//call a callback method in the present scope
sequence.add(new CallbackTask(onDone));
//start the sequence
sequence.execute();

With this new Task it’s very easy to (for example) pause the Sequence until the user pressed a button or pressed a key… or until some other object dispatched an event.

multiuser as3 framework for flash media server and red5

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 10 November, 2009
in dpdk, fms and red5
. 1 Comment

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
. 3 Comments

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.
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DrupalService as a bridge between flash and drupal

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 9 August, 2009
in actionscript3, cms, dpdk and opensource
. 41 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’

FramescriptManager: insert code on your timeline at runtime

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 6 August, 2009
in design and dpdk
. 0 Comments

In an earlier post we showed you how to seperate design and code by keeping code off the timeline at all times. The method was to have designers add framelabels to the movieclips’ timeline and have the developers react to the flash playhead reaching this framelable by means of an Event. This created a clean seperation between the job of coders and the job of designers.

We used the TimelineListener class as an example in that earlier post. This post will show you how to take an alternative approach, without event listeners, but by means of injecting code in a frame at runtime by means of our FrameScriptManager and the MovieClip.addFramescript method.
Continue reading ‘FramescriptManager: insert code on your timeline at runtime’

Asynchronous queue demo with a LinkedList

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 2 April, 2009
in actionscript3, datastructures and dpdk
. 2 Comments

This post will show you the principle of an asynchronous queue, demonstrating it with the LinkedList structure in our package, used as a Queue by making it’s datatype nl.dpdk.collections.core.IQueue.

An Asynchrounous Queue is a queue that is processed with asynchrounous operations. Instead of processing a Queue in synchronous fashion, where you would remove all items from the queue in a loop, the items are removed only when the previous operation has finished (succesfully or not). The time when this is handled is not known in advance, and is event driven rather than procedurally driven.

Most browser cannot handle more than a couple of simultaneous http requests from flash, and just trying to load them all at once (in a loop) is error prone. A queue is a lifesaver in a case like this.
Continue reading ‘Asynchronous queue demo with a LinkedList’