I’m currently sitting in Tony Hillerson’s presentation at 360 Flex: Flex and Rails with RubyAMF. It’s been a pretty Rails-rudimentary session, but there have been several useful tidbits (the Awesome Nested Set plugin looks cool, for example).

I’m glad to see promotion of Rails/Ruby as a backend for Flex apps, ’cause that’s just a no-brainer as far as I’m concerned. For some reason it doesn’t seem so obvious to the Java-background-heavy Flex community. I guess some people just really love writing verbose, mind-fucking repetitive code. Power to ‘em, I’d rather GSD.

Tony is the first presenter I’ve ever sheen whose shirt literally matches his non-plain preso slide background. That’s a level of style/detail that I think is badass (seriously).

Categories: Flex, Flex360, RubyAMF
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DevZone has a Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2 RefCard written by Peter Armstrong available for free download. Their registration/”download” process is a bit kludgy and intrusive but the RefCard is worth the effort.

Categories: Flex, Rails, Ruboss
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It never ceases to amaze me that the minute almost any new piece of hardware with a microprocessor comes out that it’s followed by an announcement that somebody has figured out a way to put some variant of Linux on it. There are some seriously savvy folks whose technical abilities are amazing but strangely they seem obsessed with putting Linux on everything… because they can. (I actually think this is a cool phenomenon.)

Similarly, Doug McCune has reverse-engineered Adobe’s new special-search-indexing Flash Player which gives Google and Yahoo’s web spiders far greater insight into SWFs (this means there’s been another big step forward in Search Engine Optimization for content in Flash! Woot!). The most amazing part of Doug’s reverse-engineering analysis is that he’s managed to communicate the entire process in just one comic-strip panel. Bravo, sir, bravo!

It’s completely worth a look even if Flash/SEO, etc. isn’t your thing.

Categories: Flash, Flex
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One of my internet friends said that she’d like a simple desktop app which would allow her to post to multiple sites like Twitter, Plurk, etc. A little later she plurked about how HelloTxt basically does what she wants except that it doesn’t have a desktop app.

Adobe AIR to the rescue.

HelloTxt has a mobile client interface written in HTML so making a simple cross-platform desktop app was as simple as firing up Flex Builder, adding panel and HTML components, and specifying HelloTxt’s mobile client interface’s URL as the HTML component’s “location.” I then twiddled around with a little bit of styling and config. stuff but that wasn’t necessary to make it work.

<mx:windowedapplication title="Grrrgregg8r" height="550" width="300"
  layout="absolute" xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">
  <mx:panel headerheight="10" bottom="0" right="0" top="0" left="0"
    layout="absolute">
    <mx:html bottom="0" top="0" left="0" right="0"
      location="http://m.hellotxt.com/" />
  </mx:panel>
  </mx:windowedapplication>

A cross-platform desktop application in five lines of MXML. Pretty dang nifty if you ask me.

A compiled/working version of Grrrgregg8r is available by right-clicking the link below and doing that “save as” thang.

Grrrgregg8tr - An AIR “microbrowser” for HelloTxt

Categories: AIR, Cool Stuff, Flex
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Peter Armstrong’s new book Enterprise Flexible Rails (which is all about Ruboss and is co-written with Ruboss badass Dima Berastau) was released to Manning’s Early Access Program today! Chapter one is available as a free PDF download.

If you only buy one book this year… well, maybe this isn’t quite ready to be it… but if this book ends up being even 1/2 as good as Peter’s Flexible Rails book then we’re in for a mammoth treat.

There’s a worth-reading announcement ’bout the book (since Peter and Dima are Canadian, I should have probably written “aboot” ;)) on the Ruboss-Framework Google Group.

Categories: Flex, Ruboss
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These are some interesting things I want to investigate in more depth, so I’m posting links for revisiting later.

Flex Stuff:

• Flex MDI: Simplifies multiple-window(document) interfaces. Way cool.
• dpunit: Flex Unit and Integration Testing, apparently different from FlexUnit.
• FlexUnit: Flex Unit Testing
• Spectra: A cool Flex Newsreader written by Microsoft. (via Bruce Eckel’s blog)
• Degrafa: A Declarative Graphics Framework for Flex.

Rails Stuff:

• Dr. Nic: Generating New Gems
• Gemspec Reference
• Single File Rails Application
• Yaml for Ruby Documentation
• Sake: System-wide Rake (HANDY!)

Categories: Cool Stuff, Flex, Rails, Ruby
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I’ve been experimenting quite a bit with the Ruboss framework, and finding that I like it quite a bit. Although the documentation is pretty darn sparse at the moment, I’ve been able to figure a fair bit out on my own, and am really impressed with how responsive the developers are. I posted a few questions and got detailed, useful responses with code bits and instructions as to where to stick ‘em (y’know, in the good way). Seriously awesome.

I fully intend to post snippets of stuff as I go along, I’m sure mostly for my own self-reference… but hey, if one person finds something useful, then awesome.

One of the more obviously cool bits about Ruboss is the yamlscaffold generator:

Create a Rails app, install the Ruboss plugin (dirt simple), create a model.yml file with your models and their relationships, run the yamlscaffold generator, compile using Flex Builder or the Flex SDK, and voila - a neat tabbed CRUD Flash interface which implements a pretty slick client-side MVC framework.

Give it a try, it doesn’t take much to get something happening…

While I’ve been spending a fair bit of time with Ruboss and have been exploring some other coolio stuff, I haven’t spent much time on a2sg proper. RailsConf is next week, so I’m either go apeshit on it this week, or more likely… not.

Seriously good news on the “deploying alpha versions to Dreamhost front:” no need to even go down the Capistrano route ’cause Dreamhost has installed Phusion Passenger, which makes deploying a Rails app to a shared hosting environment literally as simple as uploading the project directory to one’s account via FTP. I was shocked that it worked the first time, and seems to run well. Verrrrrrry cool!

I’m currently sitting in a coffee shop, sorta watching open mic. Sadly, the jackass who keeps noodling on his guitar while other people are on stage playing is my friend. Ugh.

There’s a hackfest tomorrow… I’m totally looking forward to that. See ya there if you’re goin’!

Categories: Flex, Rails Plugins, Ruboss
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