You don't need to wonder what project codename The Tangent is any longer. The tangent is SWX!

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I spent most of the morning yesterday writing documentation and examples for The Tangent. There's One More Thing (tm) I want to try and get in there before the launch late today/tomorrow so I'll be working on that today.

It's Apples and CS3s

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I wanted to get at least a minimum level of security implemented on the server side for the alpha release but I believe I've gone beyond that. In fact, I'm pretty sure that what I just implemented should be all that's needed, going forward. (One of the great things about open source is that it will be reviewed by a large number of people so if there are any issues I'm sure we'll catch them and fix them.) As far as I can see, The Tangent is now secure :)

I'm now heading back home to record a piece on Apollo for Paul's Boagworld Podcast but I'm going to get right back to working on The Tangent after that.

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Following Mike Davies's spirited uncovering of the domain name that The Tangent will be hosted at (http://swxformat.org), here's a roundup of everything that's currently public about the project, including some new bits of information, ahead of next week's official announcement:

• I started it because I'm not happy with any of the existing methods of working with data in Flash. I find them unnecessarily complicated to work with and I believe that this is scaring developers Flash developers (hint) away from building mashups, experimenting and having fun with data-driven applications in Flash. (The other formats have their uses and The Tangent won't replace them for every use case -- and will work alongside them also. You'll be able to use it in a complimentary manner with AMFPHP, for example.)
• My overriding design focus with The Tangent is simplicity. Everything about the project will reflect this, from the web site to how the project itself is deployed and distributed and the documentation and supporting materials. The Tangent is going to be the easiest way of working with data in Flash.
• Next week's release of The Tangent is *very* early alpha - it will creak, it will break, it will throw its toys and generally be a nuisance — but it will nevertheless be very, very cool!
• And a new tid-bit: Initially, PHP will be the only server-side technology that is supported. In further iterations (and with community support), we should see support for other server-side technologies such as Python, Ruby and Java.

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I just got the debugger analyzer for The Tangent working. It took a little eye-crossing bit-twiddling which I had a lot of fun with and it was lovely to see it work when it finally did.

So, here's the tease of the day -- a tiny slice of the s _ _ f _ r _ a t . org page. (See what I did there? You've got another letter!)

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