It's woooorking! :)

One of the biggest problems with troubleshooting a gateway like this is seeing the responses being sent (since they're being sent to the phone.) I had hacked in a few debug messages yesterday that were getting emailed to me but I still couldn't see the actual response being sent back to the phone. I knew instinctively that there was a problem with the response string and I knew it was probably due to a runtime error in the PHP code but I couldn't see what it was.

Enter the poster.php file to save the day.

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Do't you just hate it when this happens? Yo're in a train/plane/hot air balloon, etc. and try to wake your PC up from its slumber and it does't. So you hold down the power key until it turns off then restart it... All the while hoping you wo't get, well, this!

I just made a little change on FlashAnt so that dates are now shown in International date format (IS0 8601). I find it much less ambigious than the so-called US and/or European systems (and actually use it in "real life" too!) The format is YYYY-MM-DD. It's logical and doesn't leave any doubt as to which field is the year, which the month and which the date.

I decided to take things easy yesterday, after a tiring but very successful two weeks with the Hands On courses (more on that later) and hack up my blog so I could post pictures and videos to it from my phone (a Nokia 7610 I got so I could play with FlashLite on it before deciding that life is just too short to go back to writing anything in Flash 4 syntax.)

I started out by integrating Stefan Hellkvist's excellent MMS Diary module into the site -- initially thinking I'd have the Moblog as a separate section. I got that working (you can see it here) but quickly realized that it would be a shame that my posts wouldn't show up in the FlashAnt RSS and that users couldn't comment on them. I could have hacked said functionality into the new module but I didn't want to duplicate what b2 already does (or create a Frankenstein's monster of sorts) so I decided to full integrate the MMS/moblog feature into b2. It was actually not too difficult.

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Flex Builder 1.5 appears to have such a fundamental bug in it that I was actually afraid to post something about it earlier, without double-and-triple checking my results and extensively testing it out, for fear of having overlooked something very minor. Basically, Flex Builder loses the ability to preview your applications in Design View if you subclass mx.core.Application or mx.containers.Form. Although this is perfectly legal -- and actually, I would argue, a best practice (more on that later) -- and although the resulting applications run when compiled, Flex Builder's Design, Run and Debug features stop working.

I am still hoping that there is at least an undocumented way to tell Flex Builder, "Hey, I'm extending Application/Form, so you can go ahead and display it as if it was an Application/Form" but I haven't been able to find such a way as of yet (and I've looked extensively into to the extensibility layer for Dreamweaver too without any luck in locating hooks into the Flex Design View renderer.)

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