A friend of mine IM’d me with a link to this hilarious video, done in the spirit of the Apple Mac VS. PC ads. Now don’t read to much into my posting this on my blog, I like both of these technologies and I’m not choosing sides here. I just like funny when I see it. Video after the jump… Read more…
I just got out of the 360 Flex day 3 keynote, lots of great information (more on that later). At the end of the keynote Ebay announced the immediate availability of an AS3 library for its services.
“The eBay ActionScript 3.0 library provides an interface between the eBay XML API and ActionScript 3.0. This open-source library will allow developers to create novel and innovative applications leveraging both eBay’s marketplace services and Adobe’s Flash Player 9 runtime! It is written in ActionScript 3.0, so any environment using ActionScript 3.0 can use this library, including Adobe Flex 2 and Adobe Flash Pro 9.”
You can download beta 1 from http://adobe.com/go/ebaylibrary/
The 360 Flex conference has been terrific, I’ve been learning a ton and meeting some really nice people. I really wanted to blog more during the conference but the wireless at Ebay Town Hall has been hammered with use (go figure!) and evenings have been full to say the least. I’ll try and get some posts done while sitting in the airports this evening. Anyways, on to the tip.
Yesterday I sat in on a session by Ted Patrick, he covered MXML vs. AS3. It was a very informative session and I learned a lot about MXML under the covers. Ted showed a compiler argument that directs Flex Builder to save the generated AS3 code to a folder in your project root.
Try this; Open your project properties, select Flex Compiler, then in the Additional Compiler Arguments add “-keep” (no quotes). When you recompile your project you’ll see a new “generated” folder in the project root, all of the generated AS3 code for the project is in there. So if you have a main.mxml file in your project the generated code would be in main-generated.as.
I wanted to share just in case I’m not the last one to learn about this 
You can learn a lot by looking at the generated code.
Enjoy!
P.S. My favorite session so far has been Flex Builder Secrets, I pulled numerous productivity tips out of that one. More on that later.
In this post I’ll explain how to assign an Eclipse editor to a specific file by name.
Why is this necessary? This blog is running on Machblog Beta 2. Machblog obfuscates the the MachII configuration file by adding a .cfm extension to the file, so it ends-up being mach-ii.xml.cfm. This technique is highly effective, simple and widely accepted. Perfect right? Almost, there’s a fly in the ointment and you’ll see it when you attempt to edit the file in Eclipse.
Until today editing an XML file disguised as a CFM file in Eclipse was a little tricky because Eclipse (like most IDE’s) maps the file extension to the editor, so in this case Eclipse tries to use CFEclipse to edit an XML file. The result (since CFEclipse doesn’t do XML) is a plain old editor with no syntax highlighting and no code insight etc. etc.
Now admittedly this is not a huge problem, more of an annoyance really. Enough of one that today I got to thinking there must be a way, and there is.
In the Eclipse file association editor you can map an entire file name to an editor. So in my case I mapped mach-ii.xml.cfm to the Aptana XML Editor. Re-opened the file and whalla it worked! I tried mapping *.xml.cfm but that didn’t work for some reason. Click on the pic above and you’ll get the gist of what I did.
Enjoy!
[Update]
Brian Kotek Posted the following comment on 3/1/07
“You should also just be able to add another editor to the associated editors list for .cfm files, and then when you open the file instead of double clicking it, right click, choose open with, and choose the XML editor.”
Looks like Adobe is going to widen the testing for ColdFusion 8 (Scropio). You can sign-up to test ColdFusion 8 Scorpio here.
For a few days now Mark Drew et al have been teasing us about a mystery “it” that is coming in a few days. There’s been quite a bit of speculation across the blogosphere about what “it” is.
At first I thought Mark was hyping the long awaited 1.3 release of CFEclipse but as the events unfold I’m beginning to think there’s more to this then a dot release of CFEclipse. I’m beginning to suspect Adobe is the puppet master pulling the strings here.
Today Adobe announced an open sign-up for the Scorpio Beta. Curious timing don’t you think? The Beta is not available yet but (I’m guessing) it will be in a few days, about the same time we’re supposed to find out what “it” is. I wonder if there won’t be a little surprise in the Beta downloads, maybe a new ColdFusion IDE based on CFEclipse?
Does this level of viral marketing fit with the dot release of a product that for the most part has been available via SVN for awhile? I don’t think it does. No I think the Java gurus at Adobe have been hard at work building a sibling for Flex Builder.
Of course this is all rampant speculation on my part. Time will reveal the truth.
Tags: ColdFusion
Maybe I'm missing something here (I sincerely hope I am). After reading Ben's post on the new CF Demo I was all fired up to try it for myself. This is the greeting I received when I attempted to run the plug-in.
If the ColdFusion/Flex Application Wizard is indeed Windows specific then I can accept that because I'm sure that there's a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Just in case anyone is curious about my environment, I'm running FlexBuilder 2.01 as an Eclipse 3.2 plug-in and yes I disabled and uninstalled the old extension before adding the new one.
