Flash

AMF.NET

Kyle — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 07:47:00 GMT

Seems Karl is working on a new project, and has been since the beginning of the year. AMF.NET is an open-source alternative to Flash Remoting.

Excellent. Remoting is way too expensive. $999 per server, MacrAdobe, come on.

Anyway. Karl is on to something.

The same can be done with web services, without the HTTP Handler.

I'll post some code soon...

Flash Floating Menu with Drop Downs...

Kyle — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 08:31:00 GMT

So, my flash guy and I were working today on an issue where we needed a "floating" flash menu. The reason it has to be floating is that it has drop downs that will "drop" over content/links, etc. So, We devised a way to change the z-index of the div that contains the flash movie.

This was working great, until today, when all of the sudden, flash started barfing and shutting down on us. Not sure what was going on.

So, we came up with an ingenious solution. When the flash movie does not have the mouse over it, we roll the div up so that only the top 51 pixels (the root layer of the menu) is showing. Then, on a mouseover, the div that contains the flash will expand to 236 pixels to accommodate the drop downs.

Pretty cool. Great job Rich!

Flash and XML

Kyle — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 09:06:00 GMT

I'm not much of a PHP guy. In fact, I avoid it whenever I can. But, my church is hosting their website on a great linux provider, which has provided great service for us for the past few years. The linux server uses ChiliSoft ASP (apparently now owned by Sun... That's interesting), which also is a nifty little implementation of ASP for linux.

The only problem is, every six months or so, the ASP service on the linux box hangs. Not a big deal, I just fire off a little e-mail to the help desk, and they have it back up and running. That is, if I check every day. Since I'm a forgetful webmaster, I don't, and sometimes these things go unnoticed. Plus, now that we've jumped in traffic since offering podcasting, we can't really afford to have the site go down.

Well, it's time for an overhaul. The site hasn't been touched in 3 or 4 years. Yes, we've made minor improvements, but it's time for a complete overhaul. So, after working with the staff, as well as the graphic designer in our congregation, we have an awesome looking site. I even put it into Flash. Dynamic XML and all. So, the site has a 58k footprint (awesome for dial-up), and only about 2 k of text loads for each page (if that). Incredible. Fast, etc. SWEET.

Well, to get the data in and out from the DB, I didn't want to rely on the slightly unreliable ASP, so I decided to write the data layer in PHP. It's Picky. That's all I have to say. Makes me thankful that I'm not a C# programmer (case sensitivity).

Anyway. I'll post when the site is finished. Should be "live" around January 8th.