Getting Flash and Webservers to communicate can be like trying to send smoke signals in a hurricaine. Dramatic, yes. But it can be a fustrating exercise. Flash Remoting, Webservices, Flashvars, loading assets all of these ask something of a server. You know what youve asked for but sometimes a response aint happening, so you sit there not knowing whats going on.

The guys i work with have introduced me to a great program called Charles:

Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).

Im coming to the end of a project which needed Flash to communicate with a java based CMS system, in which i would send requests via LoadVars and the CMS would respond in XML or errors in HTML or nothing all. But during development [in the IDE!] i could see every variable i sent and every response the server sent. Thanks to Charles.

When developing Flash application that make use of the network capabilities of Flash it is difficult to debug as you cannot see the requests and responses. Charles negates this difficulty by making every HTTP request and response easily visible.

This software is the business, i can not recommend it enough. I have a project coming up next week which will use webservices. I cant wait!

http://www.xk72.com/charles/

Just completed development on this project. Basically you get to create/save a party from a bunch of category items [Location, Music, Drink, etc...]. Then when people view your party they can ask for an invite to the party. The persons party with the most requests gets the party thrown and MTV will cover it. Nice.

The project was completed in two weeks, which was probably a week too short but what can you do, its seems to be the nature of work here in Cape Town.

The backend is handled by a CMS [Java based] called Unysen. Which basically entailed me posting vars to .jsp files and parsing the XML returned.

I did quite a bit of UML before starting this project including User, Sequence and Class Diagrams. They were a bit rough but im getting better at them and they are so justified. I wont do a project without UML ever again. I really need a program that spits out ready made .as files based on UML preparation as it’ll save me at least a days coding.

http://www.freshspin.co.za

Brought a book called UML DeMYSTiFied [ISBN 0-07-226182-x] which i’m hoping will formalize the way i plan an application. Its says: ‘…show you how to visually plan, develop, and analyze software projects’.

In the past i would simply put ideas [brainstorm] on to paper, put a structure of the classes together with Visio and there it is. Not to bad i reckon, but i think getting in depth with use cases, activity diagrams, interaction diagrams and many other will take my coding to the next level, which is nice.

Im still using Visio for planning, but at least i know what im saying now. I am looking for another option as some of these editors pump out AS files from your planning, including your method,comments etc.