Happy Birthday to me!

The actual anniversary was last week but I was in the Redneck Riviera on vacation.

My blog turning one is much less exciting than everything that’s happened since I started it. A year ago being an ActionScript developer on Rails was a lonely and frustrating time (so frustrating that my first post was about installing Django). A year ago stable Rails hosting was hard to find, there was no Ruby AMF implementation, and no Flex Builder for OS X. Now you can get solid and affordable Rails hosting with Media Temple (shared) or Slicehost (VPS), two flavors of AMF for Ruby, and Apple users are no longer second class Flex citizens.

The only downside so far has been when I Google something and one of my posts comes up first - great, I’m the “expert” on the problem I can’t fix. That’s a rare occasion though, I usually find the answer from one of the folks listed on the right (thanks!).

PS If by chance you go on vacation and turn your DSL modem off, the reason you can’t get into any of your servers is that your IP address has changed and now conflicts with your iptables firewall settings. Have I plugged Slicehost yet? Their emergency console rocks! :)

If that title had any more buzz words my blog might explode.

Apple is holding a series of one day events in August on getting your app to play nice with the iPhone.

Of course if said 2.0 application is Flex you’re out of luck, for now.

There are some new RubyAMF screencasts up, Aaron Smith walks you through tutorials on…

Flex with stand-alone RubyAMF
Flex with the RubyAMF Rails plug-in
Flash and authentication
Flash and custom fault objects

RubyAMF is also now 1.2 with respond_to functionality, so you can use one controller action to return anything your heart desires RHTML, AMF, XML, JSON you name it.

def MyController < ActionController::Base
  def list
    respond_to do |format|
     format.amf { render :amf => User.find(:all) }
    end
  end
end

Of course AMF is teh bestest :)

Tom Bray of Search Coders on stage

Here are my notes from the LA stop of the tour.

[Getting There]
The large orange juice before the drive up from OC might have been a mistake. Finding a rest stop in East LA is a potentially a pant wetting experience with an empty bladder, so having an Austin Powers’ cryogenic pee on deck makes it doubly dangerous.

If you’ve never tried to get in the LA Center Studios it’s an experience akin to infiltrating the Green Zone in Baghdad.

[Morning Session]
Mike Chambers introduces Mike Downey for the keynote, MC Chambers deserves a raise, he will spend about 3hrs total on stage over a 12hr+ day. Downey gives an overview of AIR and then shows off some AIR apps including Pownce, Finetune, and Buzzword.

Chambers runs through an introduction to AIR and a HelloWorld app. He asks for a show of hands of Flex and JavaScript developers, it’s a 50/50 split.

After Alan Lewis of eBay shows off their San Dimas project I overhear an investor on the phone: “Buy more Abobe stock”.

Kevin Hoyt introduces AIR to the JavaScript folks. While not my area of focus building AIR apps with JavaScript is remarkably similar/easy as building them with Flex. Part of the session uses the Aptana IDE, there’s also an Aptana RadRails environment.

[Afternoon Session]
Kevin Hoyt also deserves a raise as he is back again talking about occasionally connected applications.

The salesforce.com dude then runs into a perfect storm for audience ADD, dry subject matter, non functioning slides, and the onset of the post-lunch food coma. The problems were unfortunate as the salesforce.com Flex API looks pretty rich (and could also make you rich).

Adobe should have scheduled Lee Brimelow right after lunch as his presentation was a) Hilarious and b) inspiring and informative. Lee showed off a series of AIR apps built sans Flex Builder with Grant Skinner’s AIR plugin for Flash CS3.

[Cocktail Hour]
I managed to find the Rails folk out on the patio and got a preview of a cool music based app (not sure the details are public so I’ll keep it on the DL, but it’s a different angle than last.fm, finetune et al).

[Night Session]
After being schooled by Kevin Hoyt at Wii Tennis I headed back for the night session (I have an excuse for my Wiifutility, Kevin towers over me and I’m 6′2″, I had visions of an errant swing lodging a Wiimote permanently in my noggin).

My notes are a bit sparse as the free as in beer beers were setting in. Tom Bray of Search Coders showed their Dashboard app which is one of the most fully realized AIR apps out in the wild. Tom’s partner Robert Cedana showed me the Search Coders Dashboard app earlier in the day and it can handle some pretty amazing amounts of a data. Check out the app if you’re looking for work as the ads are targeted at Flex developers.

At the end of the night there were still over 50 people in the audience, maybe I should buy some Adobe stock.

PS: If you can’t make it to a tour stop each event is being streamed live.

RubyAMF now can be used as a Rails plugin or you can run it as a Mongrel process. There’s a nice screencast on Rails integration here.

The one-man RubyAMF show that is Aaron Smith also has a Super Simple Remoting class to get you up and running super simply.

Ruby has gone from no AMF support to two AMF options (RubyAMF, WebORB) in one year, sweet nutz!

Looking for some Rails like scaffolding for Flex and PHP? Try clicking the purple eclipse logo at the top left of Flex Builder 3.

You’ll be greeted with a database connection wizard that helps you set up a REST CRUD service, it even builds a mini-app for managing records.

There’s a (well hidden) screen-cast on Adobe labs.

Pretty cool. Even cooler would be a built-in Cairngorm service wizard/generator.

Tip of the hat to Tomo for showing me this.

The Midnight Coders have released A new version of WebORB for PHP. There’s a bunch of new features which equal, if not leap-frog, thos in AMFPHP. Their post runs through the top ten new features, but my favorites are #6 client/server class mapping

Client/server class mapping configuration. Since this is one of the most common tasks when integrating Flex clients with any kind of backend systems, we tried to make it as simple as possible to create client/server class mappings. The Class Mappings section of the ‘Server Configuration’ tab provides an easy-to-use interface to establish class mappings:

and… #7 Tons of examples! A good example is worth pages and pages of documentation, they don’t take too long to create, and they let users get on with getting on.

There are too many candidates running for presnit in ‘08 so as a weekend project I made Whackapol to ‘thin’ down the field. After a mere two days online it got a mention on CNN last night.

***UPDATE***

Here’s a link to video of the segment (1:50 min in).

And you think someone ought to crack the candidate’s coconuts. Go ahead. Whackapol is the latest and best online way we found yet to smack down your political peeves.

(on camera): Yes! Now that’s satisfying.

And that’s “Raw Politics” — Anderson.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COOPER: Tom, thanks.

I’ve learnt that political ads pay waaaaay more than web development ads, time for a new blog subject :P

Out of curiosity I put my Flex Builder 2 serial number into Flex Builder 3 and got 120 days added to the beta trial. Does this mean we get the final version in four months?