Subpacket.com

So I went for some training on Flash this week. Specifically, 2 days for an intro course for Flash. Now, I started with not knowing shit-all on working with flash movies.. Yeah, I’ve messed with the end result in web sites, ie placing the SWFs in documents, and even have some understanding of ActionScript thanks to some experience with Adobe Flex.. But other than that, creating animations and working with the Flash environment totally mystified me..

Until now…

Now that I have a better understanding of how Flash works, I’m… intrigued. As such, I am posting my most absolutely stellar n00b animation here. I hope you enjoy it.

Scotty

So I’ve been working on a little web app that talks to Bugzilla via PHP that, when finished, will be a custom interface to Bugzilla that’s more simplistic and easier to use than the generic Bugzilla install.

HOWEVER…

After building a nice generic class that handles communication between PHP and Bugzilla, I’ve learned all about Bugzilla’s LACK of decent server-to-server communication mechanisms. Yes, they have an XMLRPC interface that would be well-suited for this type of thing, but it’s largely incomplete and lacking some significant features such as search. I’ve discovered that many devs that have written apps to talk to Bugzilla use some interesting (and possibly problematic) work-arounds that post information to the same places that Bugzilla’s own HTML forms goto. The problem with this? Decent error handling. In order to get error handling from this thing, you gotta dig up the relevant tags of HTML, pull out the message and hope that this setup NEVER changes between various versions (which it may very well do).. In my opinion, this is totally gross and sheizer-like.

And the fact that I have no method of retrieving a list of classifications without actually physically querying the database is a bit of a deal-breaker for me.

So, I’m pondering writing my own back-end for this app.. Will it take a while? Probably… but as is with anything custom, it may take a while, but you’ll end up with something that fits your needs MUCH better than trying to shoe-horn an existing package into your current processes.

Bugzilla, I like you.. For bug tracking amongst devs, you’re excellent… But alas, you do not serve my needs in this case.