Just another Nodetraveller

..since I’ve posted. I’ve been busy with a couple of projects and haven’t had much time. These projects were Java and PHP based with pure HTML frontends but could probably be enhanced quite nicely if using Flash. I’ll probably add this to my list of things to do with Flash. Lately this list of mine is getting longer; either my creative think tank juices are overflowing or there’s never enough time.

This may be a few months old but I only just discovered it. This article discusses Jakobs Nielsen 1994 usability heuristics for desktop applications with respect to Rich Internet Applications. Most of us might be used to website heuristics but RIAs are more like desktop applications and should be treated similarly and the article explains how.

I’ve been a bit busy over the last week or so and haven’t had time to do post anything or even read ppls blogs. But I had a rather pleasant surprise when I caught up on my reading and found Mario Klingmann at Quasimondo had mentioned this site on his blog! Very nice indeed! Thanks Mario… I’ve got a few flash projects in the pipeline that I’m hoping to find the time to work on.

I haven’t had time to post anything recently but I have had time to quickly cobble together a little app using flash 2004 and its components. Yet another rss app but it shows nicely the usage of various components, old and new, that 2004 offers. It uses the Accordion and TextArea UIComponents and the XMLConnector to load the urls of the feeds to download. Flash’s css support is also demostrated within the textarea.

Now Actionscript is OO, I thought it would be useful to try out implementing a design pattern in Flash. The pattern I chose is the Memento pattern, which is mainly used to implement “undo” functionality in applications. The reason I chose Memento is because its a pattern that uses interfaces and I wanted to explore this in AS 2.0. An interface is an object that defines methods but has no implementation.

Okay, heres the flash client (only 47k!) for the TVguide webservice posted recently. It’s quite a fairly simple movie using flash remoting and amfphp. I used amf to call my tvguide webservice via SOAP. Instead of having your swf call a specifc flash service, you call a special service which acts like a proxy to SOAP webservices. This service looks like this.. 1// AMFPHP uses by default the PEAR::SOAP 2// library, so you need to define in the 3// gateway not to use that.

Recently I’ve been working on a webservice using PHP and nusoap. It provides information about 41 UK TV and radio programming schedule for the upcoming week. The wsdl can be found here and example php client here. I’m just finishing the final touches to a flash client which I’ll be posting sometime within the next couple days. Hopefully this will show how to use the webservice in your flash apps..

I’ve been playing about with the webservice connector in flash mx 2004. What I’ve discovered is that connecting to a webservice and using the data returned is really easy. I’m using the tvGuide webservice (http://www.nodetraveller.com/webservices/tvGuide/tvGuideService.php?wsdl here at nodetraveller.com as one of the operations it provides is a list of channels which would look ideal in a listbox. Here’s a quick guide to using a webservice: Create a new document from a Query-Error-Response template.

Looking through the cobwebs of my old laptop backups,I (re)discovered my old DHTML newsfeeds mini-app. This app lists all newsfeeds from moreover.com and provides a user interface to view the feeds and store favourite feeds and it does this without reloading the whole pages so it can be a component within a page rather than a page in itself. You can see it here or download here. It loads the data via javascript though I did have an xml version but that one didn’t survive…In fact I’m not sure how much longer moreover.

It’s here! well, almost anyway… Flash 2004 will be released next month. I know, I’m a few days behind but I’ve been too busy to post and besides this blog didn’t exist when the word came out so I have probably the best excuse in the world for a late blog about F2004. Anyway though I’ve been busy, I have been able to read up on the new features of flash.