I had some free time over the holidays and I made tremendous progress on my new Actionscript 3.0 Framework (that I’ve been yapping about for months now).  Although I still need to go back and change a few things (and fix a bunch of bugs), the majority of the base framework is complete. What I like about it is that is accomplishes exactly what I wanted: Something simple and flexible, providing a solid foundation for all the basics of RIA development (pre-loading, queuing, parsing, navigation management, data management, etc), while at the same time allowing for the main content areas and design features to be so flexible that any designer, with basic Flash skills can work independently enough and have his/her content seamlessly integrated with the rest of the application.

Super-Actionscript nerds please cover your ears: In order to allow designers 100%, freedom I wanted be able to broadcast specific events from the timeline to my main shell application. This gives designers the ability to create whatever they want within the regular Flash IDE, as long as they don’t mess with the 2-3 lines of code that I use to broadcast key events. I was having the darndest time getting this to work the way I wanted. I checked the blogs, the forums and Adobe. I ultimately ended up doing it the way I had started: By creating a custom event and then just broadcasting it from the timeline when I want. It’s pretty cool, but there seems like there may be a better way.

//from the timeline, event to signal that current section has finished fading in

import com.petercole.event.TimelineEvent;
dispatchEvent(new TimelineEvent(TimelineEvent.TIMELINE_FADE_IN_COMPLETE, true))

I hope I don’t sound like too much of a fan-boy-freak here, but I wanted to acknowledge the amazing hosting company I use: Media Temple. I have been in this web development business for many years now (has it been 10?) and throughout my journey I have used many different hosting companies both for client and personal work. Media Temple is a company I began using 5 or so years ago for my personal, consumer-facing websites (including this one) as well as for a (behind-the-scenes) development environment. We use Media Temple at AKQA for a number of client-related hosting as well as for specific development-environment needs (old Flash Comm for example).

Media Temple just ROCKS! These guys are consistently blowing my mind with their supreme functionality, reliability and customer service. Even their administration panels and their custom web tools are awesome and look beautiful, with excellent usability. As a developer with a grid server, I have so much joy every time I log in to my admin panel; everything is so clear and there is SO much I can do. Set up a new Word Press in seconds, hook up a Drupal CMS, play with Ruby (have not done this yet), get great access to all my tools: email, databases, stats, etc. On Jan 2, at 11pm at night I had a question regarding db config – I called them up and had my question answered and was back at work in minutes!

You just don’t get any better than these guys. Thanks!

(P.S. No, I don’t work for them, advertise for them nor do I even know anyone who works there.)

Happy New Year! What a nerd I am, I spent my New Year’s Day (and more) trying to get Subversion to work with Apache 2.2x. What a pain! Apparently, Apache 2.2x does not support this or something? I was looking forward to using XAMPP for my quick LAMP set-up on my laptop. After some poking around the web, I discovered that there is some issue with Apache 2.2x support for the following files:

mod_dav_svn.so
mod_authz_svn.so
libapr.dll

Without going into the gory details, it just didn’t work with Subversion out of the box. I am surprised that there is not more information about this. Anyway,luckily I stumbled upon this:

http://forum.atlantaphp.org/index.php/m/1103/

…which essentially saved my butt! Thanks man…this was very helpful.

OK….more on this soon….again, Happy New Year.