Written by Simon Bailey

I have been avidly attempting to learn Ruby and to begin with, found writing out simple code comparisons for each language helped me visualise how Ruby came together better. I thought these may prove useful to some other AS3 devs looking to have a play around with Ruby so am sharing them in this blog post. I will aim to update them over time and welcome input and suggestions. There are many resources out there for learning Ruby but for a quick overview I found Lukes post and Ruby in 20 minutes were great!

Written by Simon Bailey

In part one I will guide you on how to get the basics setup with Project Sprouts and IntelliJ IDEA and end by running your rake task.  I am demonstrating these examples on Mac OS X, however there is nothing stopping you completing this on your own OS. Read on →

Written by Simon Bailey

Last week I was setting up an example project for RobotEyes and was using ASUnit4 which has had some tasty improvements made since version 3.  ASUnit is a collaborative effort between @lukebayes and @robpenner and has been my choice of unit testing framework for a while now.  In this blog post I will show you how to get ASUnit4 setup in IntelliJ IDEA and run a few tests taking advantage of some of the features for this new release. Read on →

Written by Simon Bailey

Recently I tweeted a Screencast of an example creating AS3 projects/classes using ProjectSprouts and Rake via AlfredApp.  I had a couple of requests to share my scripts and so I created a new github repos called Shell-Funk.  I must give a clear heads-up here that I am in no way a shell script or apple script ninja and these scripts work but I cannot guarantee how great they are and would welcome input on improving them.  They are also Mac OS X dependent.

Simply put Alfred App is:

Alfred is a productivity application for Mac OS X, which aims to save you time in searching your local computer and the web. And Project Sprouts is: Project Sprouts is a highly cohesive, loosely coupled collection of features that take some of the suck out of programming. So the two combined essentially mean super speed and efficiency for those mundane tasks i.e. creating new projects or classes etc.  The first script I put up creates a new AS3 project, downloads Stray’s Project Sprouts generators for Robotlegs and opens up the newly created project in a Finder window.  Have a play and see what you think and also be sure to check out this amazing site for further scripts to use with Alfred.

Written by Simon Bailey

A while back I setup a new Amazon EC2 micro-instance using Amazon’s own Linux AMI (based on Centos). On firing up the instance I attempted to run a simple scp command which ultimately failed. The reason I wanted to use the scp command was to push and append to authorized_keys my own generated SSH key to my instance, this is a personal preference over the generated Key Pair (.pem) Amazon recommends you use.

As you may be aware, this particular setup also discourages (and as I recall prevents) a root password login, naturally for heightened security, so I had to do some digging. I soon discovered that using the cat command I could work around the issue and append my local public ssh key to the authorized_keys on the remote server. This is what it should look like:

Written by Simon Bailey

Last night I pushed up to my GitHub account the source for an FLV player component (PlayaHater) that I built based on and using Minimal Comps by Keith Peters.

Written by Simon Bailey

Here’s a small post offering a solution to an issue I had recently. My goal was to run a shell script using cfexecute, one of the arguments being an Array itself. If your passing arguments in this manner on Linux (my flavour) elements are copied into an array of exec() arguments and I kept getting an error back from ColdFusion stating I was trying to pass off a complex object as a simple one (or something along those lines - makes sense). So the key was trying to fathom out how to pass my array of Strings to this Shell script, after a bit of trial and error I got it working by doing the following: Read on →

Written by Simon Bailey

I recently got asked about how I store and retrieve data within a Spark DataGroup using a custom ItemRenderer, with a particular focus on how to monitor property changes. There are a few ways to achieve this, particularly when it comes to storing and retrieving data, here is one simple example using a CheckBox within a custom ItemRenderer and observing the total selected CheckBoxes.

Here I will detail the main snippets of functionality, download the actual source (links at bottom of the post) to get the full picture.

Written by Simon Bailey

This post will show you how to get quickly up and running Unit Testing with ColdFusion and IntelliJ IDEA. As an example I will show you how to create a simple CFC with its corresponding unit test using MXUnit and then run the test locally in your browser. This mirrors the project example in the similar post I made earlier on in the week: ColdFusion Unit Testing with MXUnit and TextMate.

Written by Simon Bailey

I have finally managed to find the time to dig deeper into the world of Project Sprouts and am excited about the Version 1 release which hosts a collective of changes and improvements in comparison to its predecessor V 0.7. If your unaware of Project Sprouts then I actively encourage you to visit their homepage and have a read over what its all about.

Time saving utilities are crucial as a developer to help cut down on repetitive tedious tasks and also to help reduce errors. Applications such as Text Expander was one great time saving tool and then when I discovered live templates in IntelliJ IDEA, I truly saw the rewards of code generation, especially when combined with ANT for project builds. Project Sprouts takes time saving to a completely new level, accelerating project development workflow in a well structured and logical format.

What I was keen on understanding was where it would help me the most (initially at least) and that is project and class Generators (also read).

Sprout generators should be installed by RubyGems as command line applications on your system. After installing the flashsdk gem, you should have access to a variety of generators…..Some generators are expected to create new projects, others expect to run within existing projects.

Stray kindly hooked me up with her RobotLegs bundle to get me started (this is specific to V0.7 of Sprouts) and I also found the library by Kristofer Joseph which I understand Luke Bayes (Project Sprout creator) has assisted on also. Kristofer’s library has been updated for the V1 release of Project Sprouts and is in turn an excellent resource to understand the hooks required for using Generators in the latest Project Sprouts release (combined with reading the documentation and source of the Sprout-FlashSDK Gem).

I wanted to gain an understanding of building my own Generators and wanted to help detail the steps necessary to achieve this task. The rest of this post outlines how to create a custom class generator using a combination of command line (note I am on Mac OS X) and code editing (I use TextMate, feel free to choose your tool). l define a custom Event template and write a Generator for it, including simple Unit Tests and obviously a project example.