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We just completed a yearlong project for the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning with the successful Launch of MetroPulse, an analytics and mapping platform that allows government officials, press outlets and concerned citizens to access 20,000 data sets on 200+ different indicators that track quantifiable issues throughout Chicagoland. It’s interactivity and location-based visualization capabilities will allow users to more quickly assess and understand quality of life issues that impact the seven-county region.  

I asked Andrew Williams Clark, CMAP senior planner and Regional indicators project manager to comment on the project and our involvement, and here’s what he had to say:

“MetroPulse gives us a faster, more powerful, visual way to both analyze and communicate quality-of-life information. Pathfinder has been instrumental to the successful development and launch of the MetroPulse platform. From great product development to the coordination of resources from multiple organizations, Pathfinder made it possible for us to build a product of this caliber.”

MetroPulse is built in a combination of Adobe Flex and Microsoft .NET technologies, integrated with ArcGIS for geographic information. The system is highly modular, with multiple sub applications able to function on their own or integrated into the full application framework.    

We think MetroPulse is a great analytics and visualization  platform that promotes transparency, openness and sharing.  It’s very exciting to be involved with cutting edge technology and cutting edge government at the same time.

Check out the MetroPulse site and let us know what you think, and what things you’ve discovered about the region and your community.

You have a great application on your hands but you can’t load it up as a part of your brand-spanking-new application because they are not the same version.

Do you rewrite the old stuff? Or you downgrade the version of the app you are currently building? Both are very painful, and all you need to do to avoid the pain is to make the apps talk and coexist. This is a standard problem of any enterprise system, especially the ones with a long lifespan.

Flex framework addresses this problem with the Marshall Plan or at least it’s supposed to. Here at Pathfinder, when we were tasked with a complex multi-versioned  enterprise system that had just such a problem. We gave Marshall Plan a try and in our experience we never got it to work entirely as intended. But we came up with a solution.

photo credit: Amateugrapher

We recently finished a first release of a data visualization application. The application was written in Flex and needed to draw curves with up to 250,000 points total between them. To do this in less than a half a second took quite a bit of optimization, to the point where we could have written a 3D real-time video game with our rendering code.

I was curious to see what the performance would be on other browsers with HTML5 Canvas. I put together a simple GWT program to run each browser through it’s paces. The target on the Macbook Pro I was using: 400 milliseconds, which is what the Flex app could do for 250,000 points. The results?

• Opera 10.53 – 160 milliseconds.
• Safari 5.0 – 180 milliseconds.
• Firefox 3.6.4 – 180 milliseconds.
• Chrome 5.0 – 200 milliseconds.
• iPad – 2500 milliseconds.
• IE ? – Blech. Don’t ask. Minutes. It likely has something to do with the GWT implementation.

For a long time if you suggested using web technologies for complex graphical operations, you would have been laughed out of the room. When the tools and libraries catch up to Flex/Flash, however, these days nobody will be chuckling at HTML5.

I don’t remember the last time I was as excited about development as I am now, and for discovering old news no less! Enter Adobe Alchemy.

To give you some background on the problem, I am currently working with an excellent team on a huge project (top secret). It is so huge that we are trying to retrieve half a million records per call from the server and process it with complicated algorithms in a browser. A tall order for Flex. Yes, we are using BlazeDS and we’ve added Vector Class from Flex SDK 4.o. We even did some Number to int and back magic (shoutout to Chris and Jeff) to compress the data going over the wire, but the processing of the result is “less than ideal”.

This is where Alchemy steps in. Thanks to a great article by Ralph Hauwert, we have been able to tap into power of C inside Flash Player! To quote Alchemy’s site regarding that: “…performance can be considerably faster than ActionScript 3.0 and anywhere from 2-10x slower than native C/C++ code.”

[SWF]http://www.pathf.com/sites/pfd/flash/zeitlupe/Zeitlupe.swf, 500, 475, dataLocation=http://www.pathf.com/sites/pfd/flash/zeitlupe/[/SWF]

We’ve been building a lot of mapping/GIS data visualization applications over the last few months, mostly using flex with various back end services (ArcGIS, google and yahoo maps, open source mapping frameworks.) One of the more fun little projects was putting together this flex widget for displaying maps and graphical data together on a timeline. It’s meant to be distributable so that anyone with a blog can display it. We put it together using presidential election data and national debt, not because we thought the correlation was particularly significant, but because the data was available going back a long time. The widget is pretty flexible; it can go against a local data source or a web service, and we can easily modify it to show different kinds of data. We’ll be coming out with a few more of these over the next few months, hopefully with some more 3D maps, drill down on geographic level, as well as more charting and other visualizations. If you’d like to use this one, or have ideas for other data sets and visualizations you’d like to see, let us know.

After a long time of searching for the right data visualization framework for Flash Platform, some time ago I’ve put my money on Flare which is based on a Java framework called Prefuse. I have been very happy with it and haven’t looked back until a new framework of same purpose crossed my way – Axiis.

Before anything else said, Axiis is a brand new framework so I have to give it some credit if all the bells and whistles are not there. What intrigued me about it in the first place is that Axiis is heavily relying on Degrafa, a well proven declarative graphics framework that I have a lot of good experience with.

After looking at Axiis examples, here are my first impressions of how it stands against Flare.

We just launched a new rich internet application for Destinationbeer.com, called Beer Hunter.  It was written in Flex and Ruby on Rails and features mapping and 150 beers from around the world.  We think it’s pretty cool, so check it out, and let us know what you think.  One of the things I really like about it is that the design pattern can be applied anywhere you’re filtering products geographically and on attributes.  Coffee? Wine? Jewelry? Chocolate? Travel Books? I particularly like the way the beer list visually sorts when you change a filter and the zoom interactions on the map.

There’s more information in the case study on the Pathfinder web site, Sasha has written a related post on RubyAMF and Flex from the Flex perspective , and Justin has written one on Rails, AMF and Flex from the Rails perspective.

I recently had an issue in flex where I needed the click event for a component in an ItemRenderer to not bubble up to the parent list. Since the click event was being dispatched by Flex SDK code, I could not directly do this by passing false into the event’s constructor. I had hoped to find a property I could set on the object, something like “clickBubbles”, which I could set which would accomplish this.

Either that property doesn’t exist or I could not find it. My solution was to basically hijack the event and send an impersonator in its place.

One of the nice extensions available for FlexUnit is the ability to easily unit test event behavior using EventfulTestCase.

This library has support for testing Cairngorm, but unfortunately support is lacking for PureMVC. I searched for existing solutions which added PureMVC notification support, but was not satisfied with their APIs. Luckily, it was not difficult to write some code to support PureMVC which mirrored the API of EventfulTestCase.

Time and again the same scenario arises. An app is being built and it’s all going fine until the very end when performance issues start to appear.

Optimizing Flash performance is certainly the most boring part of Flash Platform development but it’s a cornerstone without which you, the Flex developer, can not do without.

An app is worth nothing unless you provide that effortless flow of interaction at all times.

There is not too much information on this topic as it is not the most interesting one but here are some simple guidelines that have helped me tremendously over the time, as well as a few great papers.