Hello,

Yesterday was very big news to the community as Flex 3.0 Builder and AIR 1.0 were finally released. The Flex 3 Builder costs $249 and upgrade is $99, however the SDK is still available free and the trial of the full version is 60 days. Thank you to the Adobe Team for this great product and I know your already hard at work on Flex 4 (code named Dumbo).

Im currently downloading the trial now, cheers!

Its not often that a politician follows up on campaign promises but this time he did. The premier of Ontario has created a new statutory holiday for the 3rd Monday of February called Family Day. Its not a Canada wide holiday yet, currently only celebrated in Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan (I grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) but I hope it catches on and the other provinces to follow suit.

How will you spend you Family Day?

As for me, since my girlfriend and I didnt celebrate Valentines on Thursday, we decided to take a road trip and just spend time together. Our destination? Atlantic City here we come! I hope to take pictures to share with everyone.

As for my American brethrans, happy Presidents Day!

My first attempt at social bookmarking was adding Digg to my site, that was awesome and I published my In Search of Perfect SEO post and was delighted when others dugg my post!

But I soon realized after trying to add StumpleUpon that I would have to manually visit each one of these sites and grab the code to embed. I found just the solution: Sociable by Peter Harkins. After activating the plug in and choosing all the bookmarking sites I realized StumpleUpon did not work. In the end I found version 2.5 created by Joost de Valk which can be found here.

Have a great long weekend to everyone.

On the Yahoo Flash Developer Center they have have posted a new Yahoo Maps! AS 3.0 Component.

This is awesome for Flex 3.0 developers and I cant wait to see more innovative ideas and mashups. The following are instructions to add the component to your project:

To use the Yahoo! Maps component for Adobe Flex in Flex Builder, you need to add the component SWC to your Library path.

1. Find your project in the Flex Navigator.
2. Right-click on the project and choose Properties or open the Project menu and choose Properties.
3. In the project properties dialog, choose Flex Build Path.
4. Select the Library path tab, and press the Add SWC… button.
5. Enter the location of the component SWC. It should be in [download location]/Build/YahooMap.swc.
6. Press OK in the Add SWC dialog.
7. Press OK to close the project properties.
8. The YahooMap component is now available in your project.

Today id like to briefly mention the PHP include statement, please bear in mind that im a PHP newbie, previous to this I only wrote really  simple scripts to run as a Flex backend for adding, deleting and updating database records.   There are 4 types of includes:

• include
• include_once
• require
• require_once

Please see here for a detailed explanation of each.

While working on my main index.html page I wanted to reuse my code for the header and side navigation. So after implementing them I seperated them into a header.php and leftNav.php and used the include statement like so:

<?php include ("header.php"); ?>

This did not work, it took me sometime before realizing that in order for PHP commands to be processed by the index file, the extension had to be renamed to index.php. Please note, for users hosting with Dreamhost, they allow your landing page to be index.php. If your host does not allow this write a .htaccess file like so:

Options -Indexes
Redirect /index.html index.php

Place the file in the root of your site and it will direct all traffic to index.php.

While many developers are hard at work to find an elegant solution to Flex and good search engine results ive decided to leave my new website pcdatasolutions.net on hold while I attempt to convert it over to a HTML, CSS and Javascript solution in which I could implement an eCommerce solution such as Magento in the future.

Now, in my efforts to be as search engine friendly as possible, I almost decided to not use Javascript but just PHP.

Enter Jaxer, the worlds first AJAX server from the creators of the Aptana IDE. Jaxer comes with the installation of Aptana 1.1 and was a breeze to setup. However I did have a hard time finding support for Ext JS 2.0, but I did find a generous contributor Markus Schmidleitner had created his own plug in which can be downloaded here.

From my investigation, Jaxer may be the first AJAX server but the idea of Javascript being executed on the server side is nothing new, however the fact that I can create dynamic pages with static HTML is what I was ultimately looking for.

Hello! Welcome to Kreative Bytes. This blog will mainly be about me and my experiences with various web technologies and how they affect us or make our lives easier. My hope is to one day create a design studio for commercial and enterprise web applications. Bringing teams, people and ideas together.

More about me here.

Cheers!