I’ve been so busy with client work I haven’t written for a long time. I was even invited to speak at MAX through a referral from Tom and John with 360|Flex and wasn’t able to write about it. I was so busy with client work when I wasn’t doing that I was preparing my presentations.

After this week I will be mostly done with a large project deadline and have time to get back to writing. There’s much I want to talk about. Including a RESTful website system I’ve helped build on PHP’s Zend Framework, cool stuff with cloud computing, and maybe even some Python. I’ll be happy to get back to doing Flex and ActionScript again.

Tyler has been working hard on a design editor that will be able to create drawing API skins visually. I’m excited for that! He’s even considering cleaning up the transform library as a package and selling it similar to GreenSock’s. Tyler is such a smart developer, I wish I had money to keep him busy making me code libraries all day.

I just submitted my 360|Flex session proposal for this year’s Indianapolis conference. I’m way excited. I want to talk about cloud computing and how you can use it with your Flex projects. I want to build an app for it that runs 100% off of services and uses no server-side code. It will be a contacts manager if I don’t have time. If I do have time it will be a web CMS in AIR that publishes to Amazon S3. That would be cool huh? :)

Geek alert: this post gets into Linux and other such topics. More geeky than I usually get.

I have finally got my setup complete. I got tired of trying to find Mac binaries of all the libraries I wanted installed for web development, and I’ve been doing much more PHP this month than Flex. So I reworked things. Here’s my setup:

• Ubuntu Server 8.0.4 running on VMWare Fusion
• lighttpd web server, learned it in a few hours and loved it (thanks Jake)
• sshfs to mount my ~/Sites folder to the /var/www/ folder on the Ubuntu VM

Installing Ubuntu Server on VMWare wasn’t a problem. I tried it on Parallels and it wouldn’t boot after the install, so thought I’d try the other. Now I may have to buy it unless they want to give me a copy for blogging about them (hint, hint). :)

After installing Ubuntu, I gave root a password I could connect with: sudo passwd root

Then I ssh’ed in from my terminal. Mostly because I can make the screen bigger and scroll it etc. I set the networking to bridged so my ubuntu install could be accessed from my Mac and also access the internet. Got the IP for it with: ifconfig

Installed lighttpd, php-cgi, mysql, etc. with apt-get.

Then I installed sshfs, again with apt-get. This allows me to mount a drive to a folder that uses SFTP under the hood. I went into my Mac settings and under “Sharing” clicked the checkbox next to “Remote Login” and then specified that only my user could be logged into remotely (keep it as secure as possible shall we?)

Then I mounted my Sites folder: sshfs myusername@192.168.1.6:Sites /var/www/ -o follow_symlinks,allow_other. The two options there at the end were to enable symlinks which I use in my sites folder to link to various folders on my Mac. And the allow_other ensures that other users on the ubuntu system (including my lighty user) can see the mount. Otherwise I get a Fobidden error in my browser.

I set up simple-vhosts with lighty and changed all my /etc/hosts entries to point to the ubuntu IP since I won’t be using apache anymore.

I think I covered it all. It’s not in great step-by-step detail, but hopefully there’s enough info that you might get something similar up and running if needed. :)

Speaking of Layered Content, I woke up last night at 2 a.m. with some great ideas that I’ve been putting into action since then. Specifically, Layered Content will be framework independent, and it will be able to integrate with any of the web frameworks (Zend Framework, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, etc.) or be used stand-alone. What does that mean? It mean’s if you’ve got a site to put together for a client you can use your framework of choice and tack on Layered Content. You’ll be able to give them a way to manage their content on top of whatever magic you’ve coded up for them.

More to come, when there is more to tell.

I’ve been involved with the Flight framework since its inception at mediaRAIN. I’ve helped Tyler with it via brainstorming, feedback, etc. But he’s been the one mostly to code it up.

It’s been great from the beginning for a lot of our projects because it has built-in undo/redo and allows for some quite custom things along those lines. Well, Tyler went in another direction with it for awhile, wanting to please everyone, taking out Singletons and such for example, and mediaRAIN forked it into a project called Nimbus. I will probably be helping out with both as I can.

Flight is now coming in from the wings more with their changes and it looks like quite a solid and complete framework, even if I didn’t need undo/redo. I’ll have to try it out with Layered Content as I upgrade the admin.

Here’s a PDF version of my presentation.

Advanced ActionScript APIs Presentation

Back in February I posted some ideas Tyler and I worked on for a component framework we’re calling Stealth. We were inspired after Ely Greenfield’s Flex Roadmap presentation at MAX last year. It struck a chord with may of our talks together about how the components ought to be architected, so we set out to make an AS3 component set.

We made a proof-of-concept and shared with a few friends. Because it’s so basic and raw we didn’t want to post any of the code, but after talking with Ben Stucki (Open Flux) at 360 Flex this year and some of the Gumbo team I thought some of the ideas we had might be of use.

We put core code into the components package, I created a CSS parser so we’re not using Flex’s stylesheets. This allows us to have full selector support, but also disallows classes to be compiled in. So we reference a few needed classes in the base file to make sure they’re compiled in. We’re using an AS3 project, but also using MXML. Pretty cool stuff. Also have undoable text in the text field.

You can check out the architecture on my previous post. And again, this is proof-of-concept code, and hasn’t been touched since February.

http://jacwright.com/stealth_concept/

Right-click to view the source code.