Marshaling and Unmarshaling, Serializing and Deserializing, Encoding and Decoding, whatever you prefer to call it, converting XML to an ActionScript object and back again can be a real chore. It’s a process that typically involves a lot of code to manage the points of connection between the AS object and the underlying XML representation. I’ve utilized various solutions to this problem in different projects: manipulating XML as the object changes via getters/setters, updating the XML in a bulk process with a toXML() function, or sometimes a combination of both. None of these solutions ever felt quite right. But short of convincing every backend developer that I work with to implement an AMF API, I couldn’t come up with a viable solution. I was stuck writing code to perform tasks that I didn’t think should be a part of my application’s core functionality.

Being a developer, and therefore lazy, I didn’t want to write my own library to perform marshaling/unmarshaling if someone else had already done so. I started searching on Google Code and Source Forge, and I found a couple of projects that did kind of what I wanted, but not exactly. FlexXB and FlexB were close, but I decided to write my own implementation.

So that brings us to ActionScript XML Binding (ASXB), which, while not a pure ActionScript implementation, could become one quite easily. Only a few classes from the Flex framework are utilized and are mostly logging classes. The other important Flex framework class is the mx.rpc.http.HTTPService, which I’ve extended as both a class to be instantiated in ActionScript (org.orpheus.xml.bind.XMLService) and an MXML extension (org.orpheus.xml.bind.mxml.XMLService). The XMLService class provides automatic handling of XML/ActionScript encoding and decoding.

This is the 0.1 release of ASXB, give it a try, and let me know what you think.

Fresh out of the Arc90 Lab: SqlWatcher.

SqlWatcher lets you use your web browser to query a SQL Server 2005/2008 database. Big deal so far. But after returning your results to you, SqlWatcher watches the database and notifies you instantly when your query results change, re-running your query and appending the latest results to your web browser as needed. And it does it without polling or leaving connections open.

Is it magic? Only if you think Query Notifications, SqlDependency, and Service Broker are magic. But they can be hard to use. At least, before SqlWatcher.

It’s free and BSD. Please leave your feedback in the comments.

The full text of Moby Dick fully annotated using Sidenotes.  An interesting use of Sidenotes, and one that I can assure you was never envisioned!

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about Yammer. Winners of the TechCrunch 50 prize, Yammer (and others) are reinventing microblogging as an enterprise communication tool.

Is the enterprise ready for the social networking revolution? Sure, services such as LinkedIn have been targeting the corporate demographic for a while, but these services mainly involve networking outside company walls. Yammer is pitching the usefulness of social networking inside a company or an organization.

The networking aspect of the application allows Yammer to get a foot in the door through grassroots initiative. Anyone can open an account for free. This gives enthusiastic and tech-savvy employees a chance to make the pitch to their coworkers. Once the value has been proven, companies may elect to pay for additional features, including the ability to limit access to a range of IP addresses, or a company VPN.

Several of us at Arc90 are already appreciating the benefits of the Yammer service. While the wide world of Twitter may not particularly care that you are in a meeting until 12:30, your coworkers might find that information tremendously useful.

Of course, we’re not the sort of people who leave well enough alone, so we’ve already started thinking of ways to integrate Yammer with our own internal tools and services. Fortunately, Yammer has launched an API precisely for this purpose. We’ll be keeping an eye on the API as it evolves (it’s currently listed as a beta service), but we’re happy to announce the release of a PHP API Client library over on the lab.