Great Model-Glue:Unity Breezo!

Steve "Cutter" Blades did a great presentation on Model-Glue:Unity last night for the Nashville CFUG. I wasn't able to attend, but watched the Breezo after it was posted, and it's absolutely fantastic. It does an excellent job walking through the framework from a developer's perspective, which can be hard for me to do. For anyone who's wanted a more in-depth introduction to the framework at a gentle pace, this is a great resource.

Watch it at http://mmusergroup.adobe.acrobat.com/p45277812/.

3 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 9:56 AM - Categories: Model-Glue

Note from South Africa

I found out that I missed the Joburg CFUG by a few days! I'm not, however, too sure attending a CFUG during our vacation would've met with great reviews on the homefront.

After getting in to Johannesburg, we spent the weekend with high school friends of Dale's, heading off to a resort/casino called Sun City for a day, then having a braai (barbecue) with a few other high school friends and their children.

On Monday, we left for a six-day guided tour through Mpumalunga and the Kruger national park. In three days, we logged thirty hours of riding in different cars looking for wildlife at 15mph. We were extraordinarily lucky, with any one day filling what would normally be a week - ten lions, a night ride with a pride of lions, four leopard spottings (pun intended), and a chance encounter with a rare pack of wild dogs. Good stuff.

1 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 10:38 AM - Categories: Off Topic

3 Week Vacation! No MG, no laptop...

This blog will be silent for the next three weeks. My wife and I are headed to South Africa for a bit of a vacation. She lived there until she was sixteen, and I've wanted to see it for a while now. We'll be doing a six-day guided tour through various cultural areas and game reserves, then spending a little over a week with her grandparents with some camping thrown in.

This is the further I'll have ever been from home - any travel tips? I'm planning only sleeping an hour or so tonight and keeping myself up until 8-9PM SA time tomorrow (2-3PM EST) to absorb some of the jet lag during the 30-hour door-to-door trip.

9 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 7:31 AM - Categories: Off Topic

Flex and Ajax: Man, Flex rocks.

I travelled last week, and I spent most of my evenings and this weekend getting up to speed on Flex. Cairngorm makes a great deal of sense, and the need for it became obvious as soon as I started an app of any fair size. Heck, I'd use it for "Hello World."

Anyhow, I've also spend a good deal of time over the past year doing Ajax applications. I've done them by hand with div replacement, by hand with DOM manipulation, with Prototype/Scriptaculous, Dojo, and Spry. And, wow, do I really just prefer Flex for doing applications

Here's a few quick reasons that I'm really digging Flex:

Vector Graphics

I had an application where it'd make a lot more sense to show some aggregate data in a pie chart. It took less than a minute to add the chart. A minute of binding a slider in a view to a property of that view's value object...and suddenly changes to a number of small views changed the chart in real time. I don't know if that'd even be possible in Javascript.

File Uploads

Without some serious hacks, it's nigh impossible to upload files via Ajax. In Flex, it's a no-brainer, and you can even show progres indicators. Rock on.

Need a control? Draw it.

I used to do a lot of Flash MX / Flash Remoting work, back in the AS1 days. I had an opportunity to do a little control prototyping last week, and I forgot how much fun it was. Now, with Flex, I can implement custom controls (down to the pixel!) in Flash, and then use them in Flex. Sweet.

Remoting

Going over AMF is nice. Going over AMF and having marshalling between AS classes and CFCs is even nicer.

It just works.

A SWF is a SWF is a SWF. Not much, if any, browser inconsistency.

5 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 10:39 AM - Categories: Flex and ColdFusion