Simeon Says

Ok, I surf the web all day, just about everday and this is the coolest site i have seen in months iFizzle is the personal website of yanathin. A genious as far as i am concerned.

This is something I have been doing for quite a while so I can attest to how wonderful it is. I seem to always “intend” to write an article that outlines how to set up and get started, but never seem to find time.

Well this morning over on theserverside I found a link to a great article on IBM’s site that outlines how to do this. Its a great step by step and even includes pictures. Its a great way to get aquainted with subclipse. Check it out here - How to use Subversion with Eclipse

I have posted my experiences in getting the SDK compiling via Ant in the past. When I pulled down the final release of the sdk I was unable to get my ant script working. I assumed it was because the command line options had changed ( they had between every other release) and decided to look into it more when I had time.

Well I need to look no further. Chris Griffith posted over on John Barrets blog about a solution. In this post John explains the the problem is related to an xml configuration change that needs to happen in the flex-config.xml of your sdk.

This fix is very simple. Just add this code on line 117 of your flex-config.xml just inside the end fonts tag.


macFonts.ser


Registration opens for MAX 2006 today, and along with that comes the agenda. Now that the cats out of the bag, I want to invite everyone to come on out and see me at the conference. I will be presenting an “Introduction to CFEclipse” at the conference this year. If you are new to Eclipse or want to see what all this CFEclipse fuss is about this is a great session to find out more.

I am very excited to have been invited to speak at the conference. I was given the opportunity to fill in as a speaker last year, but I would much rather give my own presentation. I really like giving this presentation and have been very lucky to present it at CF.Objective and CFUNITED as well as for several Adobe User Groups.

After some prodding from friends I am finally getting around to writing about this. I am a ColdSpring user and a big fan of the simplicity it brings to the implementation of my business logic. Primarily ColdSpring is an IoC ( Inversion of Control) framework for CF. What that means is rather than your code having to worry about how to instantiate its dependant objects, you just explain the dependencies in an xml file and then ColdSpring wires it up for you.

However there is another really important “aspect” that ColdSpring makes available to us. That is AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming). What AOP does is allow us to inject or wrap addional functionality around our business logic. The best part is this happens without the (already well tested) business logic knowing its even happening. The particular piece of AOP that I am going to focus on for this post is the RemoteFactoryBean. We will come back to how this works later but what the RemoteFactoryBean allows you to do is generate the remote facade layer for your service. And with AOP in conjunction with that you can “massage” the data into the appropriate format for your consumer ( Flex2, spry? ).

I am safely returned from CFUnited 06. I got back last last night, and was happily greeted by my beautiful wife, and bouncing dogs.

Getting up this morning was a bit hard. It doesnt take long to get used having your friends close at hand. I came down the steps and looked around for Maxim to see if he wanted to get breakfast, but he wasnt there. So I went downstairs to see if Mark was watching soccer. I checked the beer fridge but scott was no where to be found. I went back to the living room to see if joe was around, but I guess he was off writing a framework or something. I thought for sure Andy would be near the liquor cabinet, but I found the bottles lonely.

It took me a full cup of coffee to realize that I didnt have any of my CF buddies close at hand anymore, and I was actually a little bit sad. I really am so happy to be home, but I am disappointed that its over already. I look forward to these conferences all year, and Its amazing to have the opportunity to have all the most important people in our community together in one place.

I got soooooooo much done this week. And by so much done, I mean I ran around coming up with code problems so that while I had people at hand they could help me sort things out. My big push this week has been Unit Testing. After attending John Paul Ashenfelters sessions, I knew I was probably the most important step I was missing from my development proccess. I talked to him about unit testing and how to write better tests. Then I figured out how to load up coldspring with Model-Glue from outside the application so i could test my model with the correct components. This is also nessicary for allowing me to use flash remoting against my busines model that is tied to a Model-Glue application. Then i worked on getting John Paul’s cfcUnit Ant task to work from inside eclipse. Which on the last day I was successful in.

Beyond that I also presented on CFEclipse at the conference. I was in the second biggest ballroom, and if I dont say so myself, it was pretty packed ( I even through out a few friends who deserved to spend their time learning something in other good sessions). By chair count and my (totally unofficial ) guess that the room was about 80% full meaning there were about 400 people in there. The presentation went pretty well I think and I spent a long time after the preso helping people with specific questions and installation help. I think the community is very excited and supportive of the project.

Beyond that I spent the week talking with people about dozens of topics, and I promised to blog more info about alot of things. However, I remember promising to write about a bunch of topics, but i dont remember what many of them were. So if you really want me to write about something that we talked about at the conference, then post a comment about it here and remind me And beyond that, if we spent time talking at the conference please dont be afraid to stay in touch, I can always be reached: simeon at simb dot net.

Thats all for now folks, gotta spend some time with my wonderful wife!