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When I was presenting on Real Time Web at Adobe Flash Platform Summit in Bangalore, many people asked me whether it is possible to create P2P File Sharing (note its sharing, not transfer) in Flash Player 10.1, backed by Stratus. The answer is definitely yes. Riding on the peer-assisted networking of Adobe Stratus, it means that user can now share huge files to its connected peers, while individual peers can request and pass chunks of file to one another, just like what BitTorrent is doing.

The good thing here is that developers do not need to handle the complexity of handling their peers, transfering of data , joining of mesh themselves as all these are done by Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe Stratus 2.0 Object replication feature.

To demonstrate the P2p File Sharing capabilities , I have started an open source project that allows P2P  File Sharing named Tarts (reverse the word ‘Stratus’ to see how I get the name

To Play with Tarts , download the initial build at : http://tarts.googlecode.com/files/tarts.air
To facilitate testing, you can run 2 instance by installing the TartsReceiver, which is essentially the same file, but build with a different application id :  http://tarts.googlecode.com/files/tarts_rcv.air

Video Instruction:

1. Select a File you want to share, anything from 1mb to big files like 5 gig

2. Generate a .tart file, this is the same as a .torrent file. The .tart file will holds the description of the file that is being share.

3. Any client that want to download a file can now open a .tart file. It will automatically join the NetGroup, and begin to request for the files. The more peers is currently sharing the file, the faster the file transfer will be .

Note! You will need 2 instance of Tart if you want to send and receive a file yourself. You will not be able to send and request the SAME file under 1 client.

Source: The source for the entire project is available on Google Code:

http://code.google.com/p/tarts/

To contribute to the project, please drop me an email (shinchi-at-gmail). I hope to keep this simple project as a proof of concept for P2p File Sharing using Stratus, but we all know Flash Developers loves to push limits. So if you modify the code , feel free to commit it back to the trunk.

Last year when I was in Seoul in got the chance to chat with Jason Calacanis, whom I told him about The Actionscript Conference. When I told him that it is still small, he told me “give it a few years”. His words bring me far and I am determined to turn TAC into one of the biggest Flash and Flex conference in South East Asia.

This year, TAC will be held on the 14th and 15th September, in the 550 seater of NTUC auditorium at One Marina Boulevard. For many attendees, it simply means crossing the road of Shenton way from their office to the venue. 2 Full days means we are invite more speakers, more topics and give you the updates and knowledge of Flex, Flash and Flash Player, and AIR that you are craving for.

I am proud to announced that ticketing is now opened. So register now!

It has been a great week at MAX ‘08, providing great experience for me and looking at all the new technology Adobe has to offer. Love the Keynote, Sneak Peaks, Great People and the excellent MAX Party!

Developer Point of View
Particularly interesting to me, in order of interest is Alchemy - C and C++ codes for Flash, Cocomo, ability to have P2P video in Flash, Flex 4 Gumbo and Server Side Actionscript, and Flash Catalyst (formly Thermo)

With Alchemy, it simply means the ceiling is now higher for us the developers. Anything is now possible now on the client side and developers will have to at least have an overview of how it works in order to be able to utilize the wide array of libraries existed nowadays and incorporate them in their client. Website owners should seriously look into this piece of technology to see how they can use Alchemy to create new experiences for their users. Using Alchemy, you can achieve things that are never possible in Flash (like the Quake demo in MAX ) and thus it also give rise to new business opportunities. I will be spending the next few weeks to dive deep into Alchemy and will post up some experiments I have here.

Cocomo is SaaS from a Social Networking point of view. Tied closely to Acrobat.com, it allows developers to tap into existing components in Acrobat.com, like video chat capability and real time file sharing, and use them in their own application. It is definitely a welcoming for us developers as it gives us another option to create RIA without installing our own infrastructure. 

Flex 4 , as most people might already know, will have better skinning workflow, better performance, separation between component business logic and UI elements, support of shapes and graphics in MXML (like degrafa). It also introduce a own new set of components extended from the FxComponent (like UIComponent in Flex 3), 2 way binding, and the feature that makes everyone claps - a “layer” property in the component that defines the depth rather than the childIndex! All these in a new MXML 2009 namespace

And of course, Flash Catalyst (Fc), formerly Thermo, is also heavily showcased during the event. Fc allow designers to create their graphics in Photoshop or Illustrator, export them in a format FXG, and continue to work in Fc, and effectively saving the files as MXML into a Flex project! While I personally do not think Fc take off quickly as a tool of dictating the entire site UI (remember the Dreamweaver symdrome? ), but I do believe it will become real popular for developers in terms of component skinning. As Ryan Stewart demoed in MAX, with just a few click, it will skin a component like scrollbar automatically, which is a huge step from Flex 3. 

Community Manager Point of View

MAX provides a lot of opportunities for User group managers (UGM) to network with other User group managers and Adobe’s community managers . This time, Adobe launches Adobe Group, which FUG is part of it!. Flex Camp is also now officially Flash Camp. It is very encouraging that Adobe is pushing for the community than ever before, providing us the UGM with valuable resources and directly support. 

I also meet up with the UGM from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Seoul. Try to spot us in the photo below.

It is great when we start to see people from SEA and who knows, we might start seeing some asia speakers for MAX in the future!

Overall
Its been a great 3 days at MAX and an even better week in San Francisco. Now there is lots of new technologies to play, with the bar rise much higher than before! Work hard developers!

Lastly, not related to MAX, but hey I am on Seesmix!!!

 

Today, we have officially started the ticket sales for The Actionscript Conference.

The price for The Actionscript Conference is $60 until 1st October, which will include lunch, delegate bag and access to post-event party, and of course, many interesting sessions that the invited speakers will be talking about. 25 tickets has been sold in a day and that is very encouraging to us!

Whether you are in Singapore, or nearby countries like Malaysia , Thailand and Philippine, we welcome you to join us! Reserve your ticket today!

I will also be heading to SgDotNet Usergroup Meeting tomorrow to spread the event to the .NET users (in fact, the backend of the TAC registration runs on asp.net).

For those who wish to meet the organizers and the usergroup, learn about BlazeDS and Gaia Framework, feel free to join us at Yahoo! next week by RSVP here. There are just a few seats left at the time of this posting so do reserve one now.

Ciao~

In this episode, we talk about how you can create programmatic skinning in your Flex components

Video:

Related Files:
https://share.acrobat.com/adc/document.do?docid=539adfa2-738a-45d5-ac44-5e1b7201b200

Related Link:
Designing Flex 3 skins and styles using Creative Suite 3 and Flex Builder 3�

The Seesmic Wordpress Plugin is a plugin which allows you to do video commenting on your blogs. Ever since its launch, it has been integrated into Disqus as well as released its API for other developers to integrate into their system.

Today, the plugin make its way into the Wordpress Plugin directory, which you can download it at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seesmic-wp/

I am very excited to have played a part in coding the plugin, and thus I am very happy at where it has actually being installed  and the good feedbacks of it. Definitely keep my coding flames burning!