I have just volunteered to help host the monthly Flash User Group meetings here in Seattle! I've helped out with a few before, but I'll be doing it regularly now. They are a great group of people with some great designs and ideas. If you're in the area and want to see what it's all about, feel free to join! We meet at the Adobe office in Fremont and our next meeting is next Tuesday! Details below...

What:

Seattle Flash User Group Meeting

When:

Every 4th Tuesday of each month, from 6pm - 9pm

Next meeting is Tuesday, November 25th, 2008, 6pm - 9pm

Where:

Adobe Seattle Office - Fairhaven (room)

801 North 34th Street

Seattle WA, 98103

If you're looking for more information, or are interested in joining the group, see their website (www.seattleflashusergroup.com), or contact the user group manager, Keith Johnson.

Hope to see you out there

Charles

As you may have heard, Adobe has made a partnership with Zend Studios (the keepers of PHP, and the Zend Framework) to ensure that Flex/AIR development with PHP is as seamless as possible. This is *huge* news for PHP developers out there, myself being one of them. Christophe Coenraets, Senior Technical Evangelist at Adobe, came by the Adobe Seattle site last night to give a presentation to a couple of local user groups in town and I managed to pick his brain about the new partnership...what to expect, and what's in the works.

Well, as mentioned in the press release, a key deliverable for the collaboration is integration of the Action Message Format (AMF) into the Zend Framework. For those of you unfamiliar, AMF is a binary message protocol supported by Flex. Using AMF is preferable to other types of messaging formats, such as RESTful XML and serialization over HTTP for various reasons. First, XML and serialization (say with JSON) is plain-text, and so it isn't very secure. Second, since it is plain-text, it's inefficient. Binary, not only obfuscates the message, but compresses it significantly. So, native AMF support in the Zend Framework is huge for developing enterprise-level applications!

Also, given this integration of AMF into the Zend Framework, Zend and Adobe are also working to make a more unified IDE! They already have a good start...Flex Builder is built off of Eclipse, and Zend Studio is also built off of Eclipse. What Christophe showed us last night is that even though nothing has been released in terms of a unified IDE yet, you can start using one now anyways. Simply download Zend Studio (the PHP IDE), and install the Flex Builder plug-in for Eclipse, but specify the Zend Studio installation directory as your base Eclipse folder instead. Once this is done, you have a single portal for both your Flex, AIR, and PHP projects!

All of this is in it's earliest stages, but seeing steps in this direction is very exciting. I can't wait to see what's next :)

Charles

When you use the Internet to find something, more often than not, you're using a search engine as a portal to this information. Nine times out of ten, you're using one of Google Search or Yahoo! Search. In a few short years, Google has amassed a huge market share, taking from the likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft. However, I've read articles recently^* claiming that Yahoo!, with changes made in their search technology to combat the Google onslaught, now returns better, more relevant, and safer results, but are still failing to gain back market share because of the huge amount of momentum that Google has gained in the industry.

So, with this in mind, I thought it would be interesting to put these two search moguls to the test. I've created a simple search mashup, dubbed Yahoogle!, which I think might help verify these claims. In short, Yahoogle! takes a search query, feeds it to both Yahoo! Search and Google Search, anonymizes the results, and displays them intermixed in one search result list. Relevancy is measured purely by clicks, nothing more. Anyways, give it a test-spin and let me know what you think. If enough people search here, I'm sure we'll start seeing some trends...

Happy Searching!

^*Note: I wrote this post a few months ago but didn't publish it at the time, so the recency of these articles is based on when I wrote this post :)

^**Note: I made Yahoogle! in about 2 days, so it isn't fool-proof. Yes, with a little insight, you can tell which search results came from which search engine, but that's not the point. At a glance, it's not bad for 2 days. Oh, and it doesn't work in IE :p

So we're finally here and boy are we excited. As I mentioned in another post, myself and my teammates won a development competition in Vancouver and we were rewarded with invitations to the Apple WWDC '08 in San Francisco!

Well, we've just arrived in town, registered for the conference and picked up our badges. We also received some cool swag as a welcome gift.

We got a very cool laptop bag branded WWDC08 as well as a t-shirt signifying "10am, June 9th, Moscone Center" with iPhone icons (perhaps a precursor for what to expect for the keynote tomorrow?). Anyways, time to get some shut-eye. Gotta get up bright and early to make sure we get good seats for the Jobs keynote :D

*view more pictures from my Flickr photostream

Charles

The project formerly known as "Project San Dimas" is all grown up now is now officially called "eBay Desktop".

Looks like we did something right. The project has even moved from it's old domain, www.projectsandimas.com to it's own website as a subdomain of eBay! You can now download Project San Dimas eBay Desktop from http://desktop.ebay.com! Take 'er for a spin and give Alan Lewis (eBay PM for the project) some feedback.

Charles

I've just finished my presentation at the 360 Flex Conference this morning and it went really well. We had a really good turnout and there were some great questions. As promised, I am posting my slide deck and sample code (client and server) here for everyone to download and try for themselves. For those of you who weren’t there but are interested in what was covered, here is snapshot of the samples that I talked about…

• Why Flex & PHP
• What can I build with it?
• How can I build with it?
• Demos
  • Flex & PHP using REST
  • Flex & PHP using JSON
  • Flex & PHP using AMF
  • Flickr example

If you had any questions or comments, feel free to let me know! Thanks to Tom Ortega for getting me involved, and of course, thanks to everyone who came!

Flex & PHP 101 - Flex & PHP for Rich Internet Application Development

Server-Side PHP Code

Client-Side Flex Code

Charles

I was just recently asked to be a presenter for one of the seminars at 360|Flex in Seattle next month! The previous presenter, Mike Potter, was unable to make it so I am gladly filling in for him. I'll be covering integration between Flex front-ends and server-side technologies, particularly PHP. I will talk about common integration techniques using either a REST-based architecture, serialization via JSON, or binary messaging with AMF. My class in particular will be on the second day (Tuesday, August 14th), first thing in the morning -> 8:30am - 9:50am (schedule). I hope to see you there and if you have any questions, I'm in contact with the event coordinators, so feel free to ask!

See the schedule and register for the event at…

http://www.360conferences.com/360flex/

Charles

I read this article recently about Apple's new iPhone and the response it received when it was revealed to a crowd in Japan. "…barely a ripple" was the description, and a fitting one too. Reading about how much more advanced mobile technology is in Japan compared to here in North America makes me think about what I can expect (or hope) to happen in the coming years…a mobile boom in North America?

http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-japanphone11jan11,0,6424968.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Contrary to what my introductory paragraph might lead you to believe, this post is NOT about the iPhone. The iPhone is simply what brought me to this conclusion…that given the recent trends of Flash Player penetration coupled with the rising popularity of Flash Lite in mobile devices, I am expecting to see some sort of mobile boom happening in the near future. We are already seeing this as people are starting to download music more on their phones, keep up-to-date with e-mails, send pictures, IM, and even watch TV. Starting with Adobe's partnering with Verizon to support Flash Lite on their mobile devices, other companies have followed suit, such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson. The trend is set and I think it's on a good path.

Charles

^*Update: I've come to find out that the article on www.latimes.com has been "archived" and you have to pay to get the full text of the article (wtf?). Well, the Internet has come through yet again in the quest for open-information…I've found the article (the text at least) on www.mobileburn.com. And juuuust in case, I cached it here too.

Looks like there's a new eBay API available from the eBay Developers Site. It is a much simpler name-value-pair-based API and my friend Alan Lewis, from eBay has just uploaded a shiny new Actionscript eBay Library. It's an upgrade from the previous library I wrote which was based on the older version of the API. Check out the blog post on the developers site and try it out for yourself!

Charles

I just finished my presentation at UBC and it was another great event. We had a good attendance and some really really good questions. I was very pleased to see how enthusiastic a lot of the students were. I was also pleased to see some very good criticisms in the audience. This is a positive thing. I very much appreciate criticism. It means a few things - people are listening, they are interested about the technology, and they are giving opinions on how to improve it, and to me, these are the most valuable because ultimately, it will be these people who will be the ones using it!

I also enjoyed this presentation a bit more because it gave me the chance to speak about Apollo. I've worked with it in projects prior, but wasn’t able to say anything about it simply because of how early in development it was (and still is). I'm really excited though to see Apollo hit the masses and hopefully see some very cool applications flood the web.

As always, here is my presentation slide deck from the event. See you on the flipside…

Charles