SWF Socket Bitch for Ruby & Capri Sun Wine

Got a call from one of my colleagues asking about something he saw at the AJAX conference up in New York. Some Ruby on Rails guys utilized a 1 pixel by 1 pixel Flash Player 8.5 SWF with a custom built (in a week) bridge (didn’t sound like AFLAX or FABridge) to communicate from JavaScript & the SWF. Basically, they had Ruby push JavaScript over the binary Socket the SWF has open, which in turn throws the base 64 encoded JavaScript out of the SWF to the JavaScript on the page. Since JavaScript in a web browser has the JavaScript interpreter built in (a la eval, lucky bastages), Ruby on the back-end can pretty much push code to the client to run.

I remember at the last Atlanta Java User Group meeting like 9 months ago, these Java dudes were showcasing their AJAX endeavors. They were talking about the same thing; while JavaScript as a prototype language was “a neat new thing for Java developers”, they still were talking about frameworks to do the same thing: Having server-side code generate client code, and push it to the client to run/display.

My colleague wanted to port to ColdFusion, so basically ColdFusion would push JavaScript for the web browser to run. It’s neat to see Flash Player 8.5’s new binary socket feature used in such a unique way, and you could definately do it with Flash Player 5 using XMLSocket, as well of taking advantage of Flash Player’s built-in ability to access data cross domain via a policy file getting around the AJAX limitation.

Still… you server-side guys are nuts.

Speaking of nuts, dude, her majesty’s gotten (back) into Capri Sun’s. For some reason, one of the pouches was over-filled. My wife thought it was leaking. It was leaking slightly; I heard a muted hiss. However, upon piercing it with those overly hard straws, a loud “whoosh” was heard; it was actually overly-inflated with air. My wife pleaded with me not to drink it, but I did anyway. It tasted like sparkling wine! It turns out the air was caused by the Capri Sun leaking slightly, and thus the “real fruit juice” fermenting into a wine like substance. Tasted gross, but cool!