It's been a long time coming (and a long time since I've blogged); the newest addition to the Family.com site that I , and many of co-programmers, work on has officially been released. Months and months of research, development, and testing should hope to prove fruitful for the continual success of Family.com. Introducing: Family.com Community.

This new feature is an attempt to bring in the great social networking benefits that the Internet offers to the moms and families that visit this site. It's a place where they can start groups and topics on anything related to family and children. They will connect with other folks who are in the same boat as they are to comfort them that they are not alone.

The site incorporates the latest technologies such as: Java 6, Spring, Hibernate, DWR, AJAX, DHTML, and many other "Web 2.0" features.

Go to Family.com and click on "Community" to create your own avatar and family. Then invite other friends and family to join as well!

Many developers have the question of how to define the infamous connections to the various AMF gateways to which they need to communicate through to their server-side code. The process, while usually handled through the famed services-config.xml file, can actually be handled directly in your ActionScript very easily.

The examples below are showing connecting to a AMFPHP endpoint as opposed to a ColdFusion one, only because that is what I have been learning and working on recently. For ColdFusion, simply replace the latter part of the string with /flex2gateway/

First, define a new string in your model that references the URI to which you are going to connect with your RemoteObjects:

Then, simply define a new ChannelSet, and Channel to add to the ChannelSet that references your URI:

Finally, define your RemoteObject to access this ChannelSet that you just created and set the destination to the name you gave your AMFChannel:

It is as simple as that! Be sure to take out the services-config declaration in your compiler arguments to test this out appropriately.

Lately I have been using the Yahoo! Flex skin in a few of my interfaces as it greatly improves the overall standard look of the Flex widgets. It's very easy to implement (thanks to Adobe for creating a simple workflow for this). Recently, however, I have noticed a couple of bugs in the skin that are worth bringing up and should definitely be fixed. Suffice it to say that I am not sure if they are Adobe's fault or Yahoo!'s fault.

As you can see there is an issue on the bottom where a partial row of the datagrid is showing and the other part of it is hidden. It's the hidden part that is causing the skin to appear invisible. Note that, as soon as I scroll the datagrid it goes away. However, if I move my mouse over that row it comes back. Same goes for the [+] button. You can see that it's bounds are causing an anomaly on the control bar.

Like I said, I am not sure if this is an Adobe issue or a Yahoo! issue, but it is annoying enough that I might be swapping the skin out. I don't want to, but I may have to.

As many of you know, I was very fortunate to finish college and immediately have a ColdFusion development position waiting for me at The Boeing Company. Additionally, I had the opportunity to work on many large and great projects from consisting of ColdFusion as well as Flex.

Thank you to all my co-workers at Boeing as well as my managers who saw my potential. I would like to make a special thank you to my latest manager, Bill Roberts, for truly understanding me as a developer and my passion for technology. I appreciate everything that you did for me while I was at the company.

From one great company to another I shall go. I was offered a web development position with the Walt Disney Internet Group in North Hollywood. I will be working alongside a team of developers on the Disney family network of sites: family.com, familyfun.com, wondertime.com (e.g. for more information check out Disney Online Fact Sheet).

My last day with Boeing is Thursday the 17th. My first day with Disney is Tuesday the 22nd.

Here is some footage that I took earlier of the video equipment, red carpet, bleachers, and big screen for big Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End premiere at Disneyland.

The video link is here: http://www.kylehayes.info/share/pirates3prepremieredl.html

Cool stuff!