bricemason's blog

My goal as a developer has always been to produce products that have a positive, lasting impact on the user experience. Having spent a good part of my career in the non-profit sector, I understand the added challenges of meeting this goal. Tight (non-existent) budgets and little access to enterprise resources play a big part as barriers to working in this field from a technological perspective. Luckily there are a number of organizations whose goal is to support nearly every facet of this industry to ensure their success. One of these organizations, Netsquared is promoting the DonateNow Mashup Challenge, sponsored by The Case Foundation. This is a contest which challenges you to create the most innovative solution which supports the online donation process using the Network for Good API. Come up with the winning idea and you've earned yourself $10,000.

In my last post I talked about all the new developments not only in the world of AOL API development but with supporting technologies such as Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 from Adobe and a taste of the Ext JS JavaScript framework. Today I'll expand the tour to include a look at the latest version of the Ext JS framework which includes many helpful features for creating AJAX flavored AIR apps. I'll then complete an OpenAIM/Mapquest AIR mashup which will map the top 10 ranked AIM Fight users.

Although my original intention for this week's blog was to create an Adobe AIR application mashed up with a little Web AIM and Mapquest, I got to thinking that it was becoming more than that. There's been quite a bit going on over the last couple months. While Adobe recently shipped Flex 3 and AIR 1.0, perhaps the biggest and most important releases for us come from AOL with their authentication support for desktop applications such as Adobe AIR via clientLogin, Mapquest's free edition, the incredible advances for the Open AIM platform, and the soon to be released Userplane Media Player. While I will still be producing an AIR/AIM/Mapquest mashup, I'll also touch on the new authentication available to AIR too.

On Tuesday we completed the heavy lifting required to query the OpenMail API for new mail listings, perform some minor data transformations, and create a minimized data feed. Today we'll write just a few lines of code to create a rich interface using Ext JS.

Last time I showed you how to interact with the OpenMail API's mail count service using a ColdFusion proxy and Ext JS front end. Today we'll take a look at the new mail list service, a method used to obtain more detailed information about new mail that pops into your AOL mail.

The last couple of posts, we've starting exploring classic AJAX development using Ext JS. Having already completed our OpenBlog reader application, we'll apply more AJAX techniques to interact with the OpenMail API.

A few days back I wrote about using the OpenMail API in a simple server-side implementation using ColdFusion. Today, we'll use a mix of server and client side development to update an HTML/CSS based control with the new mail count for an AOL account.

Last Friday we created the shell of the user interface we'll be using for our AOL OpenBlog reader application using the Ext JS JavaScript libraries. Today we'll create a web service in ColdFusion to act as the data store.

If you've been following this blog for the past few weeks, you're more than familiar with the ongoing development of the AOL.Journals CFC, a ColdFusion implementation of the AOL OpenBlog API. We'll be using this as the core data source for the two main user interface components we've already developed using Ext JS, the Select a blog... combo box control and the grid control used to display blog entry information. Since method calls to the AOL.Journals CFC generally return ColdFusion native data structures, we need to write a web service to transform the data to a flexible, friendly data format, JSON.

Following the path of working with the AOL OpenBlog API, today kicks off a two part series on creating a blog reader application using Ext JS, a powerful JavaScript library which simplifies AJAX development through the use of reusable objects and widgets.

Ext JS started as a group of extensions to the Yahoo! User Interface library (YUI) by Jack Slocum. With it's most recent release of version 2.0, it's one of the simplest and most powerful JavaScript libraries on the market.

The recent introduction of the OpenMail API is the latest addition to AOL's set of messaging and communication APIs. This post will walk through the process of accessing this API using ColdFusion 8.

Continuing our work interacting with the AOL Journals API, this post will demonstrate how to control access to your private blogs using the AOL.Journals CFC.