Simeon Says

Although I love the Mac OS X inteface, I love even more that there are tons of cool things you can do to customize that interface. Here are a list of the Tips to customize the interface.

A couple of the tips are really cool, like making apps that are hidden partially transparent on the dock. Another cool thing I always loved about linux was being able to set my screensaver as my desktop background. Not all that functional, but still a really neat trick.

Beyond that if you really want to see some tips on how to control your mac from the Terminal check out the “Terminal Tips” on the Mac OS X Tips website.

So you are a budding flex developer who likes to play with new things. You saw the announcement for the new beta of LiveCycle Data Services 2.5 on Adobe Labs and you want to play with some of the new features. So you walk your mac right on over to the LCDS 2.5 Download Page to get the installer. But wait! There is no mac installer? Now what do you do.

Fear not young budding developer. I will help you over this obstacle. The platform specific installers all come with a built in version of jrun. And without a platform installer we will have to make do with our own. This is easy enough. Since Apache Tomcat 5.5 is one of the supported platforms for use with Data Services we are gonna use it instead. So we go ahead and download the binary files of Tomcat 5.5 and download either the zip file or the tar.gz. Now back on the Adobe Labs site we grab the generic java installer of LiveCycle Data Services. Now we have everything we need to get started.

We start by installing Tomcat. This is a simple as expanding the archive we downloaded. Now for convenience sake we are going to want to put that somewhere easy to get to. Like maybe move it to Applications and rename it tomcat.

Now we can run the installer for LC DS by running our installer. Just double click the jar we downloaded and we will get an installer. Pick a location of your choosing. All this will do is give us the files we need.

With LCDS installed we need to go to the directory where we installed it and we will see that we have a flex.war file in there. This is our LiveCycle Data Services server. We are going to copy that and then paste a copy of it into the webapps directory of our tomcat folder. In finder we are going to rename that from flex.war to flex.zip and then double-click it. This will create a flex folder in this directory. Now we can delete the zip file from here.

Just like that we now have LiveCycle Data Services installed into tomcat. So lets test our installation. We need to start our tomcat server so we are going to drop to the command line (open Terminal its in the utilities folder in Applications) and type this.


/Applications/tomcat/bin/startup.sh


Then you can load http://localhost:8080/flex/ in your browser to see the FDS Template home page. Now you can create a project in flex builder for FDS using this location for the screen about your Flex Server. And now you are cooking with gas!

I’ll start this post by quoting myself while talking about my mac last week, I said “Windows free since 2003″. Although technically that is when I received my first Mac. I had been running Linux as my primary OS for a year and a half before that. I made the choice to abandon the familiar windows environment for a platform that allowed me to make decisions for myself about how and what programs I use. I quickly learned to enjoy these freedoms and knew I would never go back to the restrictions imposed by the Microsoft programs. I was willing to give up “pretty programs” and even in some cases better functionality to have a level of freedom not offered on that platform. With the advent of OSX Apple chose to use a unix base for their platform. This always intrigued me but it was not enough to pull me away from linux. When OSX Panther was release and included Expose I finally found something offered in OSX that I couldn’t have in any of my linux flavors. Although I was accepting another OS overload and I could not compile my kernel any more, I found that the reasons for doing that were not needed. OSX offered the unix under pinnings with a wonderful GUI, and I immediately fell in love.

When I talk to people about my mac and I show them my computer there are 2 things they always notice. The first is my use of virtual desktops and the neat effects I display when switching. The second thing they notice is that I always have a terminal window open and that when copying and opening files I use that instead of the finder. I love the terminal and I use it extensively to get things done.

People often think this is neat but dont know where to get started in learning more about terminal. I also usually dont know where to direct them. However yesterday I found myself on the BASH website. BASH is the shell that provides the command line interface for the mac terminal. And on their website that list a set of neat tips for dealing with the CLI. If you have wanted to learn more about the terminal and werent sure how to get started I recommend you start with the BASH tutorial pages.

Since your flex applications run on the flash platform this seems like one of those no brainer type items. The problem comes in the fact that our flex applications utilize the new AVM 2 (actionscript virtual machine) thats available to us because we use the Flash Player 9 plugin. All our currently available Flash IDE generation tools still target the Flash 8 and earlier plugins. Technically we can use these 2 technologies together at the same time but then run in seperate AVM’s in the player. So to facilitate the communication between the 2 we have to go to some pretty creative uses of external communication.

Not being a person who enjoys the timeline focused development practices of traditional Flash development, this is not something I have spent a lot of time on personally. However I am always curious about these things as you never know when new requirements in a project will cause us to need this type of interaction.

Luckily both Jesse Warden and Grant Skinner took the time to tell us about some solutions to these problems at the recent 360Flex conference in San Jose. Back in December Jesse wrote an article about Integrating a Flash Interface into Flex 2. And today Grant posted about his “shake and bake” method of creating this interaction.

If the interaction of Flex and Flash is something you need to manage I have to recommend these articles for your perusal.

At 360Flex we asked how long it would be until we could play with Apollo. They kept telling us soon. Soon? Well they did in fact mean soon. Today Adobe released the first public alpha of Apollo to the labs wiki site.

Apollo is a new technology from Adobe that will allow web developers to use all their traditional tools (html, ajax and flash) to bring desktop applications to their users. Its a very exciting step for us and I challenge you to look at how Apollo can add new abilities to your web application.

Turns out I am gonna be in the city this week. I appear to have missed by the NY CFUG and Flex by a week. So are there any other Geek Get togethers that I should hit?

I also noticed that AJAXworld is next week. So maybe some of my non-NYC friends might be around? Drop me a line simeon [at] simb dot net and maybe we can set something up.

So I made a pretty big deal out of Ryan spotting’s at 360Flex. But lets get this straight, this is Mr Friggin RIA! Ryan makes it his job to be were he can get the scoop on all the good RIA goodness and tell us about it on his blogs, both personal and professional. I really feel like when I spot him in a group, that is the spot to be.

But Ryan was not the only person that I saw at the conference who I was super happy to have visited with. This conference was a chance for me to try to make in-road with the flash-erati as well. I finally met Jesse Warden in the flesh. I met Renaun Erikson and Grant Skinner. I got to listen to Ely Greenfield talk about components! I mean heck I cant even name all the rockin adobe folks that were there.

I got to see Ben Forta again, and a bunch of my CF buddies from Bend OR (Jen,Randy,Tom, and new friend Becky). Even Jared came out for the flexiness. What really amazes me is the number of new flex/cf friends i made, like my new best friend John Wilker. I had such a great time sitting out in the comfy chairs and talking with folks about all manner of topics.

I also was inspired to blog more. To be honest sometimes I don’t feel like my blog contributes much, but I had so many people make references to obscure entries I wrote that I really felt I must be doing something right.

But enough about me. What I am really curious about is who were you excited to meet. Or what conversation just blew your socks off? I am curious to hear about amazing experience at 360. So blog it, comment here, or shout it in a podcast, but lets everyone know how cool it was to be apart of the first official flex-only conference!

ps. If you say me then I will know you are teasing me about my very serious and sincere blog post and I will probably cry

Is there a word for the feeling you get when a bus rushes past you and you are standing in the wake of the air wooshing all around you? If there is that is what I am feeling.

What an amazing 3 days! I cant believe how much fun I had, friends I met and things I learned about Flex.

As far as the conference goes it was nice that Ebay hosted it. Town Hall felt like a perfect place for a conference. Good rooms, good space, and a nice pond to hang out by and chat. As great as the content at this conference was, I am almost ashamed to say the thing that really put this conf above the rest for me was the food. Yes I said food. Jeez I ate well. the morning pastries were fresh, lunch was the bomb ( right jen? the meatballs were great), and the BBQ was delicious.

I feel like I spend a good amount of time at conferences over the last few years, and the fact that this one was a bit smaller was really nice. I am pretty sure I was at least part of a discussion with every one at that conference. I think smaller regional conferences that keep the tech high and the body count low is totally the wave of the future.

Giant thanks to Tom Ortega, John Wilker, Ted Patrick and all the sponsors for making this event great. But really, thanks to all the people who attended because this conference would have been really boring all by myself

Its been very quiet on this blog the last month. Dont think I didn’t notice. Its not that I haven’t wanted to blog. Its not that I haven’t had anything to say. I have just been…well…putting off the inevitable.

I think its _ESSENTIAL_ that we as developers continue relentlessly to learn new things. I have been doing CF development for almost 9 years and I have always strived to be at the top of my game. Learning about different programming styles and frameworks. I have been doing Flex work for almost 2 years, and although that was certainly something new, it never felt that new. I was familiar with Actionscript from flash development, and although MXML was completely new, how new can an XML language really be? That was in Flex 1/1.5. Then I converted to Flex 2. Got really familiar with the SDK, and then Flex Builder and Flex Data Services. I even went so far as to become a certified instructor so I could share my excitement about these products with others. But it just didn’t feel all that new.

Its been along time since I did something with code that didnt rotate around technologies created by Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe. But this year I broke free. This year I have been learning Ruby. Of course I am learning in order to take advantage of the Rails framework, but I want to learn ruby as well. Although I have been a *nix guy for a long time I have never really bothered to learn any shell scripting languages. Ruby can fill that spot for me. But even beyond that through the wonderful work of the WebOrb folks, its a great backend for Flex 2 applications.

This last week I deployed my first Flex application that uses Ruby on Rails as a backend. The flex part worked just like any other application I would write. This application is a business valuation calculator that just needed to store the results in a database. I thought this small application would be a great time to test flex and RoR together. I was very impressed with the results and have no doubt I will keep this as an option for future projects.

I am not abandoning CF. Its still my primary language for web apps, and with Scorpio coming the functionality makes Ruby look like a second class citizen. I love ColdFusion and I have felt so guilty through this whole process. Its why I didnt blog as I went. I felt like I was cheating on CF

I am gonna post a bit more about my experiences with Flex and RoR in the next week. I am not a Ruby expert by any means, I would be happy to try to answer any questions about how Flex communicates with it, so feel free to drop those in the comments.