Flex or Ajax .. well both!

The release of Flash Player 9 included a new External API using a class file called the ExternalInterface that allows for the communication between JavaScript and Flash applications. To create the communication link and pass data between JavaScript and Flex, the developer had to create custom code to handle each call.

The newly introduced Flex-Ajax Bridge has simplified the usage of this API. By simply including the necessary classes, the bridge exposes all of the classes within the Flex application to JavaScript. You can almost create anything in your Flex application using JavaScript instead of ActionScript.

So if you are a JavaScript pro and want to try out Flex this is a good time to do so!

Update: Flex up your portlets

A while ago I had talked about Rich Internet Applications on my blog and talked in detail about Flex. You can read that entry here. I had promised to put a tutorial/entry on how to create a portlet out of your Flex application, but I
didn't get time to post the entry.

Recently, I helped my colleague Murali on getting his Flex app converted to a portlet and he has been prompt enough to post the instructions on his blog here. Thanks Murali.

A Solution: Maths Fun Again.. Again

So the solution to my previous entry and the one prior to that was provided by a few folks as (root 2), which is actually quite trivial in my opinion. The actual question that has been bothering me was what i posted in the comments to whatever  few replies i got:

That is , what actually is . If the answer to both questions (blog entries) is , then how come is 2 as per my first blog entry and equal to 4 as per the second entry. This is the one I was actually looking for an answer to. I have kind of an idea what it could be, I will put my explanation here, and hopefully it makes some sense.

is actually limit of the sequence ,, ...

It is trivial to prove that the above sequence is increasing and is upper bounded by 2.

Coming back to the original question (the previous two blog entries marked above) which can be rewritten as .

 I tried to plot the graph of this function and it comes out as follows:

This proves that given a value of x, there are two values for y. And for x = , we know these values are 2 and 4. But we just indicated above that the sequence is upper bounded by 2. So the value 4 can't be possible for .

Hope it makes some sense.