I like Fullasagoog. It was the first Macromedia feed aggregator I started reading, which then got me hooked on MXNA, which then aggregated me, which allowed me to tap into the wider world of Macromedia blogs.

That said, I have a complaint about The Goog – it’s Flex community blogs aren’t as good as the rest of the site. Don’t get me wrong, they have most of the big names, but most of those names are all actual Macromedia bloggers. If you look at the Flash blog list and the ColdFusion blog list, there is a great mix of both “official” Macromedia bloggers as well as a healthy dose of blogs from the wider community.

Now I realize that the Flex community is not as established as either of those, and in fact many of the CF and Flash blogs on Fullasagoog talk a lot about Flex. But I think that the goog is missing some great Flex feeds and when I try to inquire about adding them, I never get a response.

So my question in all of this is how to get feeds I like (including Manish Jethani’s weblog and ColdFusion Podcasts) added to the goog?

For anyone who was on vacation this weekend and didn’t see this, you should definitely check out Mark Anders’ post about the Flex Beta 1 preview. He’s got a ton of information up and there are some cool features that sound like their in the pipeline. The post is over at his blog – http://www.andersblog.com/archives/2005/11/flex_friday_dem.html

There was some big news today in the form of an announcement on Ray Ozzie’s blog about SSE, or Simple Sharing Extensions. [There is some discussion by Dave Winer CrunchNotes and Don Dodge]

SSE is an open-source spec for synchronizing RSS and OPML feeds. The objectives from the Spec are as follows:

1. 1. to use RSS as the basis for item sharing ? that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items amongst two or more cross-subscribed feeds.
2. 2. to use OPML as the basis for outline sharing ? that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous replication of outlines, such as RSS aggregators subscription lists

At this point, SSE is kind of a big concept with no real examples to point to, but essentially, Microsoft wants to allow synchronization between RSS feeds so that two people (or two groups) could be “subscribed” to the same feed and make changes to the feed which would be replicated to anyone who was subscribed. It takes RSS one step further and adds a collaboration component which I think is a fantastic use of the technology. Ray’s blog post has some real-world examples.

What surprised me about this announcement was the lack of discussion on fullasagoog. Even MXNA, which has a wider base and usually gets a wider range of topics only had two posts, a pseudo-cynical post by Sam Ruby and another which simply mentioned Microsoft’s use of the Creative Commons license by Lawrence Lessing.

So why no fanfare? I would argue that this could be huge for the Flex community. I realize that the standard is quite new and the hype is quite high, but hear me out. There are a plethora of Flex RSS readers available, and they are very easy to build, which makes them perfect. Now imagine, as a Flex developer, building your applications around collaboration using SSE. Imagine being able to sync a Flex based Calendar with an Outlook calendar, or with a Trumba Calendar. It really opens up a whole range of applications that Flex will be able to synchronize, or collaborate with.

Again, I know all of this is highly theoretical, but if SSE can really transform RSS the way it is intending to, Flex provides a way to create great user interfaces built around collaboration.

This is a question for anyone who happens to read this and is in the know: What are the plans to develop a Flex Certified Professional Program? There are some Instructor-led Flex Courses which means that they have the first step towards certification, but under the Macromedia Certified Professional Programs page, they only have Flash, Dreamweaver and ColdFusion.

I’m not totally familiar with the timeline and how this process works, but has anyone heard talk of a Flex certification? Are they going to wrap it into the Flash certification or are they waiting until 2.0 is out?

I put together a quick, low-level proof of concept that we may use for some of our learning simulations and thought I’d share it.

It’s a Flex 2.0 application that goes out and grabs stock data from Yahoo then dumps it in chart format to the screen. It uses the CF Adapter, but it really doesn’t have to, it probably should just be an HTTPServices call. I did want to do a little data manipulation within the CFC and I also wanted to build in the pause so that there would be some data differentiation.

This also could have been done with Flex 1.5 (in fact, the Charting Components Explorer has something like this), but we’re really excited about being able to use the enterprise services to accomplish something similar to this, so that’s why I put it together.

I also don’t host my own server, so I can’t run an example of it here, but feel free to download the source files.

index.mxml

StockCall.cfc