It should come as no surprise that ActionScript3 (Flex/Flash) are second class citizens in the Facebook app world.

But, that doesn’t make it any less frustrating, when you encounter it.

The most recent turn appears to involve the app installing itself into the users account. This used to work swimmingly well. Now, all of a sudden, I’m discovering my potential users can’t install. They never get the ‘Allow’ dialog and the app just hangs on connection.

Various tests show that all of my Flex/Flash, apps and test platforms do this, so it’s not just the app in question. The PHP tests, of course, work swimmingly well.

Other AS3 app developers have noticed this, too, and have had to implement a range of workarounds to fix it. I think FB has screwed up their permissions files for AS3. It would be nice to get FB’s attention to figure out what went wrong, or Adobe’s, but that’s like trying to get through to MS. All you can do is spatter messages on the boards and pray.

So, I’m in the middle of figuring out how to do the workarounds and still stay in the AS3 codespace. Another alternative is to let PHP set up the session and then the Flex app can just attach itself to that session.

Of course, once I get this many-days-endeavor implemented, FB will fix it, and everything will work properly as it did before, in the original context.

But, should they mess up again, the workaround will be a good failsafe against that.

Grouse, grouse. Ommm, Ommm.

I haven’t written in this for quite a while.  With all the spam I’ve been getting on this, it’s been discouraging to do much more writing.  I’ve currently disabled feedback – will re-enable when I get the chance.

At any rate, I’ve been up to my ears in alligators, learning new technologies (same old story), reinforcing what I know in old technologies (same old story, but new twists), and meeting deadlines.

So, I haven’t had much time to ruminate.

Where I’ve Been

Java, for one – and JOGL: This falls under the category of ’same old story, new twists’, leveraging my architecting application design experience into the land of Java, and the OpenGL/3DGraphics expertise into JOGL (Java OpenGL).

It’s worked out very nicely – Java is, of course, another ‘C’ language derivative with a bit of an emphasis on threading, especially for the UI aspects. The Eclipse developer framework is a joy to use, and I’m happy to see it becoming increasingly available for a number of languages and platforms.

JOGL is a reasonable performer, although with large models, we could see it bogging down. It would have been an interesting exercise to have loaded the same models (protein molecules, in this case) in a C++ based system to benchmark performance on some of the larger molecules. It would also have been a worthwhile exercise to isolate the graphics and try one of the newer scenegraph-based technologies (Xith, OpenSceneGraph, etc.) to try to move to higher level constructs, rather than raw OpenGL. Unfortunately, the funding ran out before any of that could be undertaken.

But, the re-architecting and bugfixing were very successful. Here’s one place the results can be seen (Java WebStart App – I’ve been seeing stalled downloads from overseas, unfortunately. Hit ESC to exit):pdb.org Kiosk Viewer

Where I’m at, Now

Flash and ActionScript have always been on the periphery. I’ve decided to take out some time and investigate these technologies, more thoroughly, with a couple of FaceBook apps as the projected end-result. A couple of observations:

• AS3 is essentially an ECMA-based language. As such, it shares a lot with JavaScript.
• Flex looks like a much better authoring environment than the Flash Authoring Tool – I’ve found the latter to be full of inconsistencies and not “helpful”. Flex looks much more amenable to building applications, which is where I’m focused. And, it’s Eclipse-based.

Why Flash vs. JavaScript or, for that matter, Java?

Easy, in my mind – Flash has a much richer innate graphics set than Java, with a lot of support for animations, curved rectangles, really nice thick line support with endcap definitions, etc. With all that, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be on every platform. There are always performance issues in an interpreted environment – even a byte-code interpreted environment, but Adobe has put a lot of effort into updating the runtime and making it more efficient, and making Flash a more formal and rigorous development platform.

Too bad it doesn’t work on the iPod…