PHP, ASP and Actionscript

First off, this blog will be extremely bias, towards what, you'll soon find out. ; )
I've recently had to work for the past 2 weeks with server sided scripting. I've generally tried to avoid it because I don't to regress to where I was a couple of years ago, jack-of-all-scripts. But my lastest work project required I do some server sided scripting to interact with a MySQL database and Flash (using amf).
I must say server sided scripting with PHP was MUCH easier that I remember in the past. Within a couple hours I had written several PHP Classes with the interaction I needed. Granted they were probably not the cleanest scripts the world, but by did the job that was required.
Now in comes my friend from IT (I'm in Marketing) and states "any new server sided code MUST be in .NET". My first reaction was (clean version...)"great another script to impede me from doing more Actionscripting, but if I have to fine." But after thinking about it, I came to ask "why?" Although all intranet pages are done with .NET, web based scripts are PHP. From a selfish point of view I thought, in the long run (as a developer), which language will give me more leverage to increase my salary in the job market. Without a doubt, I believe it's PHP. Why? Based mostly on personal experience, recruiters have often asked me "Do you know PHP?" If I look on job boards I see much more postings for PHP developers than ASP.
My reasoning for this is two-fold. Microsoft makes tons of money certifying .NET developers, where as PHP has no regulating body. PHP is niche, not many people do it WELL. When a company needs a niche developer, they pay more.
Now don't get me wrong. If you're looking for a much more stable career, that's regulated, and almost guaranteed to always be around than .NET is the way to go. But if you're like me and gamble on occasion (I dedicated myself to ActionsScript when everyone thought I was crazy) I strongly believe PHP is the way to go.

Reading a local database created with AIR

I found this neat little app that reads a SQLite database, so you can quickly and easily see whats been written to the database from your AIR file.

Hopefully, it will help you as much as it's helped me recently ;)

I'm BACK!!

After a looooong break with job changes and freelance work I'm back blogging again. I'm going to try and keep my blogs now to all my experiments in AIR and Actionscript 3 and post the results whenever I can.

My first post back is about a little problem that had me pulling my hair (what I have left of it) out. What should've taken me about 10 minutes took over 3 hours! I'm hoping this may help someone else out and save them the aggrevation. It has to do with the latest AIR beta 3 update available at adobe labs.

Being the impatient person I am, I always love to play with the lastes toys, I downloaded the latest AIR beta update. The first thing you have to know is that you HAVE to update your Flash CS3 to Flash 9.0.2. That took me about two attempts to install the update to figure out (the updater just states something along the lines of "This program does not qualify for this update.".. very helpful). After that was complete the updater worked, but none of my AIR apps would compile it kept giving me the error that a class couldn't be found. That really confused me because I knew I had updated everything. I then tried the command in Flash "AIR - Create AIR file" which still produced the same error. Now I was really confused. After some searches on Adobe labs, it stated that this error will only occur on the first compile... which wasn't happening (at least for me). After tinkering around I finally noticed that on another file that did compile the following was missing from the publish settings in the Actionscript 3.0 classpaths:

$(AppConfig)/ActionScript 3.0 AIR 1.0/Classes

After I added that to my newly created app, everything compiled correctly. Now I just hope Adobe makes things a little easier when version 1 is released.

AS3 news

I found some convincing arguments to speed up my transition to AS3. Granted they're more visual elements than arguments, but they're still convincing:

PaperVision3d - Private beta 3d engine for Flash. Available for both AS2 and AS3, but to see the real power in AS3, view this (click on the icon in the bottom right corner for FULLSCREEN). I've just got the classes and will hopefully get something together in the future. Although I love 3d, I don't anything about modeling.

computeSpectrum AS3 method - This is way overdue; the ability to generate visualizations from supported sound files. An example can be found here. (Not the best example, and you need Flash Player 9 to view it).