Christophe Herreman

Note: These are some notes from the Multi-Mania 2007 conference. I wrote them down while watching the sessions so there might be some typos and the sentences may be in telegram style.

Aral Balkan: Rediscovering fun

Starts with a WII tennis game. People line up and hit the tennis ball. It’s cool and it runs Flash ;-). What a man has to do to loosen up the Belgian audience.

Aral talks about how he had “a realization” based on personal experiences in consulting. People are scared of complex systems and workflows. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Talks about how Mac changed his life. He loved computers again. Moving to Brighton also had a big impact on his life. Gets inspiration from talking to non-flash people.

Talks about he was building for the web but didn’t really use the web. Shows Twitter and the Twitter API and the Twitter badge on his site. When starting to build the badge, he wonders what data format to use. Talks about how the data exchange formats are not intuitive: xml firstchild lastchild bastardchild, loadvars pains, flash remoting is hard to start with. This makes programming hard and the fun is gone. Json guys load javascript objects, how about loading actionscript object in the form of swf files? Aral came up with SWX.

Demos SWX: shows the installer with some poser pictures SWX is bundled with MAMP. Show the SWX analyzer: show the data that is loaded via SWX, pretty much like the netconnection debugger for Flash Remoting.

Aral creates a sample calculator application. Creates a php Calculator class and a function that adds 2 numbers. Now shows the service browser (just like Flash Remoting) and tests the remote method. Creates an fla, puts in a data holder textfield. Adds some code to send and load the data.

dataHolder.serviceClass = “Calculator”;
dataHolder.method = “addNumbers”;
dataHolder.args = “[5,7]”;
dataHolder.loadMovie(”http://localhost:8888/php/swx.php”, “GET”);

or

SWX.prepare(dataHolder); // for sending complex objects instead of strings

var swx:SWX = new SWX();
swx.gateway = “http://localhost:8888/php/swx.php”;
swx.encoding = “GET”;

var methodParameters:Object = {
serviceClass:”Calculator”,
method:”addNumbers”;
args: [5,7],
result: [this, resultHandler]
};

swx.call(methodParameters);

@aral: “terug” = “back”

Shows a barcode from a Twitter message. Now takes his phone and reads the barcode message and displays it on the screen. Very geeky and very cool!

Aral is a joy to watch. He’s a great presenter! Thanks mate!

Related links: http://www.aralbalkan.com/, http://swxformat.org/

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