Nouvelles Solutions

Announcing redis flex An ActionScript Library to integrate with Redis.

A while back I looked into accessing Redis directly from Flex and I found an existing library, as3redis that however didn’t support the new unified request protocol. So I wrote a minimalist wrapper that now allows to send commands to a redis server.

To access the Redis server from Flex just instantiate a Redis instance:

In this screencast we are going to show how to build a Rails app in a couple of minutes that is optimized for Rich Client. The application is a todo application build in Flex connecting using the bulk_api to the Rails server using my new bulk data source Flex framework.

I started RailsConf with the “Building Web Apps with HTML5: Beyond the Buzzword” by Mike Subelsky (@subelsky).

He prepared twelve html5 exercises that walked the about 250 attendees through various features of html5 over a 2.5 hour session. It’s fun to have time to work on these features. The high point was having about 200 computers using Websockets to send data back and forth with his server. He created a small ruby program that used EventMachine::WebSocket and it was holding up quite well all these connections.

Here are the notes I took during this tutorial

A lot of my work is for enterprises for software that is hidden behind closed doors but since I started helping out Thought Equity I have a few visible apps under my belt. Just in time for March madness they released a new version of the http://vault.ncca.com, see my last year’s entry on “under the hood of a cool flex project.”

And to capture all that meta data regarding games and movies they created a whole server side infrastructure but they also needed a pretty face for all that power and I got lucky to be one of the main coder on the T3 Metadata Editor.

It’s fun to work on software that ends up in the press, here are a few extracts found on the web:

I created the MiFi app during the 360iDev conference on September 29th 2009 and submitted the app the same day. I released a fix a month later and didn’t touch the application since. I wasn’t using my Mifi card much until recently when I realized that the app wasn’t working on iOS 4.1. Then I checked the comments for the Mi-Fi app on the AppStore and realized that there where hundreds of comments of people that have the same issue. Sorry for being so late to realize that. Once I found that out I had to decide wether to remove the application from the store or fix it. So I reopened the project and realized that the way it was written wouldn’t work in the new Titanium SDK. Despite of the work I decided to rewrite/reorganized the code and voila…Mi-Fi 1.2 for iOS 4.1 should now work better than ever. I did not restyle the application, it could look better but it’s still functional. I also didn’t add any feature but at least you should get the battery and reception levels that are the most important features. Another feature I should add soon is to be able to set the ip address of your Mi-Fi card in case you changed from the default address.

We just had a great breakfast at Peggy Sue’s Dinner…and moved over to the Ebay Headquarters where the conferences is about to start.

I’ll be taking notes during the day and updating this page as we go one.

UPDATE: Now that I typed all that I realized that Justin put up the slides and code on his blog: http://blog.classsoftware.com/.

Thought Equity Motion and NCAA two days ago officially released the Ncaa Vault. A cool Flex app backed by an incredible video database with awesome metedata about each game…and released just in time for March Madness.

Here are a few of the announcements and online articles describing the services:

For watchthatsite.com (not public yet) I have an instance on EC2 with Rails and MySQL but was looking for a more solid hosting solution for MySQL. And how fortunate, Amazon came out with the solution I need this week. Basically with two command line instructions you can start a new server with mysql configured, tuned, and secured. In this blog entry I will go through the steps that perform to move my sql database to Amazon RDS.

I met Phil several years ago at Derailed, the (Denver Ruby on Rails user group, and for a long time he was curious about how Flex can be integrated with Rails, about the graphical possibilities that Flex offers, the advantages over plain HTML/CSS/Javascript. Then he told me Kacie, his wife, had an idea about a website. She is passionate about quilts and has an eye for details and excellence. Phil is a geek that loves Rails, Kacie loves quilts, it’s like Quilting meets Web 2.0 and quiltivate.com was born. In fact Phil and Kacie hired me to create a Quilt Builder that integrates with Quiltivate.com.