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.

Well, I’ve upgraded my FreeBSD server and everything is back in order, including a new version of WordPress.

And, I’ve reinstated the comments mechanism (restored the DB table) and installed the reCaptcha mechanism. So far, so good – spam appears to be throttled, but not completely eliminated.

At least it’s manageable.

On AJAX

I’m kind of mystified why so many sites haven’t incorporated AJAX – a lot of really big sites still do a full page refresh when something is updated. I can’t attribute it to ignorance, so it must be … dare I say … laziness?

Some notes on my approach to AJAX:

1. A lot of the AJAX libraries descend into baroque-ness, normally pointed toward updating parts of the page with HTML snippets. The MS implementation seems to be the worst offender. This seems like a bad idea, to me.
2. To maintain presentation/logic separation we like so much in architecture circles, you don’t want to be passing UI stuff over the wire – the only possible exception is if you’re creating all of your UI on the wire (which strikes me as prime fodder for loading up the server, so I don’t like to do that, anyway…)
3. JSON is the lingua-franca of AJAX, not HTML. Better to pass JSON-encoded data back and forth and let the server and the client handle their ends appropriately. I’m a big fan of off-loading as much as possible to the client, anyway. Stuff like forms validation should be done – at least preliminarily – at the client. The client should re-arrange itself based on JSON responses and data.
4. You never know what the next new big thing is. You’re client might be written in JS, now, but tomorrow’s need may likely be Flash, Silverlight, or who knows what? Passing back and forth snippets of JSON and keeping the semantics simple doesn’t break the back-end, or entail hoops trying to support multiple types of clients.
5. There’s nothing better than updating just part of a page. Full page refreshes are jarring.

I’m sure there are exceptions (there always are), but that’s the way things appear to this author, as of this writing.

… and with our coding dead… (with apologies to Shakespeare).

Again, I haven’t been keeping this up.. why? Spam is driving me crazy. I’m currently upgrading the server and will put in a captcha to re-implement comments. After all, what’s a blog without feedback?

Adobe Flex/Flash

On the development side, I haven’t been dormant: I’ve been investigating the new Flash and Flex technologies from Adobe.

Since Adobe took over Flash from Macromedia, there has been an all out push to turn the Flash technology into a bona-fide development environment. That makes it a candidate for investigation (especially to one who professes to be a graphics developer.)

The outcome? You can see one outcome on Facebook (this is also an exercise in exploring the ’social media’ platform): Active Biorhythm. It’s pretty cute – if you’re a Facebook user, you should be able to fire it right up (you might need to log in, first.) The first tab shows your six most compatible friends for varying attributes with a series of (active, of course) venn diagrams. The second tab shows your personal values with (active, again) bar-charts. (The ‘in-tip’ value labels is a nice touch…)

The third tab is the most interesting in terms of potential applications, IMHO: Think ‘Google Analytics’ type charting, with active information popups at appropriate places. As you hover over a curve, for instance, the other curves fade into the background and data at that point is reflected in an ‘info balloon’, which has a connector to the table readout value below, for good measure.

The current date can be changed by grabbing the red cursor and dragging it, or by hovering over the pointers on the sides of the graph. A friend can be loaded, either from the compatibility panel or from the name panel on top, and the chart will show comparison values, as well as a drop-down ‘compatibility panel’ for all attributes.

It’s an interesting demo of how to show a lot of information on a graph, without cluttering it up with legends, etc. I’m sure a graphics designer (which I don’t profess to be) could think of some very interesting possibilities. It needs a bit of work, still, but it’s quite functional.

The next exploration in this (Flash/Flex) technology will be a 3d library which has been built on top of Flash, talking directly to the GPU . From what I’ve seen, it looks very promising.

Aside: ActionScript3 is ok – it’s an ECMA-derived script, so there are a lot of familiarities. The only thing I don’t like is the kind of backward typing statements (typing, in and of itself is good, of course).

For instance, to declare a variable of type ‘String’ looks like thus:


var myVar:String;

Nothing wrong with that, but say this is local to a function and you want to promote it to class scope. What you need to do is remove the ‘var’ and the ‘:String’ so the lvalue in the assignment doesn’t have the type/instance declarations – that’s a two select-and-click process (other languages the type/instance declarations precede the variable name – one select-and-click to remove.)

No biggee, just a little bit of a nuisance.

Working with the FlexBuilder development environment is much better than working in the Flash Authoring Tool. The latter doesn’t help you very much — FlexBuilder is Eclipse, so it helps a lot (although not as much as it does with Java.) The only issue is that it produces large .SWF files, compared to those created with the FAT.

So, onward. I’ll be working the rest of the day putting in a ‘captcha’ and updating the wp software so comments can be left.

You will be free to add illuminating remarks when that’s done.

… but no spam!!…