Flex and Rails Dates

I'm not sure how I didn't run into this before, but I had some trouble parsing and dealing with dates coming from Rails' to_xml rendering of an object in Flex.

The dates were coming back looking like this: 2007-08-29T23:18:07-06:00, which I'd never seen before. I've found out since that it's in the W3C date time format.

Luckly for me, I found that the as3corelib has just what I needed: a DateUtil.parseW3CDT and DateUtil.toW3CDTF method.

If you're passing dates back and forth between Flex and Rails, at least with xml, you may want to check the corelib out, but make sure you look at it anyway.

FXWidget

Ted Patrick has been integrating SWFObject with some other tricks to get a good Flex widget embedding solution called FXWidget. I've been using it for my AIR derby project, and it's nice. A lot cleaner.

Give it a look and watch for updates.

Help David Coletta speak at MAX

Did you have a Flex app that was optimally challenged? Did you beat it? How? David Coletta from Buzzword is interested to know how. Check it out .http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif. I can tell you from a first hand perspective, a David Coletta presentation is an experience.

360|Flex Day 2

Pretty tired after hanging out with some of the Adobe guys late last night. Got to meet David Zuckerman, who put refactoring in the upcoming Flex Builder 3. I had to restrain myself from hugging him. Real nice guy, too.

Buzzword. The best session I'd seen so far, in terms of really useful content about how a very complex and well architected Flex application. When I saw a demo of Buzzword at Web 2.0 I thought "Sweet, it looks better than Word, I hope I can check it out soon". They're still not done, and now I know why. They've got a very solid application and it's a lot more complicated than just a big text input area. They're focusing intently on stability and performance. They even have a testing application built in to the app which lets them record a macro of some actions and save them as a repeatable test that can be performed in a suite inside the application by QA. They do this by having each command (they have their own framework - they hadn't heard of Cairngorm when they started) know how to reproduce itself in Actionscript, and that Actionscript is run later by the test runner. Very good stuff.

360|Flex Slides

Here are my updated slides, as promised, on the Jest google code site: http://jest-for-flex.googlecode.com/files/gestures.pdf.zip

360|Flex Day One

Good times at 360 Flex. I didn't get a chance to see too many other sessions since I was practicing my own talk and getting that in shape.

Thanks to everyone that came to my talk on alternative gestures and getting them into Flex apps. Watch this space for updated slides and the sample application.

Some of the EffectiveUI crew got together with Ted Patrick, Matt Chotin, Deepa Subramaniam and a few more of the Flex Dev team. Fun discussions about when to use Cairngorm, preferences about using inheritance. The kind of stuff drunk geeks talk about.

Kicking off 360|Flex

Last night was a great party at the 360|Flex conference in Seattle. Got to meet up with Matt Chotin, Doug McCune, and meet some of the Flex Dev team, and hang out with Ryan Stewart, and lot of very cool Flex geeks.

Last the EffectiveUI crew to see Charlie Hunter who was playing a few blocks away from the conference, but it turns out they weren't doing a second set that night. That sucks, cause Charlie's a real life guitar hero.

We recovered in style by bar hopping a bit with Ryan and Doug and a bunch of other guys, and then ended up at a dive bar debating RIAs in Enterprise and if "real product" companies care, and why they should if they don't. Hopefully Adam will talk about it because he had some good points.

Off to 360|Flex

Bags packed, computer, flight not cancelled, all set. Off I go to 360|Flex. More tonight...

A quick asdoc tip...

If you're going to document actionscript getter/setter pairs, put asdoc on the getter. Doesn't seem to work on the setter if there's a getter. Not sure yet if it works if there's only a setter... anyone out in TV Land know?

asdoc tip

So, I've been senior having a little trouble with asdoc. I needed to doc some code that requires Cairngorm, so I wrongly assumed that I could tell asdoc to add another library with this command:

asdoc -doc-sources . -library-path "path to cairngorm swc"

... but I was wrong. DEAD WRONG. ok.. just wrong. Instead, what I wanted was this:

asdoc -doc-sources . -library-path+="path to cairngorm swc"

because in the former case, I was telling asdoc to ignore the flex framework, which doesn't get you very far. I should have guessed that from using the command line compilers before, but I guess not.

Word to the wise!