Saleh Blog

Adobe has recently published two articles on combining Flex and Java technologies.

• From Java to Flex
• Flex and Java – A perfect technological marriage

Google officially announced that GWT1.4 is no longer beta. As the final version of GWT1.4 has been released. Google has information of what’s new on this release.

Here’s a broad overview of the major enhancements:
– New widgets and libraries
– RichTextArea, HorizontalSplitPanel and VerticalSplitPanel, SuggestBox, DisclosurePanel, PushButton, ToggleButton, and an enhanced Image widget make advanced applications easier than ever.
– ImageBundle automatically consolidates multiple images into a single HTTP request.
– NumberFormat and DateTimeFormat make easy work of complex internationalization and localization.
– You can finally use java.lang.Serializable with GWT RPC, and the GWT RPC server-side subsystem is no longer intimately tied to servlets. You can easily wire it into any Java back-end infrastructure. Spring fans, rejoice.
– A new JUnit-based benchmarking subsystem makes measuring and comparing the speed of code snippets as easy as writing unit tests.
New deployment options and optimizations
– Adding GWT modules to an HTML page is now simple: just add a <script> tag.
– You can now include GWT modules across domains. Note that including scripts from other sites that you don’t fully trust is a big security risk.
– External JavaScript files referenced from your GWT module load synchronously now, so script ready-functions are no longer needed.
– Auto-generated RPC whitelist files are now produced during compilation to help catch accidentally responding with objects that compiled GWT client code wouldn’t be able to deserialize.
– The GWT distribution now includes a DTD for the GWT module XML format, making it easier to configure modules in an DTD-aware XML editor.

Here is the top 10 list Eddie selected from his 101 ways to know your software project is doomed post:

1. Developers use the excuse of “self documenting code” for no comments
2. All of your requirements are written on a used cocktail napkin
3. Progress is now measured by the number of fixed bugs and not completed features
4. Your source code control system is a series of folders on a shared drive
5. Your manager wastes 7 hours a week asking for progress reports
6. The phrase “It works on my machine” is heard more than once a day
7. Developers are not responsible for any testing
8. All code reviews are scheduled a week before product launch
9. You have cut and pasted code from The Daily WTF
10. The last book you read: Oracle 8i A Beginner’s Guide.

This guide is meant to give you solutions to common PHP design problems. It also provides a sketch of an application layout that MT-Soft developed during the implementation of some projects. It is by no means either complete or absolute but rather a list of common PHP best practices.

The guide is available here

Peter Goodman writes about 15 things that PHP developers ignore. Here is the list:
1. Reflection API
2. Ticks
3. list(), extract(), and compact()
4. PHP5 SPL
5. __autoload()
6. Type Hinting
7. Abstract Classes and Iterfaces
8. “static” keyword
9. === and !==
10. Variable Assignment from within Conditional Statements
11. PHP’s Magic Functions
12. __halt_compiler(): Halt the Compiler!
13. Variable Composition
14. Chaining Method Calls
15. preg_split

Here is the post.

Pretty good movie made from Metal Gear Solid fans.

Adobe has announced Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2, codenamed: Moviestar, which includes HD video standard support (H.264) and HE-AAC audio codecs. The update also includes hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced full screen video playback. This will open a huge creative ideas and possibilities for web developers.

If you have no idea what is H.264 codec, it provides a high quality (high definition) video experience. I guess YouTube can now provide HD video service to be played on their player which is made from Flash.

More details about the beta update is posted in Adobe Labs. Tinic Uro also provided a post on his blog about the update.

More Flash blogs and developer’s related websites are coming out recently. Yahoo! has launched Flash Developer Center, “an ever growing repository of tools, articles, tutorials, and information on all things Flash”.

Flash Developer Center starts with launching ActionScript Toolkit for Rich Applications (ASTRA) which is, for starter, a collection of Flash and Flex components, libraries and toolkits. In this inaugural release, ASTRA contains five UI components that complement the existing set provided with Flash CS3.

This will help understanding Mashups