It is influenced by scala’s Akka actors. It is still very much a work in progress, but the committed code does work.

Have a look at https://github.com/LaurentZuijdwijk/Aurora for code samples.

With Apollo I decided to go with a public interface driven design for dependency injection, instead of the more common meta tags+introspection, or the string based message passing as in pureMVC or the AS3 event model.

So what is the good thing about using interfaces in an observer pattern I hear you ask?

• Using interfaces gives the application architect the opportunity to divide an application up into certain areas of interest and group methods and properties together to be used across various controllers.
• Ide’s will let you create stub code for all the interfaces that are implemented, preventing you from writing boilerplate code.
• Type safety for object passing
• No horrible switch statements

You might think: ‘ok, I get that, but why another framework if the existing ones do a good job?’

This framework was developed by me as a way to test this new subscriber/observer method. Just because I can. Hopefully it will give you some new ideas or even a handy new tool.

quick overview

The basis of the framework is a static Injector class which uses the observer pattern to register controllers.

The methods inject and call are used to update controllers. Inject does exactly what you expect it does. I will inject a strongly typed object in every controller that has a registered property, based on their interface.

Given an interface ‘IPersonInjectable’ which has a method set person(val:Person), then a call to Injector.inject(new Person(‘me’)) will inject this new Person instance into every controller. You can see that with altering your models a bit, you can make databinding extremely easy.

Example

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public interface IPersonInjectable
{
   function set person(val:Person):void
}
 
public class PersonViewController extends Controller implements IPersonInjectable
{
   public function PersonViewController() 
   {
      super();
   }
 
   public function set person(val:Person):void
   {
      view.person = val;
   }
}
 
new PersonViewController();
 
Injector.inject(new Person('Laurent', 'Zuijdwijk'))

Have a look at https://github.com/LaurentZuijdwijk/Apollo for some examples.

We made a multiscreen Javascript app, which we packaged in native apps for Android, iPad and iPhone. It is based on an in-house MVC framework and a custom animation framework in order to switch between CSS3 and jquery animations. It was quite a fun project.

Thank you LinkedIn for coming up with the Javasript API.

Have a look at http://www.thenewcclass.co.uk

I did end-to-end development of this app, from database design, import and management tool, web service and two Adobe Flex applications.

Working in close coorperation with Redbike Multimedia and Pim Reinders from ReclameArsenaal, I think we achieved a really nice result.

Have a look at http://bit.ly/dt1Xan to see nearly 100 years of Dutch advertisement history.

The basic code for this script are four lines of codes, looped for each line section, with a max of 2 * PI or 360°.

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_r = ((2 + Math.cos((q * i) / p)));
 
x = _r * tr * Math.cos(i);
y = Math.sin((q * i) / p);
z = _r * tr * Math.sin(i);

The x, y and z values can be drawn using the graphics class after we convert them to 2D points.

Some interesting results can be achieved when the number of line segments is lowered below 100, making the image really distorted. With 35 line segments and high p and q values things get interesting.

Do you monitor the visitors on your website thorougly enough? Do you know who your visitors really are? Even if you have plenty of visitors on your corporate website, chances are you are not maximizing the potential value they represent. I am sure you use tools to track traffic on your website, but how well do you really know the visitors on your website?

You will probably have plenty of quantitative information about traffic. Maybe you know which browser your visitors are using and which operating system. You know if your visitors are Mac users and what size screens they have. What exactly does this information tell you? Is it enough to filter out potential leads from your visitors and does that tell you if you are reaching your target audience?

It might be, but if you do direct sales through your website, or if your website is meant to generate sales leads which need to be followed up, the chances are you are missing out on business opportunities. In this case you really want to get to know your visitors and actively engage with them.

How does it work?

As part of their three step plan to engage with web visitors and generate leads, we built an application for webleadsb2b to acquire more qualitative information about website traffic. The requirements were to get specific in-depth information to:

• Monitor campaigns
• Get the name of the organization visiting
• Know their geographic location up to city level
• Filter out competitors from the visitors
• Measure on target audience
• Find out where visitors come from

How we did it

We designed and built a tracking script in Javascript and a front end dashboard application using Adobe Flex. Adobe Flex was chosen, because of the quick development times, it’s XML support and cross browser capabilities.

This rich internet application features graphs, copyable Excel like data grids and drag and drop functionality for data. This makes the application intuitive to use and data is easy to export. All data connectivity is done asynchronous, making the application more responsive and safer than an average web application.

Results

Fiserv, a financial services provider, uses this application to monitor campaigns. They can for example track the clicks on web ads and drill down on what type of visitors clicked on them. They found out that out of every 100 clicks:

• 85 % was non-commercial
• 5% were competitors
• 10% was their target audience

With this data they were able to calculate the effectiveness of their campaigns much more precisely.

In the next two posts I will get into how you can capture even more lead data and how to effectively follow up leads.

Webleadsb2b sells this product as part of their lead generation solution. If you want analyze the traffic on your website better or if you want to be able to monitor your campaigns, the team at www.webleadsb2b.com can help you out.