XPath – An efficient way to parse xml

XPath, the XML Path Language, is a query language for selecting nodes from an XML document. In addition, XPath may be used to compute values (e.g., strings, numbers, or Boolean values) from the content of an XML document. XPath was defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). - courtesy: Wikipedia.org

XPath is a regular expressions style query language for selecting / extracting nodes from a xml document. Most of you have already seen the E4X standard introduced in as3 and how it speeds up your xml parsing. The new XML class in as3 negates the legacy XML class, which is also known as XMLDocument class now.

The reason to prefer this style over the “firstchild.childnode” style , is you can directly select nodes at any depth without having to parse down the entire family tree. This is one of the main reasons why As3 parsing seems more sensible than As2. Often you will b involved in projects where you need to parse a rss feed. You will notice the RSS feeds maintain a pretty complex structure, and a pretty good depth.  Places like these are , when you will really notice that the xml parsing time matters a lot.

Although As3 is pretty much out there and is undoubtedly the future you still need to deal with As2 for many reasons, such as compatibility / deeper language reach / Flash Lite and Read the rest of this post »

Popularity: 7% [?]

November 8, 2009 · admin · 2 Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Actionscript 2.0, Flash Lite

Flex-Ajax bridge the primer for flex-javascript communication

Flex-Ajax-Bridge

Often a common issue i face redundantly in setting up a actionscript – Javascript  communication is – actionscript function call back. ie:  calling actionscript function from JavaScript.  sometimes its a real pain to get it to work in all browser pretty much error free Read the rest of this post »

Popularity: 16% [?]

October 29, 2009 · admin · No Comments
Posted in: AJAX, Flex, General, Javascript

India goes DoCoMo !

docomo

Hoardings/Ads  of TATA DOCOMO are lashing city boards, banners, televisions in a massive way.

TATA , One of the largest mobile operators in India, is now bringing  ”D0C0M0”  implementation to Indian mobile users. Tata DoCoMo was formed in 2008  as an alliance between Tata Teleservices and NTT DOCOMO.

This partnership will bring promising opportunities to both mobile developers and users alike. Benefiting development which was earlier held back due to weak backbone. some of the key features tolook out for  incude:

2 GHz (UMTS2100) /800 MHz(UMTS800(Band VI)) / 1800 MHz(UMTS1800(Band IX)) bands.
You can read more about TATA DoCOMo here

Popularity: 9% [?]

October 28, 2009 · admin · One Comment
Posted in: Advertising, Commercial, Flash Lite

Video streaming on Nokia 6210 with Red5

red5 streaming on mobile

red5 streaming on mobile

This week i was experimenting  a lot with red5, so thought of trying this out :) . With flash lite 3.0 released its not much problem porting most of your action script 2.0 code to mobile version of it. The only thing being that you need to ensure proper memory usage. Here is  an example of setting up video streaming on Nokia 6201 with flash lite 3.0 and Red5 streaming server. If you want to tryout for other phones, please check their device profiles for flash lite version and streaming video support.

Remember we want lite,  so no flv components. The only tools we shall use is the Video Object, Movie Clips, and home grown action script. To get the source code running you need to have Red5 installed on your local machine.

Get latest stable build of red5 server from  http://osflash.org/red5

Download the full source code Here

Popularity: 26% [?]

October 25, 2009 · admin · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Actionscript 2.0, Flash Lite, General, Red5, RTMP