The PureMVC framework is considered one of the best for Flash/Flex development (definitely the best documented), I hadn’t checked out the site in a while (which has undergone an overhaul and is much improved!) and since my last visit PureMVC is now available for not only AS2 and AS3 but C#, ColdFusion, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby as well.

I should say plans for Ruby as they are looking for a project owner to work on the port. I’d volunteer myself (famous last words) but while I love Ruby I don’t know the ins and outs of the language as well as I do ActionScript.

In any case having one framework “to rule them all” would be a great boost to productivity as you wouldn’t have to mentally switch gears between the front (Flash/Flex) and back (PHP/Ruby etc.) ends.

Aral Balkan shows you how.

Via Flex on Rails…

Using HotRuby it is possible to use straight Ruby to build a Flash app.

Info here.

Some of the more interesting sessions:

Extending Web to the Desktop with AIR
Monday, March 24, 2008
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM US/Pacific

Getting Started with Flash Lite 3 and CS3
Monday, March 24, 2008
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM US/Pacific

Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex 3
Monday, March 24, 2008
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM US/Pacific

Introduction to Adobe Blaze DS
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM US/Pacific

Integrating Salesforce.com and Flex
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM US/Pacific

Building AIR Applications with Flash CS3
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM US/Pacific

Adobe AIR Local Data Storage Options With Emphasis on Using Embedded SQL Databases
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM US/Pacific

Flex and Java – Tying the Knot!
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM US/Pacific

Flex Data Services
Thursday, March 27, 2008
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM US/Pacific

Blood from a Stone: Flash Game Optimization on Low-end mobile devices
Thursday, March 27, 2008
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM US/Pacific

Flex Visual Data & Charting
Thursday, March 27, 2008
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM US/Pacific

AIR Native Drag and Drop
Friday, March 28, 2008
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM US/Pacific

Flex Architecture
Friday, March 28, 2008
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM US/Pacific

Defend your Castle (where you fling away attacking stick men) will be one of the first WiiWare games released.

Defend your Castle Wii version

The first video looks like part of a montage you’d see at the beginning of a Terminator or Matrix movie when we made our first mistake. The second one not so much.

I’m trying out Spottt which describes itself as;

a free way to trade links with other like minded sites.

Spottt’s categories are somewhat generic, ‘business’, ‘fashion’, ‘pets’ etc., the closest thing to web development was ‘tech’ so I chose that category. However 50% of the ads for ‘like minded’ sites involve pictures of women in various forms of undress. Now I love me the womenz, but I don’t think “dork who blogs about ActionScript and Ruby” belongs with the CeleZone or Desi Babes - Sexy Indian Hotties.

One of these Spottts is not like the others…

At least Crunch Gear shows up now and again, but I’d rather not have the Spottts which are visible only by black light.

The JavaScript library I use most after prototype is YUI so a big thanks to Chetan Patil for making it much easier to use in Rails.

Ruby Inside has a post on Ebb a small and fast web server for hosting Rails and Merb applications (and soon Django).

Ebb is a small, extremely high performance Web / HTTP server designed specifically for hosting applications built upon Web frameworks such as Rails and Merb (and, in future, apps on other non-Ruby frameworks.) The design is event based (similar to that used by Ruby daemons that use EventMachine) but Ebb itself is written in C and dispatches requests to Rack adapters. This is a real leapfrog over the popular Mongrel and Thin daemons which are primarily written in Ruby, and results in scary levels of performance.

I love nothing more than a good old fashioned logo contest like the one being held by DataPortablity. Even though I went down for the count in the Ruby logo contest, despite clearly having the logo with the mojo :P , I’m giving the DataPortability contest a shot.

The reason they’re having the contest is because RedHat sent them a cease and desist letter over their current logo’s similarity to RedHat’s Fedora Infinity logo. Cease and desist letters are no fun, and not usually worth fighting, so the logo contest is a great solution. My Whackapol game earned me a cease and desist from Bob’s Space Racers the makers of Whack-a-mole, I guess if you had one good idea in the last 37 years you have to protect it right? (not that I’m bitter or anything). It was a good lesson though, since then all my own logos have been researched and copyright protected/trade-marked.

Here are the entries, the fourth one is the awesomest :D

The contest runs until the 11th so you still have time to enter!

If you’re trying to develop a flex app that can go fullscreen (allowFullScreen) you’ll get an error in Flex Builder when you try and run code that launches fullscreen mode.

The issue is that allowing fullscreen is set as a param in the code of that embeds the SWF in it’s HTML page not in MXML or ActionScript. Here’s how to use swfobject instead of Adobe’s default AC_OET.js so that Flex Builder’s generated HTML allows fullscreen during debugging.

Download swfobject to your Flex Builder project’s ‘html-template’ directory (unzipping it so swfobject.js is in that folder). Then change index.template.html to the following:

<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>${application}</title>

<style>
body { margin: 0px; overflow:hidden }
</style>

</head>

<body scroll="no">

<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>

<div id="${application}">
  This text is replaced by the Flash movie.
</div>

<script type="text/javascript">
   var so = new SWFObject("${swf}.swf", "${application}", "${width}", "${height}", "9", "${bgcolor}");
   so.addParam("allowFullScreen", "true");
   so.write("${application}");
</script>

</body>
</html>

That’s it! Now when you debug from within Flex Builder you can try out your fullscreen code.