melbourne chapter

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If you recall the Eloas lawsuit filed against Microsoft for infringing on its patented browser technology you’ll remember Microsoft was forced to change how IE handled embedded programs within webpages. So, over the past 2 years Microsoft has been fiddling with the way handles embedded media within web pages. Early last year MS released the SP2 update, which saw the biggest changes to IE. A part from a much needed Popup Blocker,MS introduced very obtrusive ActiveX Prompt which detected embedded content and prevented pages from fully loading until the user confirmed the prompt. More recently Microsoft introduced a ‘click to active’ mechanism to IE. You may not have experienced this first hand if your a Firefox user or your lucky enough to frequent sites with workarounds in place. But essentially in order to activate embedded content such as Flash, IE requires that you actually click the movie. This is most annoying for interactivity within Flash movies when you consider it would take 2 clicks to invoke a getURL() action; on(release){ getURL('http://www.mysite.com.au', '_blank'); }. Fortunately Microsoft still lets us use JavaScript to Embed our Flash movies, and cool guys such as Geoof Stearns have already done the hard work for us - The SWFObject JavaScript. Developed by Geoff Stearns the SWFObject script is actually used by Microsoft and Adobe and it’s ridiculously easy to use. Just a simple inclusion and a small amount of JavaScript and your done:

<div id="flashPlayer"><!-- Flash content will go here //--></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var so = new SWFObject("swf/movie.swf", "mymovie", "200", "100%", "7", "#336699");
so.addParam("quality", "low");
so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
so.addParam("salign", "t");
so.addVariable("mp3File", "mp3/numb.mp3");
so.write("flashPlayer");
</script>

Here’s a quick rundown of the script;

Create the HTML element which will contain the final Flash content(I’ve used a div):


<div id="flashPlayer"><!-- Flash content will go here //--></div>


Create a new SWFObject, pass it the path to the swf file, movie name, width, height and Player version we want to detect for followed by the background colour:

var so = new SWFObject("movie.swf", "mymovie", "200", "100%", "7", "#336699");

Add the usual parameters using the addParam(param name, value); function:

so.addParam("qality","low");

Pass as many variables as you want to Flash with the addVariable(variable name, value); function:
so.addVariable("mp3File", "mp3/numb.mp3");

Finally write the Flash content to the HTMLcontainer you created above (the div):

so.write("flashPlayer");

More Information;

SWFObject documentation (deconcept.com)

ActiveX changes in Internet Explorer (MSDN)

There are also extensions available to integrate IE workarounds, I haven’t tested these myself though
Dreamweaver MX 2004/8 Extensions;

Softery IE Flash Problem Solver by Softery (on Adobe Exchange) (FREE)

CMX Insert FlashObject 1.2 by Paul Newman (on Community MX)

GoLive 5.x Extensions;

JM SWFObject Action by Jesper Moller (on Adobe Exchange) (FREE)

Just happened to be surfing the net the other day with IE 5 on a friends iMac -  it was either that or Netscape 4.7 what a choice. It was a painful experience. I’m a Firefox fanboy so the lack of tabbed browsing was killing me, sites were falling over unexpectedly, and some were even completely refusing entry. So what to do? Well the simple solution is to upgrade to OS 10, however if your stuck with OS 9 checkout iCab - seemingly the only graphical browser maintained for OS 9.
(And yes iCab has tabbed browsing)

Last week I posted about the 2.2 version being released, the osCommerce guys have now just released a testing version of 3 to the public!

Here are some of the new features made available in this release:

• New object-oriented framework (alpha 1)
• New installation routine (alpha 1)
• register_globals and magic_quotes_gpc compatibility (alpha 1)
• New template structure implementation (alpha 1)
• Search-engine optimizations (alpha 1)
• Service modules (alpha 1)
• Checkout procedure cleanup (alpha 2)
• New language definitions implementation (alpha 2)
• Updated payment modules with post-transaction actions (alpha 3)
• Catalog front-end, administration tool, and installation routine combined (alpha 3)
• XHTML/CSS based default template layout for the catalog side (alpha 3)
• Multiple product images implementation (alpha 3)
• New action modules (alpha 3)

I haven’t had the chance to look at the update properly but the dev team say this update addresses security related issues and bug reports that exist in the released version. More info on the update is available on the osCommerce forums and the online documents
Get the update here: http://www.oscommerce.com/solutions/downloads

Been refreshing the Actionscript skills of late and came across some excellent resources for learning OOP in Flash.
Exploring Version 2 of the Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Component Architecture

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/component_architecture.html

Actionscript 2.0 Primer

http://www.person13.com/articles/index.php

Extending MovieClip/Creating Components - Part 1

http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=4030D

When we are working with Flash Remoting we will need to set a URL for our Flash Movie to communicate through to the server. This URL is often specified as an absolute URL in the flash movie - eg, http://www.mysite.com/flashremoting/.

If we are to stage the site on a different domain and still want to access the Flash Remoting, we will need to set up a “crossdomain.xml” file that allows the staging domain to access the Flash Remoting Service - (See ‘Loading external data from Flash‘). This is achieved by creating a XML file named “crossdomain.xml” on the production domain and defining a set of properties specifying which other domains are allowed access its data (Remoting, XML etc).
This all works nicely when we are working with a contained Flash Movie, allowing us to maintain the state on a remote domain. What happens when we wish to access that state information on a different domain? When switching from Flash to another language (say PHP) you will lose your session information. When we are to “break” out from the Flash into an HTML process (- lets say a HTML checkout process) accessing the ‘State’ of the session will not be available as the cookie is set for the Remoting Domain, not the one serving our local HTML. (See ‘sharing a session across multiple domains‘).

If our staging server is a direct copy of the production server (or slightly modified) we would want to be able to specify a different Gateway URL for the flash player to load. Instead of authoring a different Flash Movie for each server (staging or production) we need to be able to change the absolute URL external. One of the ways we could do this is by parsing it in through the HTML.
FlashVars allow us to communicate between the HTML and the Flash Player. When we use the FlashVars parameter in the embed HTML code we can place variables on the root of the movie. This Adobe Flash TechNote article defines the basic use of the FlashVars capability.

We can specify a default Gateway URL to be the production server in our ActionScript like so:

NetServices.setDefaultGateway(”http://www.myproductionserver.com/flashservices/gateway”);

Using the Flash Vars we can overwrite the gateway URL through the HTML, allowing us to seperate out the Gateway URL for Flash Remoting into the HTML, so we can make a quick change without having to republish/export a new SWF file.

An example of an embed showing this in action is as below:

<OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
 codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/
 swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0" WIDTH="550" HEIGHT="400"
 id="mymovie" ALIGN="">
 <PARAM NAME=movie VALUE="mymovie.swf">
 <PARAM NAME=FlashVars
  VALUE="gatewayURL=http://www.flash-remoting.com/flashservices/gateway">
 <PARAM NAME=quality VALUE=high>
 <PARAM NAME=bgcolor VALUE=#FFFFFF>
 <EMBED src="mymovie.swf" quality=high bgcolor=#FFFFFF  WIDTH="550"
  HEIGHT="400" NAME="Untitled-2" ALIGN=""
  TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash"
  FlashVars="gatewayURL=http://www.flash-remoting.com/flashservices/gateway"
  PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">
 </EMBED>
</OBJECT>

Thanks to O’Reilly Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide

IMPORTANT NOTE: You then shouldn’t specify the URL when creating the gateway service, let it be handled by the NetServices which will have the FlashRemoting URL specified.

Welcome to the final installment of our 3 part series “Setting up a PHP Development Environment”. For those of you who haven’t installed Apache or PHP please checkout Part 1: Installing Apache and Part 2: Installing PHP4 tutorials on our site.
Setting up our Database Server…

For PHP we typically use the MySQL Database. MySQL is a open-source database built primarly for the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python.) but it’s very flexible, running on more than 20 platforms including Linux, Windows, OS/X, HP-UX, AIX and Netware (source: http://www.mysql.com). In the case of this tutorial we will be setting it to run on Windows XP.

Requirements:

• PHP 4 or later

(more…)

Often an annoying thing we come across in web development is remote access to servers. Recently we have had a project delayed while working with a 3rd party setting up a web server on site for a client. For us to access the service they have only setup FTP and SSH ports, but no HTTP ports. This would usually cause problems, the obvious being “How can we tell if the client can bring up the site?”.

We could make a HTTP GET request through our shell prompt and it would give us some results, (wget, lynx, GET commands) - but not quite the same as bringing up the page.

If we were to point our browser at their IP address, it would try to access port 80 which is firewalled. So how would we load the site in our browser?

The answer?

SSH Tunneling

A crafty tool that allows us to redirect remote IP+ports to our local machine. Meaning, whatever ports and computers you could access on the remote server, are “tunneled” to your local computer, allowing you to access them from your computer - all from 1 connection through port 22 (SSH). Virtually bypassing the firewall rules in place.

Further to make this process easier, PUTTY provides a nice utility in their settings to make this process even easier. You specify which port to forward from the external network to your local computer. You then establish a PUTTY SSH connection to the box, log in and voila, you will be able to access them on your computer.

So instead of accessing their port directly, I access my localhost:80 which pipes through SSH to their box.

I searched after for a few screenshots on how to do it, look here.

Aussie icon Steve Irwin, better known as “The Crocodile Hunter from Downunder” was killed today by a stingray barb whilst filming underwater documentry off Port Douglas. More to come on Hearald Sun