RedLiteGreenLite

What is it?

RedLiteGreenLite is a small, simple app that allows a group of people to communicate the status of something. The status can be either red or green and the subject can be whatever. That may sound a bit general, but that’s the point. It can be used for whatever purpose your crazy mind can come up with. I’ll get you started:

1. At work, we have a single shower and a lot of shweaty guys after soccer. So we know when the shower’s available, someone can turn the status red when he enters the shower and turn it green when he exits. This way nobody has to keep stopping by the shower to see if it’s available. When it’s green, it’s available. When it’s red, it’s not.
2. At a call center, representatives are split into groups. When one group is on break, no other group is allowed to go on break. Again, when the status is red, a group is on break and other groups must continue attending the phones. When the lite is green, the next group is free to take a break.

The process is pretty simple: join a group. Other people join the same group. When others in the group change the status, you’ll be notified. When you change the status, others in the group will be notified. The status of the group will be persisted across sessions. In other words, if everyone logs out and then logs back in a week later, the status will remain as it was the last time it was set. Continue reading »

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The Why, What, and Where of Custom AMF Class Adapters

If you’ve read my article on Action Message Format (AMF) you’ll already know that AMF is a super-duper way to transfer data between a Flex/Flash/AIR application and its server-side counterpart.  Essentially when the client application makes a call to a service, the server can return a Java (or PHP, Python, .NET) object and when it gets back to the Flex application, wallah, its converted into an identical object in ActionScript.  Similarly, if the client application sends an ActionScript object to the server during a service call, it arrives as an identical Java object.

While that’s impressive, when it comes to implementation in a medium-to-high complexity system there are questions that still need to be answered.   In this article, I’d like to address where to translate custom AMF classes.

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Simple AMFPHP Example

With the advent of Flex and RIA (Rich Internet Application) development came AMF (Action Message Format). Flex, in general, focuses only on front-end functionality, meaning it does not directly hit a database to store or retrieve persistent data. Instead, database calls are written in a more traditional back-end language like Java, PHP, Python, or .NET and such services are then exposed to be “consumed” (used) by the Flex front-end.

AMF is a protocol that allows ActionScript (the language of Flash/Flex) to call services exposed by the back-end. Additionally, if you choose, AMF allows you to translate a programmer-defined object between ActionScript and your back-end language of choice. In other words, if you have a customer class in ActionScript and you want to pass an instantiated customer object to the back-end, you simply call the exposed back-end service and pass the customer object as a parameter. The AMF layer transparently translates the ActionScript customer object into, let’s say, a customer object in Java. This functionality isn’t required. Instead of using a class you have defined, you could instead just send an integer to the backend as a parameter and, after processing, send a string back to the front-end. Continue reading »

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