I have previously tried to get Flex to play nicely with the Picasa API. I use Picasa a lot and host all my pictures there so to be able to do things with them with Flex would be very useful.
Before I have had issues as there was no crossdomain.xml but having had a look at the docs today this seems to now be fixed (or I missed it last time) as detailed here.
There are a couple of small projects I want to build on this API so it’s great that I won’t have to proxy these calls through the server.
I’m excited to learn that there is already an Actionscript client library that enables you to write a flex application as a Google wave extension!
Not sure what I would develop yet but there is a lot of scope for some cool apps I think.
I got my invite to Google Wave today and have had a bit of a play about. If you don’t know what it’s all about then here is a 10 minute video explaining the basics:
So far it’s a bit frustrating as I don’t know many other people who have Google Wave. I can see the potential and would love to be able to use all the features. I am actually organising a trip to Scotland for May next year with Linzi and 4 friends and Google Wave would be great to help organise that but only Linzi and I have access so we can’t use it.
So far I have installed Tweety which is pretty cool – you can get all your twits directly in Google Wave. I’ve also had a play with the map extension and the Sudoku extension.
So, if anyone from Google Wave is listening please give me 4 invites so I can use wave to organise our trip next year!
I’ve spent a fair bit of the long bank holiday weekend trying to get Blaze DS installed on Google App Engine but frustratingly I’ve not managed it so far.
I was working off this blog post but when I tried to create a flex project it would not validate the Blaze DS server. I think it is something to do with the flex context root that he is using in the example. When the validator tries to do a test on that context it doesn’t work.
I’ll have another go next time I have some time. It’s annoying when you can’t get these things to work.
Other than that I am very impressed with GAE – the eclipse plug-in is really easy to set up and use. It builds a sample site with web kit and a server call for you which works as soon as launch it.
I really hope I can get it playing nicely with Flex.
A new version of FLexUnit has been released as blogged about here.
The biggest improvements on the old version is a really easy to use FlexUnit ant task to run your tests as part of your CI build.
There were a couple of teething problems with the first version that they released.
The first issue was resolved very quickly with a new release within 24 hours or so of the first release.
I managed to get round the second issue by tweaking and re-building the ant task so that it would work on 2003 server. This fix may now be in the trunk build but I haven’t checked.
There is still a bit of an issue with setting up a trusted swf so that the tests can run but I understand there is a fix for this on the way.
I’ve just had to go through another round of re-installing Live Writer and deleting any settings files that I can find.
The fix that worked last time for Live Writer not starting didn’t work this time but a re-install did.
I’ve looked for alternatives but have not been able to find anything that looks as good.
Any suggestions?
I had a free weekend this weekend and actually stayed at home for the first time in ages. In between reminiscing about last weekend in Germany by racing the Nurburgring on my xBox 360 I spent quite a bit of time working on FlexBudget.
I have now basically got all the domain classes finished and all the tests written. This was true TDD – I didn’t even create any view components until 99% of the domain and tests had been written. I also wrote the tests first, checked that they failed then implemented the functionality. I did come across a bug with FlexUnit 4 doing this – sometimes if a test fails FlexUnit seems to not fail it and just say that 44/45 tests completed which was a bit weird.
You can see how far I have got here:
http://giles.roadnight.name/flex/FlexBudget/FlexBudget.html
90% of the work so far has been on the domain classes and not very much on presentation logic or views. The next step will be improve the user experience a lot – I’ll move all the new Account / Deposit etc windows into popups. There is no form validation at the moment either, just catching of events so I need to work on that.
The selected transaction panel was thrown together in about 30 mins after I had completed the rest as I wanted to play with it. This is what the app is about really – being able to tweak spending to see how it affects your overall budget. This component is pretty buggy and will throw RTEs if you click in the wrong place in the grid.
The view is not pretty, not well laid out and probably has some bugs in but I am pretty pleased with progress so far. Obviously the app is useless without what you enter being persisted in a database somewhere but that will come next after I have tidied the view up.
Try the following for an example of the functionality.
Eventually you’ll be able to drag transactions around to a new date and amounts etc will be editable in the grid.
I’m looking forward to getting this into a useable state so I can stop using a spreadsheet!
Any comments or ideas for features please let me know.
