Credit for the production of this video goes to Rails Envy.

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.

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.”

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