I’ve been having a major issue with Flex/Adobe AIR over the last week or so when serializing my data to files. I use a FileStream and call writeObject() on an ArrayCollection of my data. Pretty simple. Serializing seems to run fine, deserialization as well. The problem arises when I try to cast items in the collection to their appropriate type. It seems the objects have lost their type information and are plain Objects.

After a while of thumbing through the documentation it finally hits me. FileStream uses AMF3. Usually when using AMF3 you define RemoteClass metadata for each of your classes that mirror server-side classes. I had just assumed that since AIR knew I would be loading the object back in AIR again, it would do that stuff automatically. Turns out it doesn’t. A few lines of RemoteClass metadata later it’s working fine. You just need to define the alias as being your class with the full namespace typed out. Not in the documentation (or if it is, it needs to be in a more obvious spot such as here or here). Although knowing its was AMF3 format, I probably should have realized this sooner.

Hope this saves someone else some time.

I created a blog demo written in Python that runs on Google’s new App Engine and uses PureMVC Python as its architecture. If you haven’t checked it out, you should, it’s a phenomenal piece of web technology.

The blog demo is a basic one with the ability to add, edit and delete blog posts. Each post includes a title, content and the date and time it was last updated. It’s now at version 1.1.

Also, any of you programming in any of: AS2, AS3, Python, ColdFusion, Java, .NET, Perl, or PHP, check out the ports for those specific languages. PureMVC is the best MVC implementation I’ve found and there’s a good and very helpful community going on the forums too.

As a side note, I apologize to anyone who got a blank post with a similar title in their feed a few days ago, WordPress has been giving me some issues after an upgrade.

Click here to see more information, but the gist of it is meetings on the first Tuesday of each month!

The first meeting is April 8th at 7PM at Adobe’s offices in Newton, MA. Topic will be the open sourcing of the Flex SDK.

I’ll be there, and if any of my readers will be too, drop me a line.

In the past week or so I’ve begun development on a Flex-based Blog Engine. I don’t have any screenshots or videos of it yet, as it is not entirely functional yet.

It uses Flex,PureMVC, PHP, MySQL, and WebOrb for PHP.

In the meantime, check out the preliminary information and keep an eye out for updates!