Writing a Flex Application – part 2

August 5, 2008

I finally have a reasonable demo of this application. Now I need to do a thorough job of testing and debugging. As I mentioned in the previous post, this is a chat client where two people can be messaging in different languages and the chat system translates from one to the other. One feature of the chat client is shown in the screenshot above. If you mouse over any translation, you can see alternative translations. So if one translation engine did a poor job in translating a chat message, you can look at translations from other engines. We hope that this feature, as well as several others, will improve the usefulness of this chat system.

The backend of the system is in PHP connected to a MySQL database server. I am using Flex for the client side component.

As I mentioned in my previous post, this system will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of multilingual instant messaging systems and is a continuation of Bill Ogden’s work on Computer mediated multilingual translation.

Writing a Flex application

July 19, 2008

This summer I have been doing some contract work with the Bill Ogden of the Psychology Department at New Mexico State University. For years he has been investigating the usability of IM systems that have a machine translation component. In order to perform more nuanced experiments he needed custom designed IM system and he contracted with me to perform the work. When you log into the chat system you select a language and all messages from other participants will be translated to that language. For example, this would enable a Korean speaker and an English speaker to communicate with one another. The server-side system which does all the translation and maintains the chat is in PHP. The client side app is in Adobe Flex. I was going to use AJAX but my son recommended that I look at Flex. I think Flex is fantastic, but learning it has been a challenge. Most of my problems have been with understanding gui components. The screenshot above is of the system right now, about midway through the project. Throughout the course of the last month I have worked through the following Flex books: >>