If you use my open source GFS Server you might be interested to know that I have updated the project files to use Netbeans 6.8, Apache Mina 1.1.7, as well as the latest SFL4J and MySQL JDBC Connector. No code has been modified in this update.
You can head over to the Google Code site to check it out as well as see some of the plans I have for the future including updating the examples to use by default the new Flash Pro CS5 and FlashBuilder 4 products.
Node.js is very easy to use and very well designed. Today I’m going to build a simple socket server using the sample provided by the Node.js documentation and create a socket client in Flash CS4.
Updated July 30, 2010 – I’ve changed the Node.js Server code below to reflect the latest changes in the Node.js API changes as of version: 0.1.102. I also tested this in Flash CS5 and it worked.
I recently installed Ubuntu 9.10 on VMWare 6.5 Workstation and wanted to try out Node.js. According to the Node.js website Node is a way to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. The nice thing about Node is that it is event driven (making use of Javascript’s strength with events and also making it easy to learn) and there are no “locks”. Node is similar to Ruby EventMachine or Python Twisted. There is already a strong user community here.
Lets go ahead a build a couple simple apps using Node.js. I’ll assume from here that you already have Ubuntu 9.10 already running.
When most people decide to build a socket server for their Flash/Flex projects they usually turn toward using Java since there are many excellent ways to go about building on some great frameworks. Today however I’ll quickly build a socket server using Stackless Python and communicate to Flash CS4.
Several years ago there was a socket server for Flash called Unity. Well, recently Unity has been reborn (re-written actually) as the Union Platform. The same developers (Colin Moock and Derek Clayton) are still hard at work making connecting Flash/Flex applications via sockets as easy as possible. Keep in mind the spec for Union’s message format is open so I’d assume you could connect clients like Silverlight, thick clients, etc. to Union as well. This is going to be an excellent platform for building online games, chat applications, and much more.
For many people who have used Adobe’s Flash or Flex products long enough they have probably at some point wanted to write a chat program, realtime applications (stock quotes, sports scores, etc.) or perhaps a multi-player online game but maybe the complexity kept you from actually doing that. Never fear, there are many great tools out there now to help you achieve this goal. Today we’ll look at xSocket and we’ll build a Flash CS3 application that connects to a socket server, posts some information that will be echoed back, and then we’ll “remotely” shutdown the socket server from our Flash application.
GFS Server is now hosted on Google Code. GFS Server was built back in January 2008 from several other existing open source projects and samples in particular from Apache’s Mina project. Its only natural now that I turn it over as open source. Hopefully others can find this project useful and perhaps clean up the code! I just haven’t had the time to really work on it and give it the attention it needs. Relocating back to Texas this year kinda ate up my time!
Using some existing non-blocking socket code from the Internet I was able to quickly craft together a basic socket connection to Flex 3. This of course would work just as well with Flash with just a couple minor changes. Basically I took the following code and put it into a new project in a Visual Studio 2008 C# console project and called it: TcpSock
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