Nouvelles Solutions

Actually I did setup this whole website using Octopress because I want to blog more. The reality is that I’m currently working on many pretty awesome projects, a Rails project, an iPad project, a Flex project, and some consulting projects that when the evening comes…I code some more instead of blogging. But I’m learning so much cool stuff that I want to share. So here a few of the things I want to talk about:

I just read Optimizing Performance for the ADOBE FLASH PLATFORM from Adobe.

This is a good read and contains many useful tips and descriptions of optimization you can apply to your application. This become really relevant when developing Flex mobile applications.

Here are the 67 tips highlighted in the document…

I’ve received so much feedback from many of my friends on Flex projects being cancelled or scheduled to be rewritten in another technology than Flex. Great Job Adobe, you did it!

So what was really announced last week is the following:

At first I thought “Wow, Adobe really messed up their communication”. They could have focused on what they are adding, strong support for HTML5 and CSS4, Adobe AIR for Mobile, and not on what they are removing, the Flash Player in the Browser. But then they also announced that they opened sourced Flex via the Apache Foundation. And the main stream media, the blogosphere, and many developers I know went crazy and said Flex is dead, it’s over, time to convert all your projects to HTML5.

At least so says my good friend Sean Voisen in his latest blog entry Thoughts on test-driven development.

What, you are calling me a liar? :-) I must respectfully disagree with Sean. Not on the fact that he may think it’s not fun, that’s his opinion like many other Flex developers that don’t do testing. I disagree because I see many developers, in other communities, that actually really enjoy testing. If you look at the Ruby community you will see many developpers enjoying doing test driven development, enjoying writing tests, and even expanding the way you can write tests. Check out rspec, Cucumber, and the many of books and screencast on the subject. Checkout all the ruby libraries, they are all pretty well tested. There are many training classes on people that really want to improve doing testing. Many Rails projects are extremly well tested. Many Ruby developers cannot even code without writing tests first.

Announcing redis flex An ActionScript Library to integrate with Redis.

A while back I looked into accessing Redis directly from Flex and I found an existing library, as3redis that however didn’t support the new unified request protocol. So I wrote a minimalist wrapper that now allows to send commands to a redis server.

To access the Redis server from Flex just instantiate a Redis instance:

In this screencast we are going to show how to build a Rails app in a couple of minutes that is optimized for Rich Client. The application is a todo application build in Flex connecting using the bulk_api to the Rails server using my new bulk data source Flex framework.

I started RailsConf with the “Building Web Apps with HTML5: Beyond the Buzzword” by Mike Subelsky (@subelsky).

He prepared twelve html5 exercises that walked the about 250 attendees through various features of html5 over a 2.5 hour session. It’s fun to have time to work on these features. The high point was having about 200 computers using Websockets to send data back and forth with his server. He created a small ruby program that used EventMachine::WebSocket and it was holding up quite well all these connections.

Here are the notes I took during this tutorial

A lot of my work is for enterprises for software that is hidden behind closed doors but since I started helping out Thought Equity I have a few visible apps under my belt. Just in time for March madness they released a new version of the http://vault.ncca.com, see my last year’s entry on “under the hood of a cool flex project.”

And to capture all that meta data regarding games and movies they created a whole server side infrastructure but they also needed a pretty face for all that power and I got lucky to be one of the main coder on the T3 Metadata Editor.

It’s fun to work on software that ends up in the press, here are a few extracts found on the web:

I created the MiFi app during the 360iDev conference on September 29th 2009 and submitted the app the same day. I released a fix a month later and didn’t touch the application since. I wasn’t using my Mifi card much until recently when I realized that the app wasn’t working on iOS 4.1. Then I checked the comments for the Mi-Fi app on the AppStore and realized that there where hundreds of comments of people that have the same issue. Sorry for being so late to realize that. Once I found that out I had to decide wether to remove the application from the store or fix it. So I reopened the project and realized that the way it was written wouldn’t work in the new Titanium SDK. Despite of the work I decided to rewrite/reorganized the code and voila…Mi-Fi 1.2 for iOS 4.1 should now work better than ever. I did not restyle the application, it could look better but it’s still functional. I also didn’t add any feature but at least you should get the battery and reception levels that are the most important features. Another feature I should add soon is to be able to set the ip address of your Mi-Fi card in case you changed from the default address.