tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-193666942012-01-06T02:02:18.310-08:00MobosplashJohn Nicholas, a web developer in Dallas TX. I specialize in Content Mangement Systems and Flash Applications.John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.comBlogger471100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-49716025741483353072008-08-26T13:38:00.000-07:002008-08-26T14:21:04.749-07:00Flash Media Server Uptime MonitoringI recently needed to implement a way to monitor Flash Media Server for Load Balancing purposes. FMS traffic can be load balanced easily but in this case we wanted to have it stop sending traffic to an FMS server that was down. We've had a couple of times where FMS servers have run out of memory and stopped responding.The load balancer we are was set up to look John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-55482695600273126982008-06-17T08:30:00.000-07:002008-06-26T14:48:39.372-07:00I've started a new job at Ackerman McQueen as Director of Interactive Technology. While Ackerman McQueen is primarily an ad agency, they also build a lot of Rich Media Sites and that will be my focus. Going forward expect to a lot more articles on Flex and Flash and a shift away from the content management space. CMSs will still be a big part of what I do but I think there will more interesting John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-86990703685850487382008-04-08T11:37:00.000-07:002008-04-08T11:40:13.148-07:00Last year Amazon shook up the web development world with EC2, the first Elastic Computing Cloud. Later the addition of S3 for storage and SimpleDB for data fleshed out their platform as a real alternative for web application development. Now Google has launched AppEngine, a virtualized application hosting system that combines some of the features of all the Amazon services for a new take on the John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-22801613885286956682008-02-09T07:44:00.001-08:002008-02-09T08:27:21.389-08:00Over the last month I've been looking very closely at competing open source content management systems. Typo3 is my goto CMS due to its power and flexibility but no tool can be perfect for every task and Typo3 does have issues with end-user friendliness.The main ones I've checked out so far are Drupal and Joomla. Both have large communities, local user groups and development books. This post willJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-9873161233697858292007-12-22T15:32:00.000-08:002007-12-22T15:48:27.343-08:00When the Eclipse PDT project went 1.0 I started experimenting with using it as a PHP development environment and I think I'm ready to commit to it as my standard development environment.The other piece of the equation is moving to a local php/mysql setup. I'm used to having a development linux box and stuck with that for a while to avoid subtle issues moving work from my local mac to a live linuxJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-19687098461437401162007-12-07T06:36:00.001-08:002007-12-07T06:56:21.974-08:00Yahoo and the Front End Developer.I've been a big fan of Yahoo's developer site (http://developer.yahoo.com/) Beyond their excellent javascript library, they also have lots of good video content ranging from deep javascript tips to advice on developing for screen readers. It's really interesting to see how important front end technologies have become again. I started out as a front end developer John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-69663722934011222082007-11-28T07:44:00.000-08:002007-11-28T08:30:28.941-08:00Went to a Joomla User Group yesterday to check it out. I've been aware of Joomla for a while as a leading open source PHP CMS but haven't had a chance to see how it compares with Typo3 or other CMSs I'm familiar with. I thought the user group would be a good chance to get a quick overview.My first impression was that the interface was friendlier and more modern looking than Typo3's but as I saw John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-57267222043104313962007-11-02T07:34:00.000-07:002007-11-02T07:50:49.980-07:00A lot of people feel like the ASP.NET Postback model is awkward and hard to work with. If you've also been using non-.NET frameworks like Rails or CakePHP then you are probably even more frustrated with it. The closest option so far has been Castle, which appears to be a nice framework but for many MS oriented shops is too big of a leap, not just politically but because of its almost complete John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-80562842030513737272007-10-19T06:45:00.000-07:002007-10-19T06:52:19.216-07:00Actionscript 3 FrameworksSaw an interesting overview of the current Flex/AS3 framework scene at https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a200985228/p12266504/. This is a Connect presentation by a couple of Flex experts, the developers of ASUnit, who looked through all the open source AS3 Frameworks they can find and give their opinions on them. I've been using the ARP AS2 framework on a couple of large John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-75550615220765919232007-09-19T07:10:00.000-07:002007-09-19T07:30:23.896-07:00PDT IDE and Netbeans IDE updated.Good week for IDEs. PDT, the eclipse based PHP IDE and Netbeans both have major releases.PDT is one the leading PHP IDEs and the closest to an "official" open source PHP IDE project, having the support of Zend and other major players. There are several other PHP IDEs including other eclipse options but I believe PDT will become the dominate one if it isn't alreadyJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-68132134341132555732007-09-17T05:59:00.000-07:002007-09-17T06:30:41.246-07:00JQuery 1.2 (and 1.2.1!)A little late blogging this but I haven't even had a chance to play with it yet. JQuery 1.2 is finally out with several big changes. XPath selectors have been moved into a separate plugin. CSS style selectors are really the more natural way to work in JQuery anyway and the plugin gives backwards compatibility if you need it, so a good move I think. There are a lot of new John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-13598770658096798012007-09-01T10:00:00.000-07:002007-09-01T10:18:26.028-07:00Magento Commerce first beta.The first beta of Magento Commerce was released on August 31st. Varien, an Los Angeles ecommerce shop has been teasing the PHP world for months about this project and it's great to see it finally released. Despite the large number of open-source PHP CMSs, there has not been that many options for ecommerce. OsCommerce is the biggest but has a reputation for being John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-5704844167639779992007-08-25T06:02:00.000-07:002007-08-25T06:23:38.978-07:00New jQuery Release.jQuery 1.1.4 has been released. Check out the blog post for the full details. The highlights are that it is easier use alongside other JS libraries and improved selector speed. The first is very useful for when you want to use jQuery for you main library and then still easily use something like a sciptaculous/prototype slide show on a site. There's also a new .slice() method John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-54783676272286305842007-08-01T07:42:00.000-07:002007-08-01T08:22:51.778-07:00The Yahoo! User Interface Library Updated.Yahoo has released an update to their excellent javascript library with several new components and a lot of bug fixes. The YUI Library covers the gamut of javascript from ajax support to widgets like calendars and datagrids. My usual tool of choice is jQuery, the leanest, fastest javascript library but when I need a deep feature set I look to Yahoo's kit.John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-89356016603773262012007-07-21T07:45:00.001-07:002007-07-21T08:09:44.575-07:00WebORB for AIR.In my last post I talked a bit about the new WebORB for AIR that Mark Pillar showed at the Dallas stop of the Adobe onAir Tour. I mentioned that I wasn't sure of a reason for using it when SQLite was already available. Pillar left a comment clarifying that for me. I've been in CMS mode for a while and had gotten used to thinking of databases too generically. Obviously a lot of app John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-76277562803713595492007-07-19T08:05:00.001-07:002007-07-19T09:21:32.848-07:00Adobe Air Tour. Went to the Dallas stop of the Adobe onAIR Bus tour. A pretty good event and I definitely learned some things about AIR I didn't know yet. I see a lot of uses for it and think it is a good fit with the web apps that we are already planning.Mark Pillar of Midnight Coders did a demo of WebORB that impressed me. I am already a user of WebORB on several projects but I had not seem John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-80899006431443463312007-07-09T20:01:00.000-07:002007-07-09T20:15:25.295-07:00DbVisualizer 6.0 Released.Minq Software has released a new version of their excellent DbVisualizer. This is a java based tool for working with databases. It can connect to any database with a java driver and works great on Mac, Windows or Linux. There's a free version and a pay version ($149) that adds a lot more features. I've been a big fan and user for years now.The new version has several John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-70926798187164390172007-07-06T11:56:00.000-07:002007-07-06T14:33:41.292-07:00WebORB for PHP v 2.0 Released.Midnight Coders have released an update to their excellent Flash Remoting product, WebORB for PHP. I'm using the earlier 1.3 version in production now and am looking forward to working with the new version. 2.0 adds much of the management features from the .NET version and code generation for the client side connection code, including Flex, ARP and Cairngorm output. John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-84646849577003391422007-07-04T07:55:00.001-07:002007-07-04T08:01:22.628-07:00New version of Xray Flash Debugger.A new version of Xray is out. Xray is an open-source flash debugging tool that lets you see and change variables in a running flash movie. The new version completely revamps the logging pane. Now it has much better performance and a better interface with search, highlighting and filtering.I've found this tool to be invaluable in working on the large flash video John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-65227551233796794862007-07-02T10:30:00.000-07:002007-07-02T10:50:07.161-07:00Zend Framework Released.There's been a lot of interest in php frameworks recently and now Zend, the guys who actually maintain php have released their take, Zend Framework. There are a few different approaches to frameworks but they can be divided into two camps. First are full frameworks like symfony or CakePHP. These have also been called 'opinionated' in that they have strong expectations for John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-13208022028353125742007-05-05T10:05:00.000-07:002007-05-05T10:43:00.437-07:00Obligatory Silverlight OpinionWith Silverlight's introduction, all the flash guys have been talking about it and opinions range wildly from Flash-killer to DOA. I think either extreme is pretty unlikely. Adobe has a lot of traction with agencies and development shops and they aren't going to change tools on a whim. These kind of decisions aren't made on a feature-list checkbox basis or buzz.The John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-76345845905964167262007-03-26T05:52:00.000-07:002007-03-26T06:12:42.875-07:00Dallas Typo3 CommunityI've been using the Typo3 CMS for a few years now but didn't know of any other local developers using it despite the large international Typo3 community. I'd talked to at least one local agency that was toying with it for future development but ended up backing away from using it. Ad agencies seem to have a harder time seeing the benefits of CMSs. Their sites tend to be John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-43848611737530203582007-02-27T08:58:00.000-08:002007-02-27T09:22:34.856-08:00Flash on the command lineI've been doing a lot of small flash projects over the last few months. I've been using Actionscript 2.0 for all of them and making it a point to work using a good object oriented approach. Right now I'm starting a very large scale project so I decided to adopt an existing Flash framework and decided to use ARP. This decision led to a pretty major rework of my whole FlashJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1165415604443126142006-12-06T05:48:00.000-08:002006-12-06T07:18:25.296-08:00Microsoft's WPF/E Released for Windows and MacMicrosoft has released their new "Windows Presentation Foundation Everywere" beta plug-ins for Windows and Mac. Currently this is awkwardly shortented to WPF/E but this is just a codename and will be replaced soon. WPF/E is basically a graphic runtime to provide capabilities similar to Flash but with a MS centric approach to development. Most Flash John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1165330809268814752006-12-05T06:34:00.000-08:002006-12-05T07:00:09.310-08:00Better CSS for ASP.NET 2.0 controlsASP.NET controls have a weird tendency to write a lot of old fashioned HTML and Visual Studio tends to encourage styling on a control basis. The new Expression tools are better about making CSS style layouts so hopefully that will come to Visual Studio. Until then, here are some Control Adapters to help some of the messier controls. The updated controls include John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1163737971933293142006-11-16T18:17:00.000-08:002006-11-16T20:32:51.976-08:00Flash 8 and File UploadsOne of the big features added in Flash 8 was support for uploading files. Flash can be a great RIA (Rich Internet App) platform and still has a lot of advantages over HTML forms even with the rapid development of Ajax and DHTML toolkits. The lack of file upload has been awkward since that is a common need in the same scenerios where you would want the kind of interfaces John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1163169753096955112006-11-10T06:03:00.000-08:002006-11-10T06:42:33.156-08:00We recently launched Verizon Literacy Network, part of Verizon Foundation that represents Verizon's community outreach programs. We built it in Typo3 with several custom extensions and I think was a great fit for the Typo3 architecture. The content is managed between 3 organizations, Verizon and two partners, ProLiteracy Worldwide and the National Center for Family Literacy. It was very easy to John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1154705731908444652006-08-04T07:37:00.000-07:002006-08-04T08:35:31.993-07:00I'm working on a new MacBook Pro now. it's a great machine and I'm very happy with it. I'm a long time Mac user and OS X came out about the same time I was moving into doing more and more server side code. So having access to unix right along side Mac apps like Photoshop and Flash has been great. Of course, unix and OS X aren't much help working on .NET applications so for the last few years I'veJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1152288854354175772006-07-07T08:53:00.000-07:002006-07-07T09:14:14.506-07:00OpenLaszlo Announces “Legals” ProjectLaszlo continues to move out from under the Flex shadow with their new "Legals" project. Legals is an application environment that is designed to support multiple runtimes. Initially Laszlo just published to swf but there were a lot of limits in what kinds of swfs you could load into the Laszlo generated swf. You also couldn't load Lazlo swfs into another swf John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1146191842722949142006-04-27T19:14:00.000-07:002006-04-27T19:37:22.763-07:00Launched our new site Devine Sports this week. That last push to launch kept me too busy to getting any blog entries in but I'll try and get back on track. I have a second set of related sites launching over the next few weeks so it may not slow down as much as I hoped.Devine Sports is the company that is behind the Los Angeles marathon, the Las Vegas marathon and the Salt Lake City marathon. John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1145032649041129602006-04-14T08:50:00.000-07:002006-04-15T07:27:07.116-07:00I went to Refresh Dallas last night. They had a round table with Brian Oberkirch, John Keehler, Jake McKee and Blake Burris on Social Media. Buzz is started to get outside of the web community about Social Networking sites like MySpace and shared media portals like Flickr and YouTube. My current project has a lot of community tools built around Ajax allowing simple messaging and other feedback. John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1144729539076168152006-04-10T21:09:00.000-07:002006-04-10T21:33:21.516-07:00I'm seeing increasing interest in the Typo3 CMS here in the Dallas area. When I first started using Typo3 in 2002, I had just wrapped up working on a Vignette based site which was my first real hard core CMS project. Vignette is a massive system that was one of the first CMS products so it is a big crufty mess in a lot of ways. It was orginally mostly based in Perl and then large parts of it wereJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1143832345938529302006-03-31T10:41:00.000-08:002006-03-31T13:02:12.613-08:00Over the last few projects I've been doing a lot of interesting development tieing together the Typo3 CMS and RIA modules, mostly Flash but recently Ajax too.Typo3 is a nice PHP based CMS, it has been around long enough that there isn't much direct support for RIAs or Flash but it is flexible enough that it is a good platform for custom coding them. Of course, someone might wonder why not just John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1143216053750297982006-03-24T07:24:00.000-08:002006-03-24T08:49:47.100-08:00Refresh DallasI went to Refresh Dallas last night. "Refresh is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical and professional aspects of newhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif media endeavors in the Dallas area." Last night's meeting was about Rails. Adam Keys did the presentation. He also runs the local Ruby Brigade. Since Refresh is front-end focused John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1142565003429472082006-03-16T19:09:00.000-08:002006-03-17T16:18:21.903-08:00I've recently started using FlashObject as my preferred Flash embedding method. For a long time I've either just used the Macromedia standard nested or used a "sniffer" swf for circumstances where I really needed to know version numbers.I kept an eye out for alternatives and seriously looked at the Flash Satay method since it seemed to favored by many Flash experts. It was also promoted on the A John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1142456759075300612006-03-15T12:35:00.000-08:002006-03-15T13:05:59.133-08:00I found another interesting Javascript library. JQuery is a javascript library that is similar to Prototype. At first pass the most interesting feature is its support for chaining functions together like this:$("p.surprise").addClass("ohmy").show("slow");So like Prototype, you can grab and object with the $() function but then call the "addClass" method on that and call "show" on whatever that John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1142376147906981742006-03-14T14:14:00.000-08:002006-03-14T14:42:27.940-08:00Flash Forward AustinJust heard that Flash Forward is adding an Austin show. I'm only 4 hours away in Dallas so I'm looking forward to it. The conference will be September 11-14. If you're not from Texas, it's actually very warm in September but not still in the 100s like July and August. Should be really nice and Austin is a fun town.John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1141835337882295352006-03-08T07:57:00.000-08:002006-03-08T08:28:57.956-08:00Dallas Ruby BrigadeI went to the first Dallas Ruby Brigade last night. I was surprised at how many people were there. I think I heard that the count was 38 which is bigger than any of the Macromedia User Group meetings were last year. I was even more more surprised at how many people were using Ruby (and not just Rails) for real world projects. It was good to see the group off to such a start John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1141829680097827902006-03-08T06:35:00.000-08:002006-03-08T09:42:41.620-08:00Microsoft would like to convince developers like me to check out ASP.NET 2.0. So they launched Microsoft® ASP.NET 2.0 Webcast Series, a set of webcasts sponsored by Microsoft, Dr. Dobb’s, and O’Reilly. They have 3 tracks; a .NET for JSP developers, .NET for PHP developers and .NET for Cold Fusion Developers. By "developers like me" I mean people who aren't using .NET 1.x but are open-minded aboutJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1141747323026390612006-03-07T07:29:00.000-08:002006-03-08T09:07:25.963-08:00OpenLaszlo Goes DHTMLOpenLaszlo is now targeting DHTML as well as Flash as a runtime. I think this is a very interesting development. When I first looked at Laszlo, about the time it went open-source. There was some talk about the future of laszlo being in multiple runtimes. This came up more in a demonstration at the Dallas Cold Fusion usergroup when people were asking about various Flash John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1141241484213386852006-03-01T10:56:00.000-08:002006-03-08T09:08:37.360-08:00Flash Remoting and AMFPHPI've been a big fan of using Remoting to connect Flash to servers for a while now. A few years ago I started out using Flashorb when I was building the NRAnews.com site. FlashOrb is an excellent product that supports Java and .NET remoting. It has since been renamed WebOrb and now supports Ajax services as well. If you've used Macromedia's .NET remoting product you'd loveJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1140498090448912012006-02-20T20:30:00.000-08:002006-02-20T21:01:30.480-08:00In my last post I was checking out the new Yahoo Javascript Library and mentioned my experiments with Scriptaculous, Dojo and Rico. Most of these experiments were in support of features planned for the next site we are building at Winnercomm. Well, now creative is approved and it is time to start really building things out. So one of the first things I needed to finalize was which javascript John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1139955348127679272006-02-14T13:50:00.000-08:002006-02-14T14:51:10.443-08:00Yahoo! User Interface LibraryYahoo has released their own javascript/DHTML/Ajax library today. I have am using a lot of these kind of effects on the site I'm building right now. I've been mostly using Rico but have played with Dojo and Scriptaculous too. All three of those are similar in that they are built on top of Prototype, a popular javascript library.Yahoo's Library appears to be a completeJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1139201425861318232006-02-05T20:23:00.000-08:002006-02-05T20:50:25.913-08:00NetBeans 5.0I rarely get to use Java for anything anymore. My current employer is very focused on .NET and isn't interested in Java at all. I've only used Java on a few projects previously but have always liked it and make it a point to keep up with the Java community.So whenever a new version of NetBeans comes out I always download it and go through a few tutorials. I'm really impressed with John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1138808288602641962006-02-01T07:38:00.000-08:002006-02-01T07:38:08.963-08:00Flex 2.0 BetaLike many people who use flash to create webapp interfaces I've had my eye on Flex. The initial price put it way out of reach for most of the projects I work on. At that price point, even when you have a budget that can cover it you are reluctant to use it since there is little reason to learn a technology you are unlikely to get many chances to use.I've been playing with Laszlo for John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1136871036530212742006-01-09T21:02:00.000-08:002006-01-09T21:30:36.656-08:00Windows Media StreamingI'm having to dive into the Windows Media world for a live event site. Winnercomm's core business is sports television production and they are the largest provider of outside content to ESPN. One of their clients would like to show the preliminary rounds as a pay event. Makes a lot of sense since the gear is already there for the final rounds which are broadcast. While I'veJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1136260332736339132006-01-02T19:37:00.000-08:002006-01-02T20:16:32.496-08:00Flash Forms. Validation and Pre-PopulationI've been doing a lot of work lately using flash as a front end to web data. I've become a big fan of Flash Remoting using both Flashorb from Midnight Coders and the open-source AMFPHP. Remoting makes moving data back and forth from the server to the flash movie so much easier than using xml or web services and is quite a bit faster. Unfortunately, flashJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0