As we’ve been commenting on over the past several months, Aanval v6 is a major interation and one we are sure greatly improves information security efficiency and security event management.

Although now would seem an appropriate time to catch up on sleep, we have a lengthy list of enhancements and features planned for v6 and will continue to aggressively roll out new builds following our release early, release often methodology.

The interface for Aanval v6 was completely re-written in Flex 4, scrapping the entire previous Flex 3 interface. The backend remains MySQL / PHP, however dozens of updates and optimizations were made to improve performance and stability.

Aanval is quite a large project, comprised of several hundred thousand lines of code. A major portion of time for this release was spent working on the interface (Flex 4). If you follow me on Twitter, you’d have witnessed a bit of my frustrations with the latest releases of Flash Builder (the unstable, Eclipse based pile of junk). But I’ll save all of that joy and excitement for another post.

A couple of more notable features of Aanval v6, besides the new multi-tasking interface are the GeoLocation displays and the re-introduced event correlation system.

• GeoLocation with integrated Google Maps is now available in both real-time and search displays to provide a global, visual reference of event attack sources.
• The event correlation system has been re-introduced with an updated interface to group and rank events that may be related to one another.

For more information on Aanval v6, including upgrade details, new license purchasing, etc – see  aanval.com

A short list of a few of Aanval v6′s new features and enhancements:

• All new live GeoLocation (Google Maps)
• All new event displays
• All new event correlation
• All new event browser
• All new live even monitor
• All new frequent X displays
• All new report management
• All new action management
• All new signature management
• All new datastore management
• All new policy management
• All new snort management
• All new syslog filter management
• All new installation and update system
• All new multi-tasking interface
• All new inter-display interaction
• All new look and feel
• And much… much, more
• Dozens of bug fixes are included, too numerous to list

A selection of screenshots, a few of these may be early release or even beta.

Aanval Snort & Syslog Intrusion Detection and Correlation Console

Aanval is the industry’s leading web-based gui for snort and syslog intrusion detection and correlation. Government security and defense organizations from more than a half dozen countries, educational institutions from around the world, global financial organizations as well as space exploration and military weapons manufacturers rely upon Aanval as a part of their security infrastructure.

http://www.aanval.com/

Enjoy.

~moses

This was the result of a little playing with XMLSocket along with PHP to create a multi-client socket server for Flex to interact with.

Initially I only wanted to test the simplicity of Flex’s ability to make simple socket connections and pass data, however one can easily see how much fun you could have here. *scratches brain*

Left side is simply telnet’ing to the socket server on the remote host.

Right side is the Flex application which connects to the same remote socket server.

Then demonstrating basic Reflection using getDefinitionByName with ClassFactory to dynamically instantiate display objects and move them about the stage.

~moses

@umAndy (Andy Powell) dropped a tweet a few weeks ago with my name selected as the winner for a free ticket to Flash Camp Atlanta 2009.

Flash Camp Atlanta is a one day event focusing on the Flash platform, Flex and Actionscript. The camp provides tracks for both beginners and experienced developers.

Flash Camp Atlanta 2009 – Speakers and Sessions

Flash Camp Atlanta 2009 – Tickets

These surprises are always nice, and I do very much appreciate it. I hadn’t planned on attending, due only to my schedule being so full for the end of the month, however I’ll give moving things around a shot and see if I can’t get away for the day.

For those who might not know who Andy is (you should), drop by his blog and get familiar.

http://www.infoaccelerator.net/blog/

Thanks again for the ticket!

~moses

Several times within the last week or so I’ve been asked what I use for the majority of my development and if I have any secret tips on applications that aid in my efforts and productivity.

The simple answer… no.

I have a tendency to choose standards and common practice over popular, hyped applications and utilities.

This is just a few notes on some of the most used applications on my primary development machine. Oh — and it’s a Mac.

Flex & AIR

Flex 3 development is of course as you can imagine done in Flex Builder 3. For the past month or so I’ve been using Eclipse 3.4 along with Adobe’s Flex Builder plugin. I’ve bounced back and forth between the Flex Builder plugin and the stand-along Flex Builder app, but found that the latest release of Eclipse along with the plugin work and play nicely together and are relatively stable.

One note I might mention — the few times that I have installed Eclipse 3.4 along with the Flex Builder plugin I have had to customize my perspective to include the launch and debug buttons for Flex. This wasn’t an issue in previous versions and isn’t really a big issue at all, but for new users, this could be confusing.

Flex 4 development is done in the stand-alone Flash Builder 4 beta. I chose this route only as a simple and quick method of having both tools available without worrying about interference between the two. Not to imply that there is, I just had better things to do at the time than risk an issue. No other reason.

Java

Eclipse 3.4 is the Java IDE of choice. This shouldn’t be any surprise if you are a Java developer.

Nothing more to see here.

Cocoa / Objective-C 2.0

Well, unless you are a complete masochist, then you of course already know that this is done in Xcode. If you are not yet an Xcode user, then you can’t imagine what you are missing. It’s an excellent multi-language IDE and makes quick work of Cocoa applications. Although it does support a wide range of compiled and interpreted languages, it’s pretty much only used for Cocoa on my machines and most recently of course, iPhone app development.

PHP / PERL / Ruby  & Python

All of my scripting development is done using Coda by Panic. It’s a great light-weight, multi-language development environment that uses the latest and greatest features of OS X to make endless hours of scripting more enjoyable.

It is missing a feature or two that I wouldn’t mind having (such as local function / method code hinting), but ultimately it’s not a deal breaker. I’ve easily logged a few million lines of code through Coda.

MySQL

I’m more of a purist here and have a tendency to do all of my MySQL jockeying through the command line. However, recently I’ve began using Sequel Pro for OS X and although it is lacking in a few areas, it does make it nice and convenient to quickly create and modify table column types as well as backup databases and tables to the local disk.

Backup

I do get asked quite a bit about backup policies, and of course it is mostly by clients. For backup on all of my development machines I use externally connected 1 terabyte drives and use Time Machine. Time Machine with OS X takes hourly snapshots of changes and automates the management of the data so I can focus on more important things. — I like that.

~moses

My particular prize showed up this morning via FedEx.

The Pocket Guide – “Getting Started with Flex 3″ by Jack D Herrington & Emily Kim

Pocket guide may be a little bit of a stretch… It doesn’t fit in any of mine, but still makes a great prize.

However, if you are tired of being a loser, follow Edward Sullivan on Twitter @esulliva

Thanks Ed.

~moses

Half empty. Time for a refill!

Within the last 10 days or so, I’ve been able to wrap up several small Adobe Flex and AIR projects and now have some availability for some interesting and / or unique opportunities. Let’s hear em’.

Regarding the Flex / AIR sector in general; I am still absolutely amazed at the shear number of Flex and AIR projects that are in search of developers for both consulting and long-term contract work. Although I pass on dedicated contract work, any new or experienced Flex developer has a near unending supply of opportunity to harvest from it seems.

Unique, technical or interesting projects of any type are of course a preference, however I also enjoy cranking out small or quick one-off solutions.

As I said above, let’s hear what you got!

~moses

Simple or basic application states were of no real concern, but as states grew and became more and more complicated, managing and manipulating these states became a tedious and even just plain silly task.

Flex 4 (“Gumbo”) brings about a much more advanced and welcome implementation of states.

This isn’t a blog post comparing Flex 3 and Flex 4′s state architectures, but more a simple example of using the new state syntax in Flex 4. Regardless if you had ever used states in Flex 3 or not is really unimportant, this is the new and ‘correct’ way to implement an application state system. IMHO.

Flex 4 states are defined as follows:

[as3]
<s:states>
<s:State name="State1"/>
<s:State name="State2"/>
</s:states>
[/as3]

Using Flex 4 states on a specific button component would be as follows:

[as3]
<s:Button
label="I’m a button"
x.State1="10" y.State1="10"
x.State2="20" y.State2="20"
click.State1="button_clickHandler(event)"
click.State2="other_clickHandler(event)"
/>
[/as3]

Another obviously excellent set of features in the new Flex 4 state system are the “includeIn” and “excludeFrom” attributes:

[as3]
<mx:Label x="100" y="200" text="My Label 1" includeIn="State1, State2"/>
<mx:Label x="100" y="300" text="My Label 2" excludeFrom="State2"/>
[/as3]

Well done guys!

All the meat on states in Flex 4, with comparisons to Flex 3 and Flex 2 can be found here. This is a good read!
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Enhanced+States+Syntax

~moses

Pretty exciting news no doubt, and as you can see I have already allocated my portion of Adobe Labs bandwidth for the next half-hour.

Now I need to find some time in my already overloaded schedule to do some playing work with the new beta apps.

As quickly as I can wrap up a few current Flex & AIR client projects, you can bet I will be spending some quality time getting to know the new tools more intimately.

As you can see from the downloads window above, Adobe Labs has both the Eclipse plugin and stand-alone versions of Flash Builder 4 Beta available.

Go get em’ : Adobe Labs / Downloads : http://labs.adobe.com/downloads

~moses

Whenever possible, that horrific purple monstrosity sitting in my OS X dock gets kicked to the curb and replaced by the much more handsome Flex Builder icon. Soon it will be replaced with the Flash Builder icon.

For those who share my feelings, this is the quick dirt on making the swap and is rather simple for anyone familiar with OS X.

If you don’t have both Flex Builder and Eclipse installed, you can download the “flexbuilder.icns” icon file here.

To begin, right click the Flex Builder application and select “Show Package Contents”

Browse to the Contents->Resources folder and copy the “flexbuilder.icns” icon into the clipboard.

Next, right click the Eclipse application and select “Show Package Contents”

Browse once again to the Contents->Resources folder and rename “Eclipse.icns” to “Eclipse_old.icns” or something else handy just in case you change your fancy.

Paste your clipboard copy of “flexbuilder.icns” into the Resources folder and rename to “Eclipse.icns”.

Restart Eclipse.

Done. Enjoy.

~moses

This is not surprisingly quite a hot topic for both Flash and Flex developers. Flash developers who regularly use Flex Builder to create ActionScript projects think it only makes sense to call it Flash Builder, while Flex developers who use Flex Builder to create Flex projects don’t see the name change as making much sense, or possibly even a mistake.

I’ve browsed about the blogs of a large portion of Adobe technology evangelists and although my opinion is not quite the same, I completely understand their point of view. Quickly glancing through a few dozen comments revealed that the renaming issue runs the full spectrum from strong like to intense dislike and of course general indifference.

From my perspective as an existing developer using Flex, Adobe could rename Flex Builder to “Flexity Flashomator 5000″ or “Flash Master Flex” and it wouldn’t affect my views and usage of the tool and framework the slightest.

As a developer who is already exposed to the technology, well versed in it’s functionality and understands it’s place in the market I’m not concerned about the name change influencing my current use of Flex at all.

However, I do recall my conversion to Flex and I do believe that had it been called “Flash Builder” I would have been much more hesitant to take a look. I, like many others who do not come from a Flash background, but a strong development background had quite a few misconceptions about Flash in general and would have wanted nothing to do with another Flash tool.

I understood from my initial exposure that Flex Builder was an IDE for building Flash content using the Flex framework, however had it another name or been named “Flash Builder” I more than likely wouldn’t have been interested or been so quick to investigate.

My only concern about the name change, would be that new potential developers interested in Flex technology may be quite hesitant with a name like Flash Builder. After all, Flex is a technology that is creating a bridge to bring additional developers into Adobe’s fold.

If I had to complain, it would be that I’ve read several posts that suggest that because the builder compiles SWF files, it makes total sense to call it Flash Builder. However, think of EXE files and try that same logic — it doesn’t work. Possibly a name referring to ActionScript would be a better fit.

Of course, from my spectator seat far from Adobe internals — I would trust they have a great marketing and communication campaign that will clearly send a message to would-be developers that Flash Builder is the way Flex / AIR applications are built. Adobe evangelists have always done an excellent job educating all of us. Let us hope this makes their work easier as well as increases the adoption rate of Flex all around.

With all of that aside, I look forward to the new version of the builder and it’s new features, regardless of the name.

~moses

A few evangelist blog posts on the topic of renaming:

Mihai Corlan

Ryan Stewart

Lee Brimelow

Duane Nickull