NB in Electronic Design Magazine: Build Real-time Flash GUIs

[curibe]

Hi Everyone, I'm so excited to tell you this! Electronic Design Magazine has published an article which features NetBurner hardware!

The title is:
"Build A Real-Time Flash GUI For Embedded Network Devices"

You can read it on the web or check out the "Design View / Design Solution" section in the May 22, 2008 issue of Electronic Design. Comments/ratings on the online article page would be very much appreciated.

Read Electronic Design Article
http://electronicdesign.com/Article/Art ... feed=Top20

Article source code files (Flash and C/C++ source) can be downloaded here: http://www.netburner.com/downloads/DSnbsource.zip

Download the Adobe Flash 30-Day trial here: http://www.adobe.com/go/tryflash

If you have any questions about the article, feel free to send me an e-mail or post your questions on this board.

[tony]

Chris,

Thank you for providing this article. I would never have considered taking this approach in the past. I downloaded the demo of the Flash software and completed my first trial with it. I can't say that I enjoy the Flash IDE (actually I hate it). The development model is confusing and source code gets scattered all over the place. Your example is very pretty and worked great.

After working with Flash and browsing the web for help I discovered a free alternative that I think will be much more appealing to embedded developers. What I found is the Open Source Adobe Flex SDK http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/. This is a free download for from Adobe which includes a compiler that creates SWF files just like Flash does. That means they play in the same Flash play that everyone has installed for their browser and you can use it for FREE.

What attracted me to Flex vs Flash is that I can quickly create a user interface that mimics an application that designed for the desktop. It is completely text based unless you want to pay for an Eclipse IDE called Flex Developer. There is an Open Source tool called Flash Develop that is build around the Sharp Develop IDE but it doesn't have a GUI developer.

For those of you who have tried Chris's example the XMLSocket class exists in Flex. The ActionScript source code which is based on JavaScript works as well. I was able to be productive with Flex in about 4 hours. If you have seen XML before and can code in C++ you will be off to the races developing some mouth dropping GUI's with an asynchronous connection to the Netburner hardware within the day!!!

Cheers,
Tony

[seulater]

You can also give a try with
http://www.swishzone.com/index.php?area ... roduct=max

This is what i used to get me started in flash.

[seulater]

First off, Thanks Tony for that Link to adobe flex, I did not even know it was out there. I started playing arround with it, and it is sensational!!! Its like the best of both worlds, web page design and flash design combined into one deal.

Guys, Tony opened my eyes to this Flex deal. I thing NB should seriously look into this, it could really give some awesome functionality to the NB products.


Thanks again Tony

[tony]

I have posted some source code for an example of how to use Flex with the Netburner hardware on the Wiki. It is far from complete and I hacked up my current source code so that it should work on anyones hardware but I didn't try it out yet. Basically the project demonstrates how to use the XMLSocket with Flex3 and animated a compass needle. I will try to finish up the Wiki entry when I get a chance (feel free to edit it). Most of the credit for the C code should go to Chris since it is almost an exact copy of the Flash example.

You can find the entry here http://wiki.embeddedethernet.com/Catego ... ed_content

Cheers,
Tony

[Ridgeglider]

Hi Tony: Thanks for the compass needle demo. Flex DOES look very impressive. Still a few bugs in your needle code: Needle graphics's XY postion is changing but no big deal. The point is that thi stuff looks like a great toolkit. Looks like you may also have alternate career as graphic artist!

Thanks again.

[seulater]

Tony, i downloaded the example and when i went to compile it for my MOD5270 i got a error message of

Maximum address of ffc8cd5c exceeds memory limit of ffc80000

What platform did you try this on exactly ?

[tony]

I originally compiled this on the PK70 platform. I noticed the 5270 has only 512 of Flash. The Flex object is 441k so it will probably not fit in the 5270. If you downloaded Flash Develop and the Flex application I would suggest deleting the Map.jpg image from the project. This will decrease the Flex object ot 315k which will probably fit. I should have compressed the images more.

[seulater]

I asked Adobe why Flex file sizes were so much larger then Flash files sizes, roughly speaking doing the same things.

Here is the link they send to help reduce the files sizes, I have not tried it yet, and though I would share.

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Fl ... lex_3_RSLs

[tony]

I've seen some previous posts about Flash and Flex XMLSockets being limited to only one user at a time. I cut and pasted code from the TcpMultiSocket example into the ConnectionServer.cpp file. If this file is replaced in my Flex example multiple users are able to connect at the same time. This example is not pushing data to the host. It is only responding to requests. When I was pushing data I ran into some problems with Cross Domain policy errors. Basically what happens when making a cross domain connection is the Flex App connects to the host and requests this policy. It then drops this socket connection to the server. The policy file is then parsed, if everything is okay another connection is made to the server. I'm not sure where the problem is but I suspect data is getting push onto the end of policy file and messing things up. I will need a sniffer for this one.