Recently in Server-side Category

Full disclosure- "Designing in a Developer's World" is my session this year at MAX. It was born out of many, many discussions I've had over the last 2 years in which it's become increasingly clear that the line between designer and developer is blurring when it comes to modern web-based projects.

As opposed to a decade ago where static web pages and request/response interaction with server-side components were your only choice, these days your average web designer creates designs that are dynamic and stateful - user interface elements open, closed, expanded, and resized, forms that validate themselves without taking a trip to the server first, etc - it's certainly not 1997 anymore. As the technical demands on web designers increase, the complexity of our projects have increased exponentially. This session will really get to the heart of the quandary- efficiently creating stateful, web-based designs while maintaining a modicum of creativity throughout an increasingly technical process. For examples and context, I'm planning to explore several types of 'stateful design' workflows that today's web designers are regularly a part of- from interactive form-based applications, to rich interface implementation, to content syndication and reuse.

There will be slides and example code available after the session, of course- I'll be sure to post them on my blog in case you miss it. However, if this sounds up your alley, please add my "Designing in a Developer's World" session to your MAX schedule, and make sure to come armed with your best questions- my favorite part about these presentations is, quite frankly, the open Q&A that always ensues afterwards.

Look forward to seeing you in November!

As we get closer to MAX, I'll be highlighting some of the sessions I've noticed that are particularly interesting, unique or otherwise noteworthy- and the first is a rather unlikely combo of technologies that should present a really interesting look into spreading Ajax interfaces onto conventional - or perhaps even unconventional foundations.

In my first featured session, "Using the FileMaker Pro API for PHP with Adobe's Spry framework", FileMaker Pro expert Joe Scarpetta will take a critical look at how to meld the FileMaker PHP API with Spry on the front end to quickly build out rich functionality to an existing database application. This session reportedly rocked the house at the recent FileMaker Pro conference, and should be interesting to a much wider MAX audience as both a great how-to session on Spry as well as a peek into larger workflows melding database platforms, PHP and rich user interface components to build out rich, dynamic web user interfaces.

If you're a designer faced with 'skinning' database apps for web or intranet delivery or even a PHP developer looking to extend your skills upward to more UI work, this is a session you won't want to miss- make sure to add it to your MAX schedule ASAP. And keep posted- I'll be highlighting several more sessions I've particularly been eyeing over the next few weeks on a variety of topics, although probably centered around workflow and such, as that's a particular area of interest for me.

Gus recently whipped up an HTML-based mashup of US-based Macromedia User Group locations with Google Maps to get familiar with the Maps API, which should prove quite handy indeed if you're looking for a local UG meeting in the continental US. If you've got a UG that's not represented, drop a comment in his weblog post, as he's been really responsive to feedback of the sort. Enjoy!

I must admit- the hype a few weeks back appears quite justified- Shaun Inman's new site analytical tool Mint is one of my favorite new toys- I've been using it to monitor a personal site for a few weeks now and am impressed well beyond my initial expectations. I haven't seen a more usable (not to mention aesthetically-pleasing) way to scan my current referrers, visits, page views and search terms to date. I really resisted the urge to post right after the release (as the Mint beta squad did a pretty thorough job of getting the message out on their own), but can't hold back any longer.

If you've got some free time to sharpen your skillsets a bit, there are two free public Macrochats on Verity in ColdFusion MX 7 (tomorrow) and Flash Video bandwidth detection and scaling (next Tuesday) coming up you might want to catch. Note: pre-registration is required for both, links to follow.

• Verity for Fast Searching
  Wednesday, August 17, 2005 - TOMORROW!
  12:00 PM - 1:00 PM US/Eastern
  Ray Camden of Mindseye, Inc. will talk you through the updates to the Verity search engine in ColdFusion MX 7, and ways you can leverage it on your own content. Read up on the docs ahead of time here (as this Macrochat assumes a baseline knowledge of Verity), and when you're ready, hit this link to register.
  
  
• Flash Video Bandwidth Detection and Scaling
  Tuesday, August 23, 2005
  5:00 PM - 6:00 PM US/Eastern
  New Toronto Group's Kevin Towes will show you how to detect a user's bandwidth using the Macromedia Flash Video Streaming Service, and both scale bandwidth during playback and switch to alternate video encoding. Interested? Then bang your mouse here to register.

If you'd like to browse the archive of previously-recorded Macrochats, make sure to bookmark this URL for future reference, too:
http://www.macromedia.com/community/macrochats.html

Then try out these little 'codelets' available from SimplyHired - lightweight, customizable JS code that puts a customizable job search form on your site (visit SimplyHired's beta website here to build your own). I've embedded a few on this post that let you search thru available job opportunities for Flash, Dreamweaver and ColdFusion developers. Click the 'More' link and enjoy!

A nice series of articles just wrapped up at DevShed- Object Interaction in PHP, a good intro to object aggregation. Author Alejandro Gervasi lays it out nicely for novice/intermediate PHP developers- a good read, particularly if you've been hacking at procedural code 'til now. While you're at it, if this subject interests, you you'll likely want to learn a little bit about unit testing in this article by Saleh Jamal at DevPapers while you're at it- a skill that can save you a lot of debugging headaches down the road.

Macromedia's own David Mozealous will be hosting a Macrochat tomorrow (June 9th) from 1-2pm EST on integrating Captivate output with Breeze- focusing on creation, publishing to Breeze Live, and synching of a Captivate-based quiz for use within Breeze Live sessions. As with all the Macrochats- registration is required for entry (click here to visit the registration page) but the session won't cost you a thing outside an hour of your day- drop in over a late lunch tomorrow, and learn some new Captivate tricks!

Happy Monday- Flash is a platform, open source IDEs are cool, and we've all got some reading to do. The Flash Platform was announced earlier this morning (actually late last evening), putting larger context around the ecosystem surrounding the Flash Player and it's assorted technologies. Make sure to read Kevin Lynch's Flash Platform white paper (pdf, 1.55mb) for the straight story, as well as two press releases on how the mobile ecosystem and broadband telecom providers will leverage the Flash Platform.

To follow up, Macromedia also announced joining the Eclipse Foundation- while announcing a new RIA/Flex application development environment (code-named 'Zorn') built on the popular Eclipse IDE's architecture. Make sure to check out the Zorn FAQ points hidden down in the Flex FAQ on Macromedia.com, too. I see this as a very positive move for Macromedia developers in general, many of whom have already adopted the platform due to it's robust support, most notably CFEclipse. For the scores of enterprise RIA developers out there, Eclipse support spells a far more standard development environment across the technology they support. Good stuff.

And all this on a day where everyone seems to be talking about what chip the Mac OS will end up running on. Don't worry, the WWDC keynote is coming soon enough with the definitive answer to that question.

A great read for server-side folks who prefer a little humor with their tech -BileBlog's Hani Suleiman gets interviewed by The Server Side. I must admit, Hani's 'blog is one of my favorite haunts- half tech pundit, half human flamethrower, he's like the Andrew Dice Clay of the Java world. Great read for a Friday afternoon (although I'm 2 days behind on catching it in my feedreader)! I had no clue that Hani was so accomodating and friendly in person. ;-)