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Can I just say two things?
About a month or so ago I went to the local Adobe User's Group (KCWebCore) meetings and the keynote that night was a demonstration/tutorial on making a cool little "News Scroller" in Flash that uses XML to populate the news items, making it reasonably dynamic. During the course of the discussion, it came out that you don't have to point the application to a "true" XML file, but to any file that returns XML - such as a web service or any dynamic web page (ColdFusion, PHP, JSP, ASP, etc/.).
I thought that was awesome, and already saw a bunch of uses for that. I always thought Flash was just for the artists out there who could draw and were good at animation (the whole Timeline interface, while I reasonably understood it, frustrated me most of the time). ActionScript is the programming language behind the scenes - and it turns out that just about anything you can do via the timeline, you can do via code with ActionScript.
So I convinced my boss to pay for the Flash ActionScript class that the guy who did the demo at the AUG meeting taught. That was this last week, Weds-Fri. It was a most excellent class, in several ways.
First, of course, was expanding on my knowledge of Flash and learing all about ActionScript. It is very cool, and I look forward to exploring that a lot more.
Second, in one of many tangents that took place, AJAX was brought to my full attention. I know I may be a little bit late to the party with this, but there is an explanation - I had heard of it before, but it was always in the context of JAVA, so I had assumed that it was totally JAVA related and since I wasn't working on anything with JAVA, I pretty much ignored it.
Well, no longer! I have already begun playing with it a bit, and it is insanely cool! And it offers as much promise for things I have been working on as the Flash stuff does, if not more, right off the bat.
My mind has been racing the last couple of days with thoughts of how to leverage this stuff and use it both in my day job and my freelance stuff.
Way Too CoolTM.
- Flash ActionScript is very cool.
- AJAX is insanely cool.
About a month or so ago I went to the local Adobe User's Group (KCWebCore) meetings and the keynote that night was a demonstration/tutorial on making a cool little "News Scroller" in Flash that uses XML to populate the news items, making it reasonably dynamic. During the course of the discussion, it came out that you don't have to point the application to a "true" XML file, but to any file that returns XML - such as a web service or any dynamic web page (ColdFusion, PHP, JSP, ASP, etc/.).
I thought that was awesome, and already saw a bunch of uses for that. I always thought Flash was just for the artists out there who could draw and were good at animation (the whole Timeline interface, while I reasonably understood it, frustrated me most of the time). ActionScript is the programming language behind the scenes - and it turns out that just about anything you can do via the timeline, you can do via code with ActionScript.
So I convinced my boss to pay for the Flash ActionScript class that the guy who did the demo at the AUG meeting taught. That was this last week, Weds-Fri. It was a most excellent class, in several ways.
First, of course, was expanding on my knowledge of Flash and learing all about ActionScript. It is very cool, and I look forward to exploring that a lot more.
Second, in one of many tangents that took place, AJAX was brought to my full attention. I know I may be a little bit late to the party with this, but there is an explanation - I had heard of it before, but it was always in the context of JAVA, so I had assumed that it was totally JAVA related and since I wasn't working on anything with JAVA, I pretty much ignored it.
Well, no longer! I have already begun playing with it a bit, and it is insanely cool! And it offers as much promise for things I have been working on as the Flash stuff does, if not more, right off the bat.
My mind has been racing the last couple of days with thoughts of how to leverage this stuff and use it both in my day job and my freelance stuff.
Way Too CoolTM.
