arc90 lab

TBUZZ

Tue, 12 May 2009 08:16:54 -0500

Following in the footsteps of our last lab experiment - Readability - we bring yet another bookmarklet. We wanted an easy way to twitter as we browse the Web. We also wanted to see what others were saying about the pages we were visiting.

Readability

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:31:37 -0500

Reading anything on the Internet has become a full-on nightmare. As media outlets attempt to eke out as much advertising revenue as possible, we're left trying to put blinders on to mask away all the insanity that surrounds the content we're trying to read.

ActionScript XML Binding

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:22:02 -0500

Working with XML in ActionScript has been made pretty simple by E4X. But many developers prefer to work with ActionScript objects rather than straight XML. Unfortunately, converting to and from XML is an often laborious, and certainly tedious, task. Java developers may be familiar with Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) and will quickly note that it was the inspiration for ActionScript XML Biinding (ASXB).

Best Buy Remix API client (PHP)

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:29:18 -0500

Best Buy has opened up its retail catalog in hopes that innovative developers will help to expand the company's online presence. Best Buy Remix (currently in Beta) exposes information about Best Buy products and stores.

Interested? Apply for an API key, download the PHP client library and get started!

SqlWatcher: Ad-hoc database change monitoring

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 10:48:14 -0500

How many times have you needed to debug an application and wished, just wished, you had put better instrumentation in your code? It would have been brilliant if you had logged the key database fields before and after the update. It would have been killer if you had recognized exactly which rows and columns were in play and had a way of confirming that your stored proc is doing what you thought it would.

But you didn't.

Yeller

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:28:59 -0500

Yeller is a PHP script that lets a group post messages to a single Twitter account using Yammer. It does this by searching Yammer messages for a special tag (by default #yell) and sending any messages it finds to Twitter. It also pulls replies back from Twitter so the group can participate in conversations.

JSON CSS: A More Powerful CSS Proof of Concept

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:29:56 -0500

JSON CSS is a proof of concept meant to demonstrate what could be accomplished with a more powerful syntax within CSS. The current implementation uses the power of jQuery and its plugin architecture to do the heavy lifting. The implementation is not really important though - the featureset is what matters.

In short, CSS is great at the basics, but there is a lot of opportunity for improvement by adding a few simple programmatic concepts like variables, inheritance, syntactical cascading, and browser detection. We're demonstrating that.

To be fair, this is a topic that is hotly contested, but a seeing the benefits in action may be useful.

Yammer API Client Library

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:43:17 -0500

Yammer is a new microblogging service that has been described as "an enterprise version of Twitter". Instead of asking, "What are you doing?" Yammer asks, "What are you working on?"

Yammer has released their API with some great documentation, so we've written a library for building our own tools (RSS feeds, status updates on intranet pages, etc...)

Anyone can start a Yammer account for an organization (defined by email domain), and many services, including IM, SMS, and email integration are free. Optionally, organizations may claim their domain for a fee, allowing for more advanced control and customizations.

Enjoy!

Java Encrypter

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:23:08 -0500

Encrypter is a simple Java class for encrypting a java object to text, and later reversing the process. It's useful for transferring sensitive data over an unencrypted channel, such as in an XML document or email.

DES encryption is performed using Java's SealedObject class, and Base64 encoding is handled by the public domain Base64 class.

PHP Twitter API Client

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:20:00 -0500

I've been having some fun with Twitter lately.

Twitter's direct messaging feature is great for automated messaging tasks. With SMS and IM forwarding, I can receive critical updates from a server (or my coffee pot... or whatever) just about anywhere. Good times!

In need of Twitter's services for a recent side project, I thought it would be nice to have a simple easy-to-use Twitter client that fit in with our existing libraries.

Feedback is definitely welcome. Feel free to email me at mattw@arc90.com with questions, comments or suggestions or post your comments over at the Arc90 blog.

Happy Twittering!

jQuery Reverse Order plugin

Thu, 22 May 2008 10:19:40 -0500

Ever want to reverse the order of a group of DOM elements? Or want to give your user the option?

SVN Notifier

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:30:00 -0500

If you work with Subversion on a Mac (and you should), and especially if you've got Growl installed, you might be interested in SVN Notifier, the first Apple Dashboard widget to come from the Arc90 lab.

Updated 4/21/2008: Patched a security hole, and other minor enhancements. Details on the blog.

Flex / AS3 Library : RESTService

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 10:56:27 -0500

One of the most lamented issues in the Adobe community has been Flash Player's lack of true HTTP support. In case that issue is unfamiliar to you, here's the rundown: Because the Flash Player VM can run in a variety of browsers and operating systems, it was deemed too complex to try and accommodate all the various permutations of how the VM should react to the potential outcome of making an HTTP request. This situation creates something called a crippled-client.

In the Flash Player's case, it can only handle responses of type 200, not 200 series, (e.g. 201 Created, 202 Accepted, etc.), just 200. Anything other than a 200 is treated as a 500. No message is passed to the Flash Player, instead the VM throws a completely worthless IO or Stream error. Also, regardless of the success or failure of a request, there are no response headers. Yet another issue is that request headers cannot be passed on anything other than a POST. This requires that all services must support some type of crippled-client protocol, in which every request from said client is a POST, with request headers that tell the service what the client is actually attempting to do.

The solution to this problem is to communicate directly over sockets. This is fine for requests made over HTTP, but since, until recently, Flash had no support for SSL, there was no way to make requests over HTTPS. Enter as3crypto, a cryptography library that supports SSL. Using as3crypto, we've developed a small library that can make fully aware HTTP requests using sockets.

There is, unfortunately, a caveat. Adobe has recently decided to make it near impossible to use sockets from web delivered applications. If you're interested in jumping through the hoops necessary to get sockets working, be sure to let us know about your solution. AIR, however, has no such restrictions on sockets and you should be able to use the RESTService component to make fully aware HTTP requests. So have it!

CollapsiblePanel

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:55:21 -0500

The collapsible panel is a fairly simple container that pops up all over the internet. It's great for hiding, but not losing, areas of the screen that may be unnecessary at a given moment in time. This allows the end-user to customize certain aspects of the screen to their liking.

Unfortunately, the Flex Framework doesn't actually contain a collapsible panel. We moaned and groaned, and then built our own. Now we're offering it to you for nothing, because, well, that's how we roll. So, with no further ado, arc90 presents a simple solution for a simple need, CollapsiblePanel.

JSON Lint

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:05:09 -0500

I've been really getting into JSON as a transfer protocol lately. Having been recently muddled in XML, the simplicity of JSON is a welcome respite.

Despite its simplicity, I've still seen quite a bit of poorly formed JSON around. And I had a bit of trouble finding a simple JSON Validator / Reformatter service on the web anywhere. So I decided to create my own.