Mats Lindh

Fresh from the Google Open Source Blog comes news that Google has released their Protocol Buffers specification and accompanying libraries. The code and specification has been release at Protocol Buffers on Google Code.

Protocol Buffers is a data format for fast exchange and parsing of data and messages between computers. It is similar to simple uses of XML in this manner, but the messages size on the wire and their parsing time is very much optimized for busy sites. There is no need to spend loads of time doing XML parsing when you instead could do something useful. It’s very easy to interact with the messages through the generated classes (for C++, Java and Python), and future versions of the same schema are compatible with old versions (as new fields are just ignored by older parsers).

Still no PHP implementation available, so guess it’s time to get going and lay down some code during the summer. Anyone up for the job?

Adobe Flex is an SDK from Adobe for creating Flash applications based on XML and ActionScript. No need for Flash MX or Flash CS3, just markup, markup, markup and some ECMA-script thrown in for making it all come together. While I’m no fan of flash content on sites, this adventure has it’s purpose: making an open source multifile upload application. Every now and then I run into the need for allowing people to upload several files at once (think 20 - 100 files), and selecting each by itself would be really tiresome. The only good solution I’ve come across so far is the flash based uploaders, so well, here we go. The plan is to release the result under a MIT-based license.

Flex has been quite good to me so far. The UI of the application is built as a XML file, and the code is simply added as ActionScript in a CDATA-section in the XML-file. Simple. You then run the XML-file (MXML) through a compiler (mxmlc) and get a ready-to-run .swf file out. Works like a charm.