I had originally wanted to build this project with my Parallax RFID reader, but since I can’t interface it with the Make Controller until Liam at MakingThings fixes the serial BLOB implementation fixed in mchelper 2.0, I decided to complete a proof-of-concept with a Phidgets RFID reader. The application is pretty straightforward - it consists of an RFID tag embedded in a cell phone that is read for its unique ID, prompts a user to enter some data and then remembers their personal data when they return. While the premise is simple, there are a few moving parts required to stitch it together.

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On a project that I am currently working on, the team was having some issues consuming JBoss SOAP services. The root of the problem took a while to figure out, as apparently there are very few people that try to consume SOAP services experience the same issue we were encountering and The Google revealed few clues. At first we thought that perhaps the difference was between WSDL 1.1 and WSDL 2.0 and Flex’s lack of support for WSDL 2.0, as that is what the SOAP services were generating. After some initial investigation, we thought we eliminated that as a possibility. Then we discovered that the WSDL that we were consuming contained overloaded methods. Some reinvestigation at the W3C was done to see if perhaps a difference between the WSDL 1.1 or 2.0 specifications was support for WSDL overloading. It turns out the the specs are silent on this issue, so again we eliminated the difference in WSDL versions. Some additional searching after that determined that Flex definitely lacks support for WSDL overloading.
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Use Case
I’ve been working on a project with a team of some of our really talented Flash developers (props Ben, Leon and Gabriel) where a Flex app being served from a non-secure URL via plain HTTP needs to connect to and consume data from another server via HTTPS and have run into some issues and a workaround that I’d like to share. For that particular project, the other server is a SOAP service running behind SSL with a Flex app served over HTTP consuming those services. However, these concepts also apply to any external data consumed by the Flash Player. A simplified diagram of the system is below:

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I just attended Adobe’s on AIR Bus Tour the other day on its stop in Los Angeles. While typically those types of event don’t delve deep enough into details to be of much interest, I figured that I’d attend anyway since I’ve been away from the computer for so long on vacation and needed to catch up on some new stuff. The vast majority of the talks were JavaScript-centric which was interesting and perhaps highlights Adobe’s desire to sway over the current generation of standards- and open-source centric client-side developers to a proprietary technology, but more on that in another post.

Anyway, I had hopes of converting an app that I had been working on over to an AIR app for desktop deployment. The app that I was going to port over was a quick and rather silly app that I threw together using the Yahoo! Maps API and an geoRSS feed constructed using Yahoo! Pipes to filter earthquake data from the USGS. However, I quickly remembered that developing against an alpha release of anything can be tedious at best.

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