Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

A friend of mine asked me if I knew anyone that would like to apply for the following job:

A small, relatively new company that has been set up as a sister company to a leading new media agency. Both companies work closely together and both have recently won new clients and have exciting growth and development plans and potential. Due to our size, culture and approach to client service we are looking for candidates who can demonstrate an ability to multi task, work under own steam from brief to completion and who are committed to delivering work that works. We would ideally like someone who can work on own initiative in Flash, Flash Lite 2 (nice to have), HTML, CSS, ASP. The emphasis would be on Flash but must have an eye to dynamic data driven content and applications, through to flash based sales presenters, banners etc. They will need an eye for design (though often design is provided), lateral thought, motion and interactivity when it comes to Flash. In an ideal world they would also have an understanding of .Net or at least what can be done with it. Must have lots of energy, passion and dedication to the job in hand. As a company we will be moving towards dynamic applications which may encompass Adobe Air, Flex etc. in the future. Salary level: circa £35K with possibility of share options

Don't send me details, you can email them

I had a little play this morning with Apollo and Flex, and I apologize to all you Flexers out there, I haven't as yet had the time to REALLY get into Flex, so all of this is really obvious to you all. Anyway, I made a little browser implementation, you can load a URL and browse as you normally would, but if you have bad eyesight (as I do at 6 am) its nice to be able to zoom into the web page, hence zoomBrowser! The code for this is really simple: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:ApolloApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" height="700" width="800">

<mx:Script>
   <![CDATA[
      private function loadURL():void{
         htmlBrowser.location = locationBar.text;
      }
   ]]>
</mx:Script>
   <mx:HTML id="htmlBrowser" right="10" left="10" bottom="30" top="40" scaleX="{zoomSlider.value}" scaleY="{zoomSlider.value}"/>
   <mx:HSlider id="zoomSlider" right="10" bottom="10" minimum="0.5" value="1" maximum="3" snapInterval="0.1" liveDragging="true"/>
   <mx:TextInput id="locationBar" text="http://" right="59" left="50" top="10" enter="loadURL()"/>
   <mx:Button label="Go" id="goButton" right="10" top="10" click="loadURL()"/>
   <mx:Label text="URL:" left="10" top="10"/>
   <mx:Label text="Zoom:" right="178" bottom="5"/>
   
</mx:ApolloApplication> There are two functions, loadURL and zoomBrowser. LoadURL is called either when you press enter in the mx:TextInput field or when you click on the "Go" button. The mx:HTML item is simply bound to the slider and it resizes with the values. Amazing that you can build such a complicated app (if you think about it) with so few lines of code! Download and unzip and give it a whirl (you need to download the Apollo runtime from Adobe Labs)

I know Eclipse 3.3 hasn't been released, yet, but I was looking at the latest stream build's notes on what is new and noteworthy and I found a few things that might be of interest to people that use CFEclipse and have had some bugs or issues with it. Mozilla everywhere Mozilla can now be used as the underlying browser control on Windows and OS X, providing that you have XULRunner installed and registered. To use this just create your Browser with the SWT.MOZILLA style. This means we can set the default internal browser to use Mozilla, which means (if I am reading it correctly) we could include Firebug and Ray's ColdFire. Open files with other editors You can now open files with editors that are not registered for the specific file extension. Right-click on your file and select Open with > Other. You will be presented with a list of editors to choose from. As it says, you can now choose what to edit those .tpl files (if you have made up a template extension) and quickly edit it in CFEclipse Text drag and drop in text editors It is now possible to drag and drop text to and from text editors This has been a long time coming. Spike implemented the drag and drop stuff in CFEclipse which has caused some problems with some users, and its a pain to have to implement something that should be part of the framework! Finally!!! (I breathe a sigh of relief) Configurable and extendable hyperlink detection Clients can use the org.eclipse.ui.workbench.texteditor.hyperlinkDetectors extension point to add their own detectors and can enable their viewers using the corresponding methods in the source viewer configuration along with the org.eclipse.ui.workbench.texteditor.hyperlinkDetectorTargets extension point One of the nightmares of adding CFC introspection and linking is simply adding the (simple) hyperlink for the objects and telling it what to do. All the solutions I have been looking at so far look like hacks, so this is a much neater way of doing it! Great stuff! Reading more into past Eclipse 3.3 (M4) releases, there are other things that will make some issues disappear from my little list too. Show invisible whitespace characters It is now possible to see the invisible whitespace characters in textual editors: Such as space, tab etc. I remember there was a bit of a conversation about this in the cfeclipse user list (did I mention it moved to google groups by the way?) Spell checking in text editor Spell checking is now also available in the text editor As it says on the tin! There are many other improvements, some of which affect more plug-in and Java developers than the CF Community and that will definitely make my life easier! I just love it when a product starts getting better and better! I am also thinking of dropping support for Eclipse 3.1 (as if I did a lot of support for it! I know, I know!) as soon as Eclipse 3.3 is released (which I think will be this summer). I know this will affect people using FlexBuilder standalone, but the easy work-around is to re-install it as a plug-in onto 3.2 so I hope it wont cause major issues.

This is a question to the community, I cant find any answers with my terrible Google skills, can you create a component in Flash and put it in Flex? I am thinking of making something that uses a lot of actionscript that would be easy(er) to do in Flash but can you then use that in Flex? Comments?

Ben Forta, Sean Corfield, Ray Camden, Spike Milligan in the house. Joe Rinehart, Doug Hughes, Simeon Bateman, Rob Rohan, Ollie Tupman in the house.
Jared Rypka-Hauer, Nathan Strutz,  Mike Nimer, Tim Buntel is out the house. 

Just a little sing song for all the people who have helped and taught me things about ColdFusion and CFEclipse along the way.

THANK YOU!
(Check out the song on )

Notice I didnt say CFEclipse? Anyway, in the latest round of plugins that Adobe has released, with the new CF/Flex Super Wizard they have also included the ColdFusion documentation under the help menu. This is great news for all you developers.

One strange thing I should point out. All these plugins which are labeled under "Flex" are actually very good Coldfusion plugins, the RDS data viewer (unless you are on a Mac, where you are stuffed if you want the Query Builder tool), the RDS File explorer, the RDS -> DAO/Active Rectod wizard and now the ColdFusion documentation. They are all branded under the labs as Flex and you have to click on the "Download Flex Builder" before you get to them. They are very handy even if you dont even touch Flex (like me)

I am now not sure what to do with the inline help for CFEclipse. If all the developers are using Flex Builder, and using all the CF extension/plugins then all is fine. If not, then we would have to deploy the CFHelp docs and add our own extension to go to the right help item. So you could then have two versions of the documentation, which is mad.

Adobe seem to be doing very well adding features to Flex (which are really very useful CF Features too). Now not sure if I should continue doing work on CFE, and just let them do it all.

If you have just got your clammy hands on the RDS plugin and installed it onto your Eclipse then got an error when you opened up a Quiery View, click on the details and if you see something like

"at org.springframework.ide.eclipse.beans.ui....."

it means you have myEclipse installed and it is clashing with the RDS plugin.  So you can disable (just momentarily I am sure) the myEclipse plugin by going to

Help -> Software Update -> Manage Configuration

There look for the myeclipse plugin and select it and click the disable link on the details.

Hope that helps

Finally they have released the RDS plugin for Eclipse. This is a great contribution from Macromedia Adobe to the community. I dont know if they will charge for it but it finally gives a GREAT feature back to the community for people using CFEclipse. The nice thing about the RDS plugin is that it allows you to browse datasources on registered Coldfusion services and (on windows only) use a familiar homesite style Query Builder. I have been using the RDS plugin for a while now and its fast, damn fast! And unlike other database plugins for Eclipse its very easy for the CF'er to set it up, since you dont need to add jdbc connection strings or driver classes.

The other feature of the RDS plugin is that you can browse the filesytem on an RDS server and edit the files (and if they are CFM files) in CFEclipse. A great combination!

Along side the RDS plugin there are some great wizards that allow you to create some DAO and Beans for each of the tables. Or you can choose to create an active record CFC. Its pretty damn awesome stuff if I may say so and it just shows how you can use CFEclipse + adobe plugins together in Eclipse as your single IDE of choice. (ok ok.. apart from the design part)

And yes... it all comes under the banner of Flex for some reason... but I guess that is just because you can also create Flex AS objects for your database tables.

A small warning though, I noticed that the RDS plugin doesnt seem to play nicely with the myEclipse plugin, I need to check iinto this issue more as to why that is and workarounds.

Yesterday, and the thrust of this morning's post was that I ws having problems getting data from a cf script from the flex swf's I was creating. The solution was to add a crossdomain.xml file to the root of my local server. This crossdomain file defines what hosts we will accept flash requests from. Check this page out for more details Macromedia Knowledge Base I am still left with the problem of not being able to view generated SWF's using http:// but only being able to run them from c:\Inetpub\wwwroot\yadda\something.swf Annoying isnt it? I coulddn't find anything that mentined that the swf's generated by Flex Builder are disabled in this manner.

Just in time for the MAX conference (where every other developer seems to be but me!) Macromedia release a new section on their site (like Google) with labs.macromedia.com, as a showcase of their up-coming products. One of the more interesting products for me is the Flex Builder 2. Formerly named Zorn it is an Eclipse based plugin that allows you to build flex applications as you would Java (write, compile, deploy as swf) rather than using the Flex server to do the compile and deploy for you (along with a hefty price tag!) I am using the plugin version of Flex Builder 2 which is a fantastic way to develop since I can have my CFC's in one window and the flex app in another and switch between them in one IDE. Pretty easy to develop, it builds automatically (as you would expect in eclipse) and you can both run and debug your applications. Awesome! I have some niggles tho: Firstly, is that the plugin is windows only. So I can only play with it at work. I don't understand why this is since (when writing the CFEcplipse plugin) I never encountered features that I had to make Windows only. Secondly, when running a flex app, it seems to run locally, from the file system (not from localhost) even when I changed the build paths for the project to run it through my webserver nothing runs in the swf. I am not sure if this is a limit on the alpha or something but there is nothing in the documentation. I am re-reading the following (Flex Wiki) and will let you know if this solves the problem. Seems to be that we have to create a Proxy to get it running. Any Ideas out there?