Our current project is a content heavy site for David Wu & Associates called MoneyWisdom.ca. The site focuses on important topics such as tax, investment, insurance for Canadians. Its information that every Canadian should know. The site is set to launch later this month.

Unlike our past projects we developed this site strictly with HTML and CSS. The images were from istockphoto and be sure to sign up for their monthly newsletter to receive free articles written by the MoneyWisdom team. David requested a mailing list to be implemented and we stumpled across a great free solution called poMMo.  This open source php project requires a database and was very easy to setup and the user interface is intuitive and has a web 2.0 look and feel.

It was a pleasure to work with David and the team. Cheers.

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!

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.