I’ve had the pleasure of meeting James a few times, first at CodeMash in 2007, then the past couple of times he’s come through the RTP area. Honestly, I don’t know where this man gets his energy. Between his travels around the world, constant blogging, writing and the various support he gives people through forums and emails and such, it’s like he does the job of two people. Perhaps he rests now and then, but it doesn’t seem like it to me.
James gave our group the latest from the Adobe Flex world, demonstrating Spring/BlazeDS integration, FlexUnit/Fluint testing, and more. Some of the demos were from last year (his Census test info), but some were new (Flex Monkey – think Selenium for Flex apps). The numbers on AMF were, as usual, impressive, and I got to wondering (out loud) if there are other projects outside of Flex/Flash that use AMF compression. It seems like it’s something only used in the Flex/Flash world so far, but perhaps there might be some use for it in regular JavaScript clients. I suspect it might be too slow to run in pure JavaScript, but maybe not with the current crop of JS engine improvements.
James was also giving out a few copies of his latest book, First Steps In Flex, co-written with Bruce Eckel. I’ve gone through about half of my copy (picked up in January) and have to say it really is a great introduction to Flex. I wish I’d had something this useful a year ago when I was trying to start with Flex. My only complaint about the book is the lack of screenshots – it’s only text. Still, if you’re looking to start with Flex, James’ and Bruce’s book is a great first step (pun intended).
A few of us went out for drinks afterward and James attempted to show us augmented reality and computer vision stuff with Flex. How far along are we? You be the judge.
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Need some Flex/Flash help…
Hello all:
Often when I post a question here I find someone ready to help, so here I go again.
I’ve got a Flex3 app that I’m trying to pass parameters to. The docs say to either embed them as param tags in the HTML which calls the SWF file (as < param name=’flashVars’ value=’param1=X¶m2=Y’ />) or as a query string on the SWF reference (embed src=’foo.swf?name=mike&zip=27596)
I’ve done this successfully on another project, but now I’m having problems, and I can’t tell what’s changed. Referencing the values in Application.application.parameters when I call the SWF directly (with the query string params), everything’s fine. When I loop through the Application.application.parameters to get the params (either from the query string or flashVars param) when the SWF is embedded in an HTML page, I get nothing. This is an https request, which may have something to do with it (I dunno). Tried this from Firefox 2 on Linux and FF2 and IE6 on XP. No dice. I can’t find any references to things *not* working for people at all, so I thought I’d turn to you. Any light that you can shed on this is appreciated.
Thanks!
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Audible comment system
I’ve been wanting something like this for a long time, if for no other reason than to prove I can do it. 
I looked a bit at mychingo.com, but they force java applets on you, and I’ve never had good luck with audio and java on linux. Also, it’s a separate hosted service and I like to be in control of the bits, at least at the beginning so I know what’s going on. Lastly, the mychingo service seems to be on hold, and it costs money. I might pay a few bucks a month if I knew it was going to continue.
Anyway, this is still all just alpha, and I might take it off, but for now, have fun playing with it. Send feedback – audio or text – to let me know what you think of this.
There’s a 30 second limit, which should be fine for most people, and it requires a decent upstream connection as the recorder streams the data up at about 11k per second. Not sure if that’s bits or bytes, but you need to be connected anyway. However, if you’re reading the blog you’re likely connected at least some of the time 
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What I’ve been up to lately
These deserves more than a twitter…
1. I just got my copy of Scott Davis’ “Groovy Recipes” book – I’ll be posting a review as soon as a I can. First impression is about a 8.5 out of 10.
2. Just came across this -> http://froth-and-java.blogspot.com/2007/06/html-screen-scraping-with-groovy.html <- didn’t know about tagsoup parser (seems very handy) and want to try some twitter scraping when it’s up for more than 5 minutes
3. Been doing a bit of flex/audio code for an idea I’m working on. I’m more impressed with it (flex) now than I was a year ago.
4. I have a collaborator for my book – hopefully we’ll have that wrapped up in the next few weeks and off to the publisher.
5. Doing some contract PHP dev work, adding new features to a poorly documented mish mash of PHP code. There were multiple attempts at abstracting business logic and presentation, but they’re not consistent and, imo, mostly wrong. Abstracting at a bad level is almost as bad as not abstracting at all. I’m throwing away about half the code, and have about half that thrown away functionality reimplemented in new objects with unit tests (about 50 so far). I should have another 20-30 tests written tomorrow which will round out the basic functionality, and I should be able to have most of the front-end redone to use the new classes before a Monday afternoon meeting. I couldn’t do this without getting to the point of saying ‘enough – I can not work with this code in its current state anymore’. After that it was easy. Mind you, I don’t have time to rebuild the entire thing (wish I did) but it’s coming along nicely.
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