Dynamic Flash

Aral has finally taken the wraps off of his super-secret Singularity project:

Singularity is the first large-scale online web conference in the world.

Singularity is over 100 of the world’s top web visionaries, developers, designers, thought leaders, and celebrities.

Singularity is three days of talks over multiple tracks.

In 2008, Singularity will define Web ‘08.

I’m proud to say that I’ve signed up as a speaker for the event. My session, however, is an absolute secret that I will not divulge to anyone before the time is right. Okay, okay… I’m not 100% sure what my session is going to be just yet, but I’ve got until mid-october to sort something out. My experience working at Yahoo! - trying to bring together the best from the Flash/Flex work with the best from the HTML/CSS/JS standards world - is sure to give me a unique view on something, right?

If there’s something specific you want to hear about, let me know via the comments.

My colleagues in the Yahoo! Flash Platform team recently released version 1.1 of the Yahoo! Astra library. The library includes a whole bunch of brand-spanking new Flex and Flash components, as well as updates and bug fixes for the existing Flash components

All of this stuff is available now under a BSD-style license. Check out the official announcement or get straight to the goodies at the Astra Component Library section of the Yahoo! Developer Network.

PS. Yes I know I’m a little (okay, almost 2 weeks) behind the times with this information. However, since I know that a number of people come here to get their fix of Flash/Yahoo! news I thought I ought to mention something about the release, however belated.

Just a little note to say that I’ve just launched the Foundation ActionScript 3.0 book companion site at foundationas3.com.

There’s precious little there at the moment except some illustration errata for Chapter 14: Flex by Example, but I hope to build this into a site full of great resources for readers and prospective readers of the book.

At work we're working on an application that makes heavy use of the FileReference.upload() method to upload files to the server. We recently had a change request to add some custom HTTP headers to the upload request, which I didn't think would be a problem. I was wrong.

When using the FileReference.upload() method to upload a file to a server, you can specify additional variables to be sent along with that upload request by means of a URLRequest object like so:

Since you can send custom headers using the URLRequest object's requestHeaders property, I should have been able to specify custom headers for my file upload request fairly easily:

Sadly, the above code doesn't work. I checked the raw request and response using Charles and the custom X-Test-Header I was trying to send just wasn't coming through. I tried a number of different variations of the same code, all with the same result.

The problem, I have just discovered, is that there are a number of restrictions placed on the URLRequest object when used in conjunction with the FileReference methods. One of these restrictions is that the requestHeaders property is completely ignored when using the FileReference.upload() method, so it's impossible to send custom HTTP headers along with a file upload.

To be completely fair to Adobe, this and the other restrictions are stated quite clearly in the documentation for the URLRequest object:

The FileReference.upload() and FileReference.download() methods do not support the URLRequest.requestHeaders parameter.

Since I can't see any security or technical reason why the URLRequest object should be restricted in this way, I'm off to file a bug with Adobe to see if we can get this addressed in a future version of the Flash Player.

Lesson learned: RTFM.

Somehow this slipped under my radar, but better late than never. Foundation ActionScript 3.0 for Flash CS3 and Flex, my big book-writing project from last year, is now available in all good bookshops.

Here's some of the blurb from Amazon.com:

Whether you are an aspiring ActionScript developer, or an experienced ActionScript developer who wants to upgrade your knowledge to version 3.0, this book teaches all you need to know to start to harness the power of ActionScript 3.0 using Flash CS3, Flex 2 or Flex 3. It covers all the essential techniques from the ground up, allowing you to get up and running quickly and easily.

The book is available to purchase right now at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk and all good bookshops.