Apollo presentation

today I did my Friday weblog presentation about Apollo. It has not much to do with weblogs but it is very important to follow the Apollo application because it is also possible to build Flex applications for Apollo.

Here you can find on Google video the interview with Christian Cantrell. If you want better quality here is a 100MB file.

I also used some screenshots from this site from the fancy mp3 player.

File down and upload

Niels Bruin already posted a open source upload component, but of course you learn nothing from just copy and pasting a open source component.

Here can you find a tutorial to make your own upload component.

update_attributes returns "false"

Today we had a big problem with Ruby. We tried to update all the database fields of a user by a simple form. Ruby refused to do that and the only thing he send back to us in the event result was "false".

Normally Ruby gives back a nice fault message so our thought was that the problem was in Flex. After 1 hour and we changed everything on the Flex side nothing was changed. Then we when't in the code of Ruby.

2 hours later we finally found the problem. The problem wasn't in Flex and wasn't in the Service that we used to update the user. The problem was that we had this line in our model

validates_presence_of :name

But the database field name wasn't anymore in our Users table. We will never forget what we have to check first the next time if we get a "False"

A small Flex application

Last week i tried to make a start with our school project in Flex. It is hard to do, but i was glad that i did a few tutorials for flex. So i already know a few things about Flex.

For our project for school we needed a vertical menu on the left of the screen, and it has to slide in and out (so the menu slides to the middle of the screen) In this vertical menu you can open your profile, clip player, etc. This is one of our "features" (You can browse and watch a clip at the same time) where you can watch a profile but if it isn't the one your looking for you can easily click on one of the other members on the right side of the screen.

But i talked enough and it is easier to understand if you see it. Maybe it isn't that great but it is a start.

Flex live reflection

Found a demo and code of making a live reflection in flex. It looks really nice. A bit like the reflection of video's and covers in iTunes

Direct link to the demo:
http://www.rictus.com/flex/LiveReflection/LiveReflection.html
The hole article is here
http://www.rictus.com/muchado/2006/07/05/live-reflection-component/

Direct link to the demo:
http://blog.wrench.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Flex/livereflection/LiveReflection.html
article:
http://blog.wrench.com.au/2006/07/08/live-reflection-component-with-a-twist/