Archive for PHP
December 25, 2007 at 1:06 pm · Filed under Actionscript 2, Flash, Open Source Flash, PHP
Yesterday I received an email from Aral Balkan informing me that one of my entries in the SWX Contest won!
The Gal to Gal Walk site completed a few months back, which was one of (if not the) first large-scale site completed using SWX, won the website category. In addition, the Verisign Payment API service which was written for use on the Gal to Gal Walk site and enables interaction with the Versign/PayPal Payment Gateway through SWX came in third place in the services category.
There was some great competition, so I'm really happy to have placed in two categories and am also excited about the amazing prize package Aral has put together. What a great unexpected holiday gift!
A huge thanks to Aral and the sponsors!
December 20, 2007 at 7:36 pm · Filed under Actionscript 2, Flash, Open Source Flash, PHP, Portfolio, SWFAddress
Project:
p.i.n.k. Spirits website
URL:
http://www.pinkspirits.com
Synopsis:
This high-profile consumer site was built for p.i.n.k. Spirits -- a new premium liquor company which creates various liquors infused with caffeine and guarana. The best way to describe their product is your favorite liquor and RedBull, without the RedBull taste, calories, or color. The first product to launch is vodka, with gin, tequila, rum, whisky, sake and others to follow in 2008/2009.
Why it is cool (to a Flash developer):
- The site makes great use of a couple of open source tools: SWFAddress 2.0 and SWX.
- The site was almost 5 months in design and development.
- SWX is used extensively throughout the site to communicate with the back-end content database. Once again this made the creation of the CMS go much faster and communication between the site and CMS much smoother. SWX is also used for e-mail list sign-up, and I have released this service open source as part of the SWX contest.
- An extensive listing of drink recipes, events, and venues can be found on the site.
- A custom retail store and bar/restaurant locator was developed for the site, providing users with the distance from their ZIP code to the local places they can find pink's products. I may release this as a SWX service in the future.
- I contracted with The Bailey Group of Philadelphia, PA on this project, whose talented designers concepted the site and team was great to work with.
- A huge thanks goes out to Jason McCoskery, who again was a great partner in development and whose overall development knowledge in both PHP and ActionScript is always enjoyable to work with.
October 28, 2007 at 2:41 pm · Filed under Actionscript 2, Actionscript 3, AIR (Apollo), Flex, Open Source Flash, PHP, Remoting
I have just posted a small collection of AS2 and PHP classes I have written/modified while working on various projects over the years. I intend to continue to add code as I have the time, so the list should be ever-changing.
For the initial push I posted: SmoothImageLoader (AS2), RegExp (AS2), Tooltip (AS2), BadFilter (AS2), ConstantContact (PHP), and SubmitVerisignPayment (PHP). For more details on these classes, please visit:
http://www.jonnymac.com/blog/code/
Enjoy!
October 5, 2007 at 4:32 pm · Filed under Actionscript 2, Adobe, CS3, Flash, Mobile Development, Open Source Flash, PHP, Remoting
Aral Balkan has just announced swxformat.org/contest which seems like a great way to spread the word about SWX and get more developers trying out the new project.
The competition has three categories: Web, Mobile, and API, and each of the three winners will receive a prize package worth almost $4,000. Not a shabby deal at all. The prize packages include a copy of Adobe CS 3 Web Premium Bundle, a one year premium subscription to Lynda.com, a Nabaztag/tag wi-fi bunny, and an iPod Touch. I have a Nabaztag/tag, and winning one of these alone is worth a few hours of work!
If you have been following the SWX project at all, you already know that I have used SWX on a couple of projects and that I am a huge fan of its simplicity. It just works, and it makes your life as a developer easier. What's not to like? This contest is the perfect way to give it a shot and possibily win some cool stuff.
More details on the contest can be found on the SWX site.
September 26, 2007 at 3:08 pm · Filed under Flash, Open Source Flash, PHP, Portfolio
Project:
Gal to Gal Foundation Virtual Walk website.
URL:
http://www.galtogalwalk.org
Synopsis:
The goal of this project is to raise money for stage 4 breast cancer patients through a virtual 'walk'. You can join the site and donate $3 (or more) to create a 'gal' that will randomly show up on the home page as part of the walk. You can also log in after you have created a gal to see her displayed as the 'champion', up front and center. Clicking on individual gals shows who created them along with a short personal message they entered.
Why it is cool (to a Flash developer):
- SWX is used extensively throughout the site to communicate with the back-end and database. This enabled the rapid development timeline, and made the process of storing and passing data through PHP seamless. I haven't seen any other true sites built with SWX, but rather small mash-ups and widgets, so I believe this is a first for the SWX project.
- The entire site was built in about 1 1/2 weeks.
- There are over 302,400 possible combinations when creating your 'gal': 2 body types x 2 skin tones x 9 hair styles x 5 hair colors x 2 expression choices x 2 expression/lip colors x 2 eye types x 3 eye colors x 70+ outfits. Trust me, this equates to a lot of assets!
- The background changes with each day as the walk progresses across the US. To see the progress, click on the map at the bottom of the site. Note that the walk starts on Oct. 1st, so until then all you will see is the warm-up (Day 0) and race start background. Click the book at the bottom right to learn about each city as the walk progresses.
- Martha Stewart has a tv show and she recorded a segment about the site that will air on her show on October 1st. Can't say I have ever seen her show, but the national TV exposure should really test the limits of SWX.
- The foundation is expecting $1+ million in donations during the month of October, so the site was optimized to handle the heavy load. It is being hosted on three load-balanced servers to alleviate the crunch times as much as possible.
- The site is built for broadband connections, so we were able to load in higher-quality (and lots of) assets. The total overall load is about 2.3 MB and then each set of assets only get loaded when necessary.
- I contracted with Curiosity Group on this project, who's talented designers concepted and designed the site.
- A huge thanks also goes out to Jason McCoskery who jumped in to help out as the timeline kept shrinking and was instrumental in us meeting the deadline.
[Update: Check out Aral Balkan's post on the project and our use of SWX as well!]
September 11, 2007 at 5:01 pm · Filed under Actionscript 2, Flash, Flash on the Beach, Mobile Development, Open Source Flash, PHP, Remoting
Today Aral Balkan released SWX 1.0 for PHP, his answer to Flash Remoting. I have been waiting patiently for this release, as I am currently in the midst of building out two larger-scale projects with remoting and feel much better about using a 1.0 (read: non-beta) tool. Overall, SWX has been a joy to use. Aral has certainly accomplished his main task: simplify the whole remoting process from setup to development to deployment. Setup is as easy as copying the directory to your server, and development is much more kind since he re-wrote the AMFPHP service browser and debugger in Flex, while adding a few features to make it generally more usable. Using the services in your AS2 projects also couldn't be more simple. And to top it all off it is completely open source (is anything Aral does not open source?).
I was initially concerned about performance under heavy loads, but Aral was quick to give a test case and show that even with 250 concurrent hits to the gateway, it should still perform. It would take an extremely busy site to get 250 concurrent hits to the gateway (note that the gateway only gets hit when there is a service call).
My only recommendation at this point is to release a ZIP of only the files you need to deploy to the server. While I don't mind having all the graphics for the project and Flex source for the service browser and debugger, I don't want to upload those files to my server and digging through all the folders to figure out what is needed can be a drag.
If you haven't already, I highly suggest you give SWX a go. You can even use the public services that Aral has posted -- so you don't even need your own gateway setup to get started. Oh, I should also note that because the SWF file that SWX produces is Flash Lite 2.0 and 2.1. compatible, it can be viewed on a good number mobile devices.
Want to learn more? See Aral speak at one of several conferences in the next few months.
A huge thanks to Aral for the hard work!
I'll be sure to post links to the projects as soon as they are completed, along with additional thoughts and tips on working with SWX.
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