Flex 5 day Course – Day 1
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Today was the first day of a 5 day course on flex, led by the illustrious Robin Hilliard. It’s already shaping up to be a great course – naturally a lot of today was intro stuff but we still got into the event management, bubbling events and data binding, all of which are very exciting. Skipping ahead slightly in the manual I can see some interesting things coming up which I’m looking forward to.
It’s a small group – just 10 of us plus Robin in the training room at the Adobe offices, and the environment makes it great for asking questions. Most of the people in the room are pretty advanced which is a big plus as we get into some more interesting discussions than might otherwise be the case.
Flex is soooo nice, and I’ve only scratched the surface of it. I’d encourage anyone in the industry to give it a look – even just for small time front end bits and pieces. However the ActionScript 3 language is really nice, and along with the power that comes with flexbuilder (it genuinely IS worth the money!) actionscript / flex is definitely a serious application development platform.
At once point we had a discussion about “target” and “currentTarget” as related to bubbling events, and Robin mentioned that “there need to be a few more blog articles written about it” so I thought I’d have a crack 
However since I was out of bed at 0400 this morning with a grand 3,5 hours sleep I may not get to it tonight. If not, then probably tomorrow.
Ok, I’m off to fiddle with some RIA shinyness!
Shirt tearingly good fun
A brief escape – kicking the football around with my son, B (real football, you know – with a round ball) having lots of fun I managed to slip over in some dry dirt. Which was fine. But getting back up I overbalanced, being the smooth, suave individual that I am, and managed to fall into a bush, one prong of which gave me a lovely little gash up my back and tore my nice new shirt open Of course it’s the shirt I was planning to wear on monday to the first day of the flex course! Ah well, Robin will have to settle for my second best shirt.
Meet Mr Orange Monkey
I have often wanted to do similar sites myself but never gotten around to it. Here’s a site that will be enjoyed by all those of you who collect monitor toys and random office junk
Vista is not an OSX ripoff
Excellent pair of spoof videos. The second one in particular is brilliant, shows someone using osx functionality synced to the audio of the windows vista demo videos
- update – Yes, it would help if I attached the link for the videos wouldn’t it…
Flex Data Services on OSX
Having gotten cfmx / jrun happily running on my Macbook Pro I needed to get Flex data services next. I scrounged around and found a couple of examples on the web then mucked about with it myself – here’s what I ended up doing (assumes you have jrun installed):
1. Browse to jrun admin server (localhost:8000) and use the console to create a new server.
2. Call the new server flex.
3. Open up a terminal, and execute the following command to set the permissions for the new server:
chmod -R 775 /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex4. Test the new server by executing the following on the command line:
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.4.2/Home/bin/java -server -Djava.awt.headless=true -jar /Applications/JRun4/lib/jrun.jar -start flex5. You may get some warnings etc but it should start successfully – once it does, kill it (CTRL+C should do it)
6. Download the windows installer for flex data services express.
7. On a windows machine, or a virtual machine, run the installer, choosing the “Flex Data Services J2EE Web Application” option (leave everything else as the default)
8. Copy c:\fds2\flex.war, c:\fds2\flex-admin.war and c:\fds2\samples.war to your flex server at /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex
9. Execute the following commands to create directories and move the war files into them:
mkdir /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex/flex
mkdir /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex/flex-admin
mkdir /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex/samples
cp /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex/flex.war /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex/flex/
cp /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex/flex-admin.war /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex/flex-admin/
cp /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex/samples.war /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex/samples/10. Execute the following commands to extract each of the war files:
cd /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex/flex
jar -xvf flex.war
cd /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex/flex-admin
jar -xvf flex-admin.war
cd /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex/samples
jar -xvf samples.war11. As mentioned here, there is a bug to do with the commons-logging.properties file. Fix it like so:
cp /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex/samples/WEB-INF/flex/jars/commons-
logging.properties /Applications/JRun4/servers/flex/samples/WEB-INF/classes/commons-logging.properties12. Start our shiny new flex server:
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.4.2/Home/bin/java -server -Djava.awt.headless=true -jar /Applications/JRun4/lib/jrun.jar -start flex13. Test by browsing to localhost:8301 (or whatever port your new flex server is set to use - check it in the JRun admin console). You should receive the message "Welcome to JRun4!".
14. Test the flex install by browsing to localhost:8301/flex and you should see a simple welcome page saying "Welcome to Adobe Flex Data Services 2!"
You're done! You can look at the flex management/monitoring console by visiting localhost:8301/flex-admin and the sample apps at localhost:8301/samples
Coldfusion / jrun on macbook pro (intel)
I got cf running locally on my intel macbook pro today using this fantastic guide
I’ve up to now been running everything on virtual machines, but I thought it might be useful to have a quick and easy local install for the sake of the courses and conferences I’m going to attend in the next couple of months. Now to get FDS installed!
Tech blogging
I’ve found myself in the very lucky position of having a project that is going to require me to research and work with a number of things I’ve been wanting to spend more time on for ages, so I’ve decided to get back to the technical blogging.
Over the next little while, I’ll be exploring Flex, Reactor / Transfer, Model-Glue, Mach-II, Rapide, Apollo and various other fun bits and pieces. I thought I might as well blog my experiences and opinions in the meantime – so keep an eye out for news of my upcoming travails
New design (again)
As you can see I’ve changed the blog design again – I got this one from open source web design, a fantastic web site giving loads of templates for web layout which are totally free. This one I’ve modified slightly is called “Deliciously Blue” by Super J Man. Nice and clean, and will allow a little more flexibility.
Podcasts
I’ve been listening to a few of these lately and am finding them very valuable – particularly the coldfusion weekly and Hal Helms and Jeff Peters’ “Out Loud”. They great to have on the ipod for those times when I’m waiting around for something, and I’m starting to listen to them while I’m walking too – great way to keep up with things and regularly learn a little more.
World of Warcraft
It seems I’m going to have to give up the online gaming again. I tried it for a while, and even though I wasn’t getting heavily involved with online politics and guilds etc, I’m still wasting too much time on the game. It’s a great escape, and it’s just too easy to sink time into it whenever I feel likke getting away – at least when I’m reading a book or something I’m a little more sociable
I love the game and would really like to explore all the detail of it, develop a few new characters and have a go at end game stuff and the expansion pack, but I just can’t justify the time. I find myself playing the game when I shouldn’t be and I just don’t have the time to waste at the moment. So sad to say, I’ll be giving up WoW again. Don’t know how long for, or if it will be permanent but I just have too many other things I’d be better spending my time on.
So farewell sweet warlock.