The 19 20 22 entries that we received for the SWX Contest have now been published on the SWX Contest page for public viewing.

Due to the manageable number of entries, we're going to forego the first round of public voting (although you are welcome to leave comments on the entries) and allow our outstanding panel of judges to pick the winners from the Web, API, and Mobile categories in a single round of voting.

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Recently, I gave a talk titled Web '07 - Web '08 at the Christmas charity dinner (linking to the Google cache as the original site appears to be down at the moment) organized by Sussex Geek Dinners. It was a lighthearted tour through the highlights of Web '07 and a look ahead to Web '08* with predictions by myself and some of my friends.

In my predictions for 2008, I talked about how we will be seeing more RIAs in 2008 -- both from Adobe and third parties -- how Silverlight is not going to have a widespread impact (although is definitely something to keep an eye on for 2009/10 and the competition is going to give Adobe a welcome push in the right direction), how mobile Flash is going to move away from Flash Lite to full-scale Flash playback on devices and how we're going to see Flash on the iPhone, how sometimes-connected applications and web/desktop hybrid applications are going to gain importance with AIR, Google Gears, etc., and how real-time 3D in Flash is going to change the aesthetics of the web.

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Here's quick update on the session I'm presenting at FlashBrighton's Big Day Out (the event's now sold out) this Saturday. The talk is titled Beyond the Buttons:

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I'm currently working on a stealthy little pet project of mine that involves creating a PayPal Website Payments Pro API in SWX. A couple of the methods in the API require quite a few arguments (all the billing-related fields for processing a credit card transaction, for example) and I quickly got sick of having to enter mock data manually in the SWX Service Explorer to test and debug methods calls. (This is one scenario where Transfer Object support would be helpful but adding that right now would complicate things too much.) So, to make things easier for myself (and hopefully some of you as well), I've added mock data support (both static and dynamic) to SWX PHP and the SWX Service Explorer.

Using mock data

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I was looking for a distraction from the PayPal integration stuff I'm working on today for my Super Secret New Project (tm) when I ran across Ted Patrick's Cards API post from yesterday and decided to quickly implement a SWX API for it.

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