webqem blog

The Adobe  Flex  2.0 release is on the horizon and in an effort to stir up developer interest Adobe has announced the  Adobe Flex Developer Derby . It’s a competition (with some rather cool prizes) for developers to take the current beta release of Flex 2.0 and make the best RIA possible. The only problem with this idea is that the competition is open only to residents of the USA and Canada excluding Quebec (they have some funny laws apparently). But all is not lost for the rest of the world, Robin Hilliard (from RocketBoots) has stepped up and announced a competition for us second class netizens. So to this end I turned my messing about with Flex 2.0 into something a little more focused.

The end result is a new component/class lib for Flex enabling it to read a barcode with any ordinary off the shelf webcam (it will need adjustable focus for best results). This demo RIA reads EAN13 barcodes, more specifically ISBN-13 barcodes and searches Amazon.com for the related book information.

Originally I had written the component for Flash 8 but with the arrival of AS3 and the AS3 VM in the flash player 8.5 Beta, I was able to make the most of the increased speed and add a lot more scanning paths so that it can scan right-side-up, up-side-down, sideways etc.

You will need the 8.5 Beta version of the Flash player to use the barcode reader demo. There are instructions on how to set up your webcam in the demo.

***Updated***

With the release of Flex 2.0 Beta 3 and Flash player 9.0 Beta I have updated the barcode reader accordingly. It’s the same, except I’ve added the price info.