Ryan Campbell

Bringing the desktop experience to the web

Thanks to this TechCrunch blog entry I stumbled upon a new web service called Anywhere.FM. It was built using Adobe Flex and allows you to upload your entire music collection, listen to it from anywhere and share it with friends. It’s definitely a simple yet well thought out application with a similar appearance to iTunes.

Lately a lot of focus in the blog community has switched to Adobe AIR and bringing normally web based applications to the desktop. Although Adobe AIR is a great technology and will play a large part in RIAs future, I think Adobe Flex still deserves a lot of credit for helping bring the desktop experience to the web.

When using HTML to develop web applications I often got frustrated with the hoops I repeatedly had to jump through to make the web page look and feel like an application. Instead Adobe Flex’s customized components and object-orientated nature is helping developers around the world build web applications quicker and easier than ever.

Now if only the Anywhere.FM developers can package up their service as an Adobe AIR app! *hint hint*

Posted in Anywhere.FM, Flex | No Comments »

RIA for the Next Generation

One of today’s big announcements is the $700 million purchase of Club Penguin by Disney. For those who don’t know, Club Penguin is a virtual world for kids ages 8 to 14 where they can safely communicate and play mini games with other members. It makes extensive use of Adobe Flash allowing them to create a fun virtual world without the need to install stand-alone software.

When I got my first internet connection I used a browser called WinWeb which didn’t even display photos on websites. Although at the time I was ok with that, mainly because I really didn’t know what I was missing and was just excited to figure out what the heck the Internet was. At least now though, I always crave a better experience and could never go back to the web I first met. Yet not everyone likes change as much as I do and I believe that is why many think the simpler the site the better and don’t see a need for richer internet experience.

Although convincing usage of technologies such as Adobe Flex to the WinWeb generation can sometimes be tough, the newest generation just getting a taste for the Internet for the first time doesn’t need to be sold at all. They just want a great user experience and have no bias on what technologies are used. It’s purchases like the one today that assure me RIA has a very big future and I am definitely excited to be apart of that.

Posted in Club Penguin, Disney, Flex | 1 Comment »

Adobe Flex Coolness

The last couple weeks I have been working on a classified ads perl script that I am planning to sell. Originally I created the software for my fiancee’s http://www.petsbc.com website but have recently decided to try and make some money from it. (Our first child is on the way, so my mind seems to be stuck on career lately ha)

The software front-end has lots of features but the back-end admin was almost non-existent. Other than a page to view unapproved ads, I would just use the MySQL command line client to manage the database. Since not everyone enjoys writing SQL statements as much as I do (and I don’t enjoy it very much) I have been spending the majority of my time developing an admin interface using Adobe Flex.

Although I’ve read books, watched videos and visited every blog around related to Flex, up until this project I haven’t had a chance to build any large real world applications using it. I’m almost finished development and am very excited to see what potential customers think of the application.

In the past I spent a lot of time focusing on making my cgi scripts look and feel like an application. With Flex I don’t have to try, it is a real application and looks very professional even with the default skin. I think Flex not only produces a useable great looking application but will give me the edge over the competition with its coolness factor. Not to mention I can easily take the admin app to the desktop with Apollo.

I look forward to showing off the completed app and am also very interested in hearing what your customers first impressions were on Flex apps that you’ve built.

Posted in Flex | 1 Comment »

MySQL access in Adobe Flex

Over the last few days I’ve been writing a shared library to connect directly to MySQL in ActionScript (a great way to learn the Socket and ByteArray classes ha). The code is now compiling without any errors or warnings but still needs a lot of testing. Over the weekend I’ll make sure everything works correctly and also make it more Flex-friendly. I think it would be pretty cool to be able to query the db directly from ActionScript and have the results bindable to a DataGrid.

Although connecting directly to MySQL from Flash probably isn’t the best idea for most applications, I’m mainly doing this for the learning experience. My plans are the following:

1. Complete the ActionScript MySQL Client
2. Modify/abstract the code to allow other database drivers (JDBC, ODBC, DBI, PDO-ish style)
3. Code a simple object-to-relational mapping framework (Similar to ActiveRecord)
4. Build a database administration app using the Flex framework

I’ll keep everyone updated on my progress and I’ll release the code as it is completed. I hope to hear anyones comments on similar ideas.

Posted in Flex, MySQL | 7 Comments »

Bypassing Web 2.0 to Adobe Flex

Last month I stumbled upon a technology that has revived the original motivation I use to have when developing software. For the majority of my career I have focused on building web based data driven applications. Each project I pushed the limits of HTML further, especially once AJAX came along. Although I’ve always been excited with the end result, it’s still just a web page and I’m starting to get the feeling the browser just wasn’t meant to serve applications. I think the browser has evolved quite a bit since originally introduced with CSS, JavaScript, DHTML but I also think HTML has reached its limits.

There is so much hype around AJAX because we’re all amazed at what new things we can make the browser do, things that it originally wasn’t meant to do. AJAX is simple, pulling data from the server after the page has loaded, but it’s a hack and when dealing with all the cross-browser issues it feels like even more of a hack. Yet everyone uses it though because hack or not, it works and we could no longer imagine the web without it. I’ve actually started to feel like if I don’t use it I am stuck in the old web, while everyone else is steps ahead in their fancy AJAX enabled web.

There will always be a place for HTML and it has served us well but for web applications I have now found a much better solution called Adobe Flex. It’s a framework built on top of Flash 9 that from the beginning was developed specifically for building Rich Internet applications. Instead of steps ahead, I now feel leaps ahead of the AJAX world. No longer am I using JavaScript hacks, with Flex communicating with web services and even pushing data from the server is built in.

Server communication, although the biggest hype currently in the HTML/AJAX world, is only a small part of Adobe Flex. When developing HTML based applications I spent more time designing the pages and debugging JavaScript then I did writing the actually server-side back-end. With Flex there are no cross-browser issues to worry about and with 100 or so built in components it feels a lot more application developer friendly. If I want a data grid, I don’t create an html table with the first row the labels and each other row the data, I use a Flex DataGrid component and assign a data provider to it.

Adobe Flex has allowed me to develop more interactive, user friendly, better looking applications easier and faster then ever before and with Flash as the back-end, it makes things possible that HTML isn’t meant to do or will simply never be able to do. When picking tools for future web development, why not choose technologies that are built from the ground up to be full solutions and not just some quick fix buzzwords that only give us a taste of what the web should have been long ago.

Posted in Flex | 2 Comments »

Ruby on Rails

Ok I’ve been playing around with Ruby on Rails lately and thought it was a fun toy but wanted to put it to the test of building a real application. So far I have to say I am very impressed. For such a new technology there is a huge community around it which is extremely helpful. By itself, Ruby on Rails is a great framework to get a simple web application up and running quickly. I must admit though that the documentation is a bit lacking. The API docs have repeatly required me to google for answers. Also the wiki adds more confusion than help because of all the contracticting comments on the pages.

One major plus is how well plugins/extensions play with RoR. My favorite so far is FileColumn, which couldn’t compliment RoR any better. With only a couple lines of code I can have photos being uploaded, resized and displayed within my application. The only complaint I had was quickly solved by using ActAsPartitionedId with FileColumn, which I do hope is bundled with FileColumn in the future.

This is also my first experience with Ruby. At first glance the syntax looks a little odd but coming from a perl background, it grew on me quickly. I think this language has a lot of potential and I hope its user base keeps growing.

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Hibernate, Spring and Tapestry

Although I love perl, I decided lately I wanted to try a different language for web development. Since I hate php, I thought Java was a great choice. The number of frameworks available for server-side Java development is overwelming. On one hand this makes chosing which technologies to use frustrating, but at least it shows there is a large community behind Java. After reading, reading and reading some more I settled on using Hibernate for database persistence, Spring for the middle tier and Tapestry for the web front end.

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Lets Build a Blog System

Ok so I’m always thinking about new projects to work on and new ways to make money but I never stick with one. I’m sure I’m not alone on this, so many ideas I don’t even know where to start. It’s also hard to decide when you’re unsure which idea will make the most money.

Repeatedly a lot of my ideas revolve around blogs and I’ve even been getting multiple requests to build blog hosting software. At the same time I also think about giving back to open source. Lately I have been contributing ports to the DarwinPorts Project.

Although I think MovableType is a great start to a blog manager, it definitely lacks in many areas. For example it could use an easier way to change themes/templates, adding plugins and how you content is displayed. So I am going to write a new blog system, might even name at CyberScript (my company name)

Another reason I have decided on this is because I think releasing software for free would be a great way to really show my talent. I have also seem a lot of companies base their business on open source and find that very respectable. Also free software is a great way to get lots of exposure quickly.

Stay tuned for more details on this project as I get further in to planning.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

The Fedora Fad

I am starting to really hate Fedora, honestly I see it as nothing more then a toy that I would get bored of within a week. Forced to use it in a production envirorment actually makes my day worse. Who knows, maybe I am just so caught up in the FreeBSD Ports Collection that I am completely missing the positives to using any other OS. I do know though that FreeBSD has never let me down and is a breeze to maintain.

As a web developer I depend on the system I’m using to work correctly. I have my own code problems to solve and should not have to be creating work arounds or spend hours guessing why my code runs different on every machine I install it on. Some might say suck-it-up but if I’m wasting time on something that could be avoided, why not avoid it? It is unproductive and burns me out for the rest of the day.

Anyways.. enough complaining for today..

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My First Post

Well this is my first post to my blog, mainly want to just test out how this system works. I’ve never stuck with writing in one of these in the past but I want to try this time. I think blogs are a cool idea and are already changing who people use for their news sources. Gives everyone an equal opportunity to let their thoughts be heard.

Although this is a great system.. One suggestion I would have for the MovableType developers is to explain further on this “entry body/extended entry” stuff. How do I know how much I should write in the entry body? Does the entire entry body get displayed in my RSS feed? I think the extended entry textarea should be hidden by default. Also why not a browser-based wysiwyg editor? That technology has been around for quite a while now.

Anyways.. I think this is a enough for my first post

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