Author Archives: Alastair

Display Rails associations in a Flex DataGridColumn

Frameworks like Ruby on Rails and CakePHP make it easy to set up model associations with belongs_to, has_many, and the ever popular has_and_belongs_to_many. However, getting those associations to show up in a Flex DataGridColumn’s dataField isn’t immediately obvious, you’d assume you could just do parent.child or child.parent but that just gives a blank column. After [...]

New job! I’m now an ActionScript Developer at OpenSoft

After three years of consulting I’m heading back to a ‘real’ job as a Flash/Flex (mostly the latter) developer at OpenSoft (aka Farheap Solutions). It was a tough call but doing full time Flex work a mere 15 minute commute away was too good to pass up.
The blog, which was about 50/50 Ruby/Flex, will probably [...]

Some App Engine links

Aral Balkan on Building Flash applications with Google App Engine.
PureMVC Python / Google App Engine Demo

Run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure

Google releases App Engine. It’s Python only for now, but there are rumors more languages (Ruby!) will soon be available.
Here’s a video intro. And Django runs out of the box (in the box?) – well some parts are missing like no relational db – still you can’t beat the one line deployment!

Docs! Running Django on [...]

List of Flex resources and tutorials

Paranoid Ferret Productions, who themselves are a great Flex resource, have a list of the ‘Best Adobe Flex Resources and Tutorial Sites‘.

ActionScript MVC minimalist example for PureMVC 2.0.3

I’ve updated Chandima Cumaranatunge’s excellent PureMVC walk-through to work with the latest version of PureMVC (2.0.3). Although PureMVC has extensive documentation nothing beats a simple demo for wrapping your brain around the framework. The most helpful part of Chandima’s tutorial is when he steps through the sequence of actions which includes initialization and then following [...]

PureMVC for Ruby

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, [...]

Deep linking in Flex and Flash with Django

Aral Balkan shows you how.

Build Flash with Ruby

Via Flex on Rails…
Using HotRuby it is possible to use straight Ruby to build a Flash app.

Adobe holding a series of online seminars this week

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 [...]