timwhitlock.info

My much neglected personal project JASPA has been taken offline. All traffic to jaspa.org.uk is redirecting here for now.

Read more…

I use this really basic Firefox bookmarklet pretty much every day, so I thought I’d post it.

–> Dictionary.com <– drag to toolbar

Dictionary.com provide an ‘official’ bookmarklet, here:
http://dictionary.reference.com/tools/bookmarklets.html

I’ve improved it a bit Read more…

AMF and RTMP libraries for node.js – Flash remoting with node.

I’ve been having fun playing with node.js over the past year, but have had little, or no excuse to use it in any production work, so I thought I’d set myself a challenge and build a module. That challenge was firstly to create a simple AMF gateway for Flash remoting, and secondarily to see if an RTMP socket server was achievable in node.

If you don’t know about “node” – It’s a JavaScript runtime that allows you to write socket servers. I like it a lot – it brings asynchronous, event-driven programming to the server side and provides a truly global variable scope across all connections. I’ll blog about it in more detail later, perhaps.

At Public we do a lot of Flash work, and regularly implement Flash remoting using a PHP AMF gateway. I wasn’t necessarily looking to replace this stock approach with node, but node offers proper socket connections that PHP can’t, so I was imagining the possibilities of using node as a free, and more flexible alternative to Flash Media Server. Not for streaming media, but for real-time messaging, for example in multi-player games. If I’m honest though, I did this mostly for fun, an academic exercise and as an excuse to work with node.

Read more…