Another cool product form Adobe: Adobe Wave

Adobe® Wave™ is an Adobe AIR® application and Adobe hosted service that work together to enable desktop notifications for web publishers, large and small.

Simply speaking it is an Air application that receive notifications from the Adobe free Publisher Service.
With Wave site owners can use a simple REST api to send notifications, while desktop users can use a single application to receive notifications from multiple sources.

Wave flowchart

Opera ha just announced Opera Unite: a web server that run inside the browser and that will offer functionalities similar to Google Weave.

Who will win the real-time web war?

Grant Skinner has just released RegExr: a wonderful tool for writing and sharing regular expressions.

Its main features are: show results as you type, contextual help, save and share your regexps.
It also runs as an Air application or directly from the website.

RegExr

Zend_Tool is a command line tool released with the latest version of Zend Framework. It will jump-start the development automating some tasks like the creation of an empty project or of a controller class.

Other than from the command line, its possible to use Zend_Tool directly from Eclipse, lets see how.

Use Zend_Tool from Eclipse

First, download the framework and extract it.

I’ve had trouble with the full package of the 1.8.1 version, its seems to have a corrupted file in the tar.gz archive:
library\Zend\Tool\Framework\Loader\IncludePathLoader\RecursiveFilterIterator.php0000664
you can resolve the problem simply by renaming it to RecursiveFilterIterator.php

Now in Eclipse or Zend Studio for Eclipse, create and empty php project in a place accessible from your local webserver.

Now go to the “External tool” => “External Tools Configurations” panel to create a quick link to Zend_Tool.

NB: If you are using Zend Studio, you’ll have to remove the filter that hide “Program” item first:

In Zend Studio remove the filters that hide the Program item

Now you can create a new “external tool”:

1. Click the new item button
2. Give it a name
3. Point it to the location of the bin\zf.bat file in your zend framework folder (where you have extracted it) using the Browse File System button
4. Set the working directory to the location of your newly created php project with the Browse Workspace button
5. In the arguments box insert ${string_prompt}. In this way Eclipse will prompt for input when you’ll start the tool.

Create an External Tool in Eclipse

Now in the “Enviroment” tab, configure two enviroment variable:

• Path: to your php.exe folder
• ZEND_TOOL_INCLUDE_PATH_PREPEND: to your Zend Framework library folder

In the Common tab check Display in favorites menu and in the “Refresh” tab check Refresh resources upon completion => The project containing the selected resource

Now you can run it, and in the dialog write show version. In the Eclipse console you’ll see the zend framework version.

Now you can experiment all the Zend_Tool commands of your choice:

create project [absolute path of your project]
create controller [name of the controller]

And don’t forget that you can create your own Zend_Tool command too.

For all the 8bit lovers, visit the web site of this new york based band: Anamanaguchi and listen to their latest hit: Dawn Metropolis

Anamanaguchi 8bit band web site

Anamanaguchi is a four-piece group from New York City that combines guitars with the thick, electronic tones of a hacked Nintendo Entertainment System. With driving, dynamic and melodic tracks, they focus on creating sounds that seem bigger than their hardware

Google is exploring new ways to advertise its browser, releasing a YouTube channel with 11 shorts about Chrome, and its planning to advertise the browser with tv spots this weekend.

Today I’m stumbled upon this interesting site that shows the activity of the net in real time.

Every time someone visit a site a flash light on the map.
Read the rest of this entry »

Great news for multiplayer flash games!
In the latest beta release of Flash Player 10, Adobe introduced the RTMFP support.
In short this technology will allow P2P communication between players and UDP:

Direct (P2P) communication between Flash players.

Every flash application will be able to connect to another without going through a server, saving bandwidth and lowering latency.
A Flash Media Server will be required to establish the connection between players.

UDP communication with a server

The next version of Flash Media Server (and maybe of Red5) will allow audio and video streaming from and to the flash player over the UDP, which is a more efficient way to deliver low latency packets.
Applications like Skype and the majority of multiplayer games already use that with obvious advantages.

Further informations:
RTMFP FAQ
Flash Player 10 Release notes
UDP Wikipedia entry

This week were released:
AMF3 specification

Action Message Format (AMF) is a compact binary format that is used to
ActionScript object graphs. Once serialized an AMF encoded object graph
to persist and retrieve the public state of an application across sessions or
endpoints to communicate through the exchange of strongly typed data.

And Java-Remoting BlazeDS Beta

BlazeDS is the server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR applications for more responsive rich Internet application (RIA) experiences.

Previously available only as part of Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES, Adobe is announcing its plans to contribute the proven BlazeDS technologies to the community under the LGPL v3. BlazeDS gives the rapidly growing Adobe developer community free access to the powerful remoting and messaging technologies developed by Adobe.

The source code will be available for download in early 2008.

In short: more AMF servers for free, other than RED5

I’ve not blogged too much lately, however, there was some strange “activities” on my blog…

Today someone in a comment warned me that I have some spam links in the footer visible only with javascripts disabled.

I’ve updated wordpress some days ago because I’ve noticed some spam links in my sidebar, but as it seems this wasn’t enough to fix the problem.

Luckily, I’m using subversion to manage wordpress updates, in this way I can see what happened to my wordpress:

? wp-includes/class-mail.php
M 6377 wp-includes/default-filters.php
M 6377 wp-includes/wp-db.php
M 6377 wp-includes/gettext.php
M 6377 wp-includes/pluggable.php
M 6377 xmlrpc.php
M 6377 index.php
M 6377 wp-admin/admin.php
M 6377 wp-admin/index.php


There was a new file class-mail.php and the others were modified.
Luckily nothing that a few svn revert commands couldn’t heal

If you want to check if you blog has the same “guest” links:

1. disable javascripts
2. look at your footer.

If so:

1. replace those files marked with M
2. delete class-mail.php

More info on this exploit: Phentermine attack
This episode is the proof of how useful is to install/update wordpress with subversion: Install wordpress with subversion