Understand Flex and PayPal API Integration at 360Flex
Need to get your Flex app talking to PayPal and have no idea how to do it? You're not alone! I spent days losing hair (and sleep) figuring out how to get Flex and PayPal to play nice with each other. I don't want anyone else to have to go through that madness.
I've received plenty of e-mails asking for advice and code examples on this topic. In response, I will be releasing a modified copy of the FlexStore sample app with a completed order screen using PayPal. At my presentation I will be giving a detailed step-by-step talk on how I got this working. Also, although I'm using PayPal in this example, the knowledge gained could be applied to using any secure payment API.
If you haven't registered for 360Flex yet, be sure to do so quickly (really quickly actually, I've heard there's only a few seats left). This will be my second time attending the conference and I can't wait to get there! Also, don't forgot to enter the API Contest for a chance to win some really great prizes.
See ya there and don't forget to say hello 
Who Cares About Indexing a SWF File? Not Me!
I just read a blog entry titled "Google's Indexing Flash Text with Adobe's SDK" over at O'Reilly's new fancy smancy InsideRIA website.
This isn't really too interesting to me since it's just for indexing static text. For me that means it would index my labels but not my real content from the database. Plus I keep my static text in separate language files so it wouldn't even be indexing the correct SWF anyways.
I don't think there will ever be a time where a crawler could actually run my flex app, screen scrap the dynamically loaded text, look for buttons to click and match up the deep linking url with the content. Honestly though, I don't care. I have an html version of the content for browsers without flash, it's optimized for search engines and since I didn't have to think too hard about usability it took me only a half hour to build it.
Plus, most Flex apps that I have seen you wouldn't even want to crawl (usually because the content is private). It's not like a crawler sees AJAX content either.
If this "issue" was solved, the people who have been bitching about it wouldn't even start developing with flash anyways. They will just find a new excuse, it's time to leave them behind.
Anyways.. Happy Monday.
Adobe Flex and Google AdSense
I've recently launched a Flex-based classified ads product allowing anyone to start a classified ads service. Almost the very first question I was asked was how to place a Google AdSense banner in to their app. I really didn't want to tell them that wasn't possible because I choose to use Flex. Instead I set out to find a solution. It turns out not only was it possible but it was a lot less complicated than I imagined.
For those who don't like reading, a quick summary of what I did is:
1. Create a search engine friendly HTML version of my content (home page, category/search results, ad full details)
2. Add a param that will toggle displaying the Google AdSense banner at the top of that content
3. Use the IFrame component to load the banner in an iframe
4. Reload the iframe as the user views different content
5. Have a beer!
You can see an example of this in use at www.shopcarro.com.
Classified Ads Done Adobe Flex Style!
I haven't been posting much in my blog lately since I've been working on a personal project day and night. I've built a classified ads system using Adobe Flex and although I still have a ways to go, I launched version 1.0 today on PetsBC.com.
Please check it out and let me know what you think. (Good, bad, ugly). There are still a million more features I am planning to implement but I think I'm off to a good start. Also, this is my first large project using Adobe Flex so I am definitely interested in getting some tips from the Flex experts.
Bringing the desktop experience to the web
Thanks to this TechCrunch blog entry I stumbled upon a new web service called Anywhere.FM. It was built using Adobe Flex and allows you to upload your entire music collection, listen to it from anywhere and share it with friends. It's definitely a simple yet well thought out application with a similar appearance to iTunes.
Lately a lot of focus in the blog community has switched to Adobe AIR and bringing normally web based applications to the desktop. Although Adobe AIR is a great technology and will play a large part in RIAs future, I think Adobe Flex still deserves a lot of credit for helping bring the desktop experience to the web.
When using HTML to develop web applications I often got frustrated with the hoops I repeatedly had to jump through to make the web page look and feel like an application. Instead Adobe Flex's customized components and object-orientated nature is helping developers around the world build web applications quicker and easier than ever.
Now if only the Anywhere.FM developers can package up their service as an Adobe AIR app! *hint hint*
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