Pagination of Flex MVC Frameworks

Yes, I realize the title makes absolutely no sense, but really, you should be used to that by now.

Pagination (Node) has a new release (6.x-1.2), and you can read all about the fun additions there.

One feature I was unable to implement was clean URL's. If you recall, I had decided on exploring the possibility of using the hash symbol to get around content using Drupal's Path module. (ie, "/custom-title/#page2"). I'm embarrassed to say it doesn't look like that's possible, as server side languages do nott pick up the value of the hash in a URL.

In my (admittedly weak) defense, I faintly recall realizing, and apparently, promptly forgetting that fact, quite awhile ago.

In any case, I've lately been siding with the voices that suggest strict adherence to Clean URL's may not necessarily be the best approach. I'm not at all suggesting we don't change something like "?section=Blog&page=8&category=PHP" into something more user-friendly, but if the scenario is similar to this, is there really a huge difference between "/article/#page2" and "/article?page2"?

When it comes down to it, I'd prefer a clean URL approach, due to my pedantic nature, so I'll keep thinking about a way to incorporate that. However, I have a feeling that it's looking like it may mean suggesting a few patches to Drupal core.

MVC and other such TLA's

The whole reason for the pagination module in the first place, was that the functionality did not exist in Drupal 6. My little foray has spurred the Drupal 5 paging module developer to update his (I don't think he's particularly impressed with me). In essence though, it's competition, which is probably a good thing. From what I can tell, I believe we have a pretty different approach to how we develop, and how we choose to incorporate features.

Which brings me too: I've been considering writing a tutorial for building a bare bones MVC framework in PHP, complete with relevant design patterns and explaining how they work. (And as such, was looking for a way to support longer articles. See, it's all relevant.)

One thing that frustrated me back in the day was getting examples beyond the incredibly basic ones that are typically used (I have a feeling I've been guilty on this a few times).

I think a lot will remember the joys of basic OOP:

    $car = new Car();
    $car->drive();  // putter

    $car2 = new Porsche();
    $car2->drive(); // vroom!

So I thought I'd mention that now, mainly to commit myself to actually doing the tutorial series.

Flex

The most recent Drupal user group meeting involved a presentation on Flex/Adobe AIR. I had heard Flex was being moved to open source, and was a bit chagrined to find out that the first release of Flex 3 was in February. So either, I've been living under a rock (half possible), or their marketing hasn't really done a super effective job (possible too!)

I tried to get into Flash way back in the day, before the language was officially Action Script. As I apparently don't deal with timelines very well, I found it pretty frustrating to get anything done.

Getting a quick overview on Flex and the possibilities of Adobe AIR though, has re-ignited my interest somewhat. I may take a closer look and see if I can get into some Flex development on the side.

The move to open source should help brace Adobe for the Silverlight onslaught that I imagine Microsoft is planning. I've yet to see freeware/shareware Flex based development environments though, perhaps it's not worth the development time with Flex being relatively inexpensive, or perhaps my versiontracker.com search skills are severely lacking.