WebORB examples are now part of Tour de Flex!

Tour de Flex is an awesome application showcasing a lot of great Flex examples. Tour de Flex is available both as a browser-based application and as an AIR installation. We were offered to add a few WebORB examples to the collection and now you can see WebORB for .NET and WebORB for PHP in action directly from Tour de Flex. (the examples are available under the 'Flex Data Access' node). I would like to thank Adobe and especially Greg Wilson for all his help. Thank you, Greg, it would be impossible without you.

Introduction to WebORB for PHP (webinar recording)

We conducted an online webinar yesterday to provide an overview of WebORB for PHP. The webinar was recorded and now the recording is available online. You can access it at the URL below. I highly recommend watching the video as it reviews some of the key configuration elements as well as core product features.

Introduction to WebORB for PHP

WebORB for PHP v3.6 is released

We released a new version of WebORB for PHP today. The release introduces several new features. A complete list is below:

• Feature: Support for AJAX clients. WebORB for PHP includes a JavaScript library that provides very elegant and easy-to-use APIs to access PHP services from JavaScript.
  
  
• Feature: Support for SOAP Web Services. All supported client types (Flash, Flex, AJAX and Silverlight) can now invoke web services via WebORB. The product functions as a proxy between a rich client and the target web service.
  
  
• Feature: Drupal integration. WebORB for PHP includes a Drupal module enabling integration between Drupal and WebORB. Once integrated, WebORB enables all supported client types to invoke Drupal services.
  
  
• Improvement: Performance enhancements. There's a major improvement in performance. WebORB 3.6 has been optimized for speed and should deliver 2x better performance than the previous releases.
  
  
• Bug fix: Fixed polling support on MacOSX
• Bug fix: Fixed problems with UTF8/non-ascii character encoding.

You can download the release from the company website.

From UI Mockups to Flex in seconds

If you are not familiar with Balsamiq Mockups, you should definitely check it out: http://www.balsamiq.com/. It is a web-based AND desktop application where you can create mockups and wireframes to model the user interface for your applications. We worked together with Balsamiq to create a feature which allows you to generate a Flex application based on a mockup. The generated application consists of the client-side MXML/ActionScript as well as server-side code. The client code and MXML renders the same components you used in a mockup, while the server sode provides all the data from the controls in the mockup to the corresponding controls in the Flex application. The integration between Flex and the backend is done with WebORB.  The generated code includes support for Java, .NET and PHP. 

You can read more about the integration in the Balsamiq blog post pre-announcing the integration:

http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2009/05/25/newfont/

There's also a page on our site dedicated to the project:

http://www.themidnightcoders.com/develop-ria/balsamiqapp

I am very excited about this integration as it makes it super simple to go from a mockup to a fully functional Flex-remoting application!

Midnight Coders Launches Free Webinar Series

This is good news for developers around the world who are interested in getting started with our products and services. We will launch our first of many free webinar events on May 18th from 3-4pm (Central). This event is an Introduction to WebORB Messaging SDK. Attendees will learn:

* How to install Messaging SDK
* How to use publish/subscribe API in Flex applications
* How to use publish/subscribe API in AIR applications
* How to use publish/subscribe API in .NET applications
* How to integrate Flex and .NET using Messaging SDK
* About the Messaging SDK features and benefits

To register: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/907481963

Future webinars include:

June 1st – Introduction to WebORB PDF Generator
To Register: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/712611978

June 8th – Getting started with WebORB for PHP
To Register: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/223302378

June 29th – Getting started with WebORB for .NET
To Register: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/855841554

Running WebORB for Java in Google App Engine

Google has recently added support for Java applications to the Google App Engine, which is their cloud environment for running web-based applications. We decided to try out WebORB for Java and ran into a few problems. Most of the problems were related to the usage of the classes which are not on the approved JRE Class White List. There is also a bug related to their Servlet API specification that prevented normal execution of WebORB. However, we found a way to work around all the major issues and I am happy to report that WebORB for Java now can be deployed into Google App Engine to provide connectivity for Flex, Flash, Silverlight and AJAX clients with the deployed Java objects. 

We also have a sample WebORB deployment in our AppEngine account which you can see at the following URL (check out the Examples tab as well as the Service Browser under management):

http://weborbdemo.appspot.com/

We're working on a new build of the product with all the fixes we have made. Until then, there is a patch build of WebORB for Google App Engine available for download.

The ZIP file contains both management console and examples. However, if you do not care about that, then use just the contents of the WEB-INF folder and extract the files into the WEB-INF directory of your Google App Engine application.

We also plan to make a few changes in the product to support Google's persistence mechanism. Once it is done, then all the features that require File IO (code generation, data management, etc) will also be supported.

Happy coding!

Free WebORB webinar tonight

I will be doing an online presentation for the Pennsylvania Flex User Group tonight at 6pm Eastern time. I will be talking about Flex client/server integration focusing on WebORB, AppPuncher and PDF Generator. Since it is an online webinar, anyone can attend and you're cordially invited. You can register for the webinar at the following address:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/603107563

See you tonight!

Deploying WebORB into a Java container

WebORB for Java can be integrated into any Java container which implements the Servlet API 2.3 and above. We just updated the documentation with the steps to deploy WebORB into most popular containers and the information has been posted to the user guide on the website. 

If you are not familiar with the process, WebORB can be deployed either as a self-contained web application in the form of a WAR file created by the installer. Alternatively, the product can be integrated into an existing web application. 

See the "Deployment" section of the WebORB user guide at the following URL for more details:

http://www.themidnightcoders.com/fileadmin/docs/java/guide/index.htm?t=30

Last but not least, we have added Sun's GlassFish Server to the list of officially supported containers. The product has been tested on both version 2.1 as well as v3 Prelude.