Well, it seems there's one more Canadian in the world. Yesterday, Flash on the Beach announced that I was "one of the UK’s (adopted from his native Canada) top Flash/Flex authorities." So, there you go, eat your hearts out Grant and Colin! :P

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A common question when using Arp is: "How do I use external SWFs (forms) in my applications?" I posted one solution in Flex 1.5/AS 2 a while back on the Arp list in a thread titled Multi-movie ARP application but it's not the easiest information to find so this post will hopefully give it a bit more exposure.

You've no doubt heard about Ruby on Rails (RoR) by now. It's a full-stack Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for creating web applications using the Ruby programming language. RoR adheres to the Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle and uses the dynamic nature of Ruby and the idea of convention over configuration to reduce duplication and code line-count without sacrificing maintainability or scalability. In short, it's a Good Thing! Even better news: If you're on OS X, it couldn't be easier to get up and running with RoR thanks to a one-click installer and administration application called Locomotive. Here is a quick tutorial to get you started.

• Download Locomotive and install it by opening the image file and dragging the application to your Applications folder.
• Run Locomotive and click the + button in the control bar. Select "Create New" from the button's menu.
• Give your application a name and select the directory (folder) that Locomotive should create it in.
• Press the Create button

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I was just reading an article called 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website and was interested to see that the author mentioned Apollo on #9 under "Watch, pay attention to, or implement right away". His one-line description of Apollo: "deploy Rich Internet Applications easily."

Cool to see a growing awareness and excitement for Apollo outside the immediate Flash community.

I wanted to play with the .NET version of the ARP PizzaService application by Mark Piller on WebOrb for .NET so I thought I'd try it out under Mono on OS X. Unfortunately, WebOrb for .NET only appears to be available as an MSI and thus I don't seem to have a way of installing it on OS X. (Not that it was guaranteed to work under Mono but I was hoping it would.) In any case, Mono is very cool. It's basically .NET for Linux/OS X/etc.

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