Created by the guys (or Pirates, as they prefer to be called) over at Substance, Logobama lets you upload a photo to create a custom Barack Obama logo in sizes to fit user icons for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, LinkedIn, Flickr, and others.
This is a great example of how to use various services, such as Flickr, to fit your simple mashup needs -- just like David and Shaun spoke about at FITC Hollywood a few months ago. Great idea, fellas!
According to Ryan Stewart of Adobe, it was announced this evening that Adobe has acquired Virtual Ubiquity, and thus their product Buzzword. For those who may not know, Buzzword is a complete word processor and document sharing application written completely in Flex. Virtual Ubiquity has an informative blog post about the acquisition as well.
Congrats to Dave Coletta and team! It is great to see Flex RIAs taking off and to know that all the resources available to Adobe will be put behind this amazing product.
This morning Flickr finally added a crossdomain.xml file (located here) to their image server. No more setting up a proxy on your server to access the bitmap data of Flickr images!
More details can be found on the Yahoo! Flash Blog.
About a month ago I got an email from
More info about SWFAddress can be found on Rostislav's blog, the SWFAddress website, and Sourceforge. I highly suggest you subscribe to the mailing list to be the first to hear about updates and new releases.
The more I code in AS3 the more I want to be able to use it as a server side programming language - mainly as a replacement for PHP. I might be missing something, but at first glance, I don't see any reasons this wouldn't be possible with a little effort from Adobe.
Let's look at the current manifestations of ECMAScript 4, the standard on which ActionScript 3 and the new version of JavaScript are based. There is Flash/Flex (SWF) with delivery to the web browser via a plug-in, JavaScript for direct interaction with the web browser, and AIR (Apollo) for desktop delivery. The only missing piece is server-side deployment, a fact of which I'd bet Adobe is well aware.
PHP is a great server-side language which I use very often, but every language has its own nuances, and switching continuously between PHP and AS3 often opens the door for several small bugs due to the syntactical differences.
As a framework for how much effort it would take to port AS3 for server-side usage, let's look at how PHP5 and AS3 compare on key web development factors. These core features are supported in both PHP5 and AS3:
- MySQL/database integration (PHP built-in, AS3 through classes)
- Open source and free
- Extendable (PHP through plugins, AS3 through classes)
- Large developer community
- Class-based development possible (Full OOP in AS3)
So with most of the features needed already included in AS3 or written by the community, why not take the extra step and port it to the server side? I'm sure Adobe doesn't want to sell Coldfusion 8 short, so there is that corporate hurdle. I could see it being integrated with Coldfusion in a similar manner that ActionScript can be included in MXML through the usage of a code/cdata block.
All said, nothing is stopping the community from developing an open source project based around this concept. A quick search of Google reveals that at least one other person is having similar thoughts.
Would you use AS3 if it was ported for server-side usage?
Tim Wilson has just posted PressConnect, a "PHP script which interigates a WordPress database and returns posts, pages, and creates menus in an XML format."
Tim's site/blog runs a completely Flash front-end using WordPress as the content management system, so he has some experience making Flash and WordPress work together. You can even see the normal WP install at this URL.
On his PressConnect page he explains the necessary process of retrieving the data from the WP database and using PHP to format it as XML. This concept isn't exactly new, but Tim has done everyone researching the topic a favor by explaining the process in detail, creating a diagram, and posting some of the PHP code which interfaces with WP. Just another example of the Flash community giving back.
For other takes on the same idea see Arpit's blog Code Zen and Brendan Dawes' wp-xml file (link to the file is at the very end of the post).
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