This is a bit of a combined effort as I worked with another Flash developer to complete work that another agency had begun. It’s an example of why good coding practices and project organisation are important because you never know when someone else might have to take over from you and just because you might be able to remember why something works in the most bizarre of ways, the next person won’t.
This project uses a drag-and-drop interface which allows customers to design their own utility trolley from a collection of components.
Not only is the project multilingual, which means that all of the captions and messages must be brought in from xml files, but all of the trolley components, options and positions are also fully customizable through a series of xml files.
There are also the perils of working with foreign character sets in xml, mysql, flash and php.
On the plus side, I discovered the amazing PHPExcel class which allows you to dynamically create Excel files, even embedding images. More impressive still is that you can do this with pre Excel 2007 files which didn’t even support open formats. An invaluable class that allows you to really push the functionality past the usual “download csv” option.
Check it out: http://taskitrolley.com/
