One of the big things that Ruby has going for it is the Rails framework which is the standard framework for Rails development.  PHP developers don't have it as easy when choosing a framework, because there hasn't been one framework that has taken the community by storm like Rails has.  I've personally tried a few of the frameworks out there and still have yet to decide which out of the ones I've tried I like best and if any framework suits  our current needs better than current homegrown methods.  I know that many other developers have contemplated this as well, so perhaps Jonathan Snook's thoughts can help shed some light on the issue.  If that doesn't narrow things down for you, then maybe I can complicate things by passing on the news that the Zend Framework Beta 0.9.0 has been released.

One of the pluses (well, or minuses) of working at a fast-paced interactive ad agency is that a lot of times, you will have to learn as you go. We recently worked on a Flex 2 project that required us to learn AS3 on the fly. By no means the learning curve was as steep as jumping from AS1 to AS2, but getting into AS3 wasn't exactly a walk-in-the-park either. I am sure there will be more and more resources on learning AS3 as we get closer to the release of Flash 9 and Apollo, but here are some of the resources we found useful during that process:

• Flash 9 Preview on Adobe Labs
• Adobe AS3 Language Reference
• AS2 to AS3 Migration Cheatsheet
• AS3 Tip of the Day
• AS3 Tutorial from Flashscript.biz
• Actionscript 3.0 Cookbook by Joel Lott

Also you might want to pick up Essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock when it comes out in June

Caught this bit of news from the Zend Developer Zone.  If you're a PHP developer near San Francisco or San Jose Adobe is holding a usability survey where they'll show you some of what they're working on and you can provide some input.  Besides the benefit of possibly making things easier for those of us working with PHP/Flash sites and getting a peek at Adobe's latest stuff they're also giving out $150 for your time.  The direct link to the survey can be found here.

Our favorite Flash tweening engine MC Tween is being updated to a more powerful and robust AS2 and AS3 extensions. Although it does not yet have all the nice extra features (like filter tween) like the old MC Tween, the new extensions do offer simplier and more structured syntax. So instead of using the old #include "mc_tween2.as" and

mc.tween("_x", 100, .3 , "easeInQuad");

we can start using aurina.transitions.Tweener, or just Tweener

Tweener.addTween(mc, {_x:10, time:.3, transition:"linear"});

We are big fan of MC Tween and are excited to see the next version. Meanwhile, examples, documentations and downloads are available here.

For the next phase of The Interior, we have to embed some of the online audition videos from YouTube. Instead of using the YouTube player widget, we were exploring the possibility to play the videos using our own skinned FLV player . There are sites like Keepvid that lets you retrieve the actual path to the FLV, and after poking around a bit, we ended up using the YouTube API and a PHP script to retrieve the YouTube video and play it in our own FLV player. YouTube has also recently changed their crossdomain.xml (you can read more about it here) so we had to use this script to proxy the request through our web server.

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