liverail.net

Yes that’s right i’ve been very very bad. No posts since the end of July is a sign of my life right now between moving home and working a very tough two months, but at least i’m getting paid for this one.

So i’ll try not to let this become an abadoned blog, left on the heap of forgotten posts of the internet and get back on the horse real soon.

There’s still a lot to talk about!

Stuart

I know liverail has been down for a while, it’s a real problem.

I had been attempting an upgrade to Typo 4.0 but problems with the themes seem to be a real issue, hence the switch-back to default.

It was down for so long because I just have no time for anything at the moment with my workload and trying to find a new place to live. So those who are looking for more on Flex2/Flash/RailsDAV or anything else I normally do are going to have to wait a little. Sorry folks.

I’ve recently been forced to use IE after a Firefox explosion at work. I’ve just realised how bad this site looks in IE, normally I use Firefox on a PC and camino at home on my macs so never noticed….

Time for a re-skin!

The London Flash Platform User Group has posted up a video of my talk last month. You can find it here.

There is a little dodgy part where due to a dodgy internet connection my screenshots of Ruby On Rails sites don’t show. Good for a laugh though as i use the SmackBook

Last weeks presentation at the “London Flash Platform User Group” was great fun and it seemed like lots of people got really interested in Ruby On Rails as a result.

For your delectable delight here is a PDF of the presentation I gave. There isn’t much content in it as I go for the presentation style that the presenter is the content and the slides are just backing.

But there should be a video of that presentation coming soon and i’ll link to it so I can be laughed at by all.

Well Flex 2 has been released along with the Flash 9 player needed for Flex 2 applications. To top it off they have also released the preview of the Flash 9 authoring tool. It’s a big time for Adobe and worth a post.

There are also a few Flex development resources worth mentioning, the devnet and flex.org.

I thing its worth mentioning the pricing model in GBP :

Flex 2 SDK: Free as in beer

Flex 2 Builder: £370.12 a license. Free trial available.

Flex 2 Charting: £235.95 a license

Flex 2 Data Services: There is a free express edition for use on one application on one CPU. (Do Adobe realise that you can barely buy a one CPU server anymore, minimum spec is usually two making it pretty useless?). The full Enterprise edition is going to be priced per CPU, I would suggest haggling/negotiating over the price as with any Enterprise software.

The moment a few of you have been waiting for.

I’m releasing the first version of the RailsDAV plugin. What does RailsDAV do. Well it allows people to create Ruby On Rails controllers which will respond to WebDAV requests and expose functionality as a file-system.

The plugin can be downloaded from

svn.liverail.net/svn/plugins/railsdav

Of course the great thing about WebDAV is that it doesn’t just need to expose a directory on your server but can expose any concept you have in your application. For instance, for a Digital Asset Management System expose a list of tags as directory names, navigate into that directory and see all the images tagged with that word.

I’ll write about using the plugin in just a second, but first a little wording. This is definitely a 0.1 release and still needs work and a lot of testing before being production ready. It is likely to take on a different shape as well. It has many problems under WebBrick but works very very nicely under Mongrel (this is a problem with WebBrick) But release early, release often huh!

The plugin contains a base WebDAV controller and 2 specific implementations. A file-system exposer and an ActiveRecord exposer.

With thanks to Fabien Franzen for his input so far

There is also video of the FileSystem WebDAV Controller and the ActiveRecord WebDAV Controller

Yours truly will be giving a little talk at the London Flash Platform User Group on Thursday 22nd June

Ruby On Rails for the Flex Developer (20:15 – 21:15) – Stuart Eccles

Ruby On Rails has been one of the hyped development technologies of the last 12 months but what is it really about? Find out how you can use Ruby On Rails to build database-driven back-ends for Flex 2 applications with less lines of code than ever before.

Stefen Richter is giving a talk on Flash Media Server which i’m really excited about. The Media Server is one of the things that makes Flash unique as a true Rich Media Application.

So if you are interested in Flex, Flash or Ruby On Rails and you are hanging around London the sign up at www.lfpug.com/

UPDATE:

O’Reilly have been kind enough to give me 5 copies of Agile Web Development with Rails and 5 vouchers for a free copy of their new book Ruby On Rails: Up and Running to give away as prizes to attendees.

So register over at LFPUG to be entered for the draw.

If like me you are coming from a Java development background or even other languages there are a few things with Ruby you just gotta say “What the hell is that?” when it comes to reading code.

Reading other people’s code is the best way to learn a new language. Period. But there is a few things with Ruby you may not be used to, well I wasn’t anyway.

I do suggest everyone interested in Ruby take’s a browse through The Ruby Book

Here are a few of them:

Spry oh why oh why? I am of course referring to Adobe’s recently released AJAX framework called Spry.

See the problem I have with this is Adobe seem to be lining this up directly in comparison to Flex. After Adobe’s recent adverts to “Go Beyond AJAX with Flex” they now seem to be hedging their bets by releasing their own framework in an arena with the other 135 other frameworks (134 plus the Google Web Toolkit). There is now so much choice it’s unreal and how many people are going to use Spry over Prototype, DOJO, JSON, Yahoo’s web widgets and all the others.

The way I see it Adobe should be 110% behind making Flex 2 a success which is fairly unique in its industry (yes I know about Laszlo et al.) At the moment they are only diluting their position. The developer community is going to watch them plug each other while they go on hacking around with their favoured AJAX framework.

This said, Spry actually looks quite good. It’s very much based on loading then manipuling XML datasets and will feel very familar to Flex developers and using it’s dynamic region markup does make a page quite readable and succient while other AJAX frameworks require much more effort to understand where the data is coming from and being manipulated.

But why would I use it over Flex? In non-Flash based environments? Maybe but then i’ve got Prototype and Scriptaculous that. Instead what Adobe has done is sow doubt in my mind that they are not 100% sure Flex will suceed…..