I'm about to make a 3D Rubik's cube based game in Flash AS3 and Away3d.

I don't really know how to manage the 2D arrays of the Rubik's cube.

For example, how do I rotate the corresponding arrays if I rotate a side, or just rotate a middle part?

In this stage I also don't know how to rotate those smaller cube parts all together if a side is rotating. First I was thinking of "groups" ( like in sketchup or 3ds max, blender), but that would be tricky, because the group components would change every time.

So I was thinking of just rotating each individual piece along a global axis. However, I just know the Away3d functions to rotate the cube of his local X , Y or Z axis, but how to rotate in global axis?

Does anyone know of a algorithm for doing these types of rotations?