Written by Simon Bailey

This post will show you how to get quickly up and running with ColdFusion, TextMate and MXUnit. 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 within TextMate’s preview window.

Written by Simon Bailey

I hit a peculiar issue yesterday where my remote requests to ColdFusion from Flex were failing with Charles telling me I had a 404 for the flex2gateway? Even stranger was that some requests seem to make it through, it was the first ‘fresh’ browser session’s that were failing consistently. Looking at the url’s it seems that the jsessionid appended to the url was the issue i.e.

1

http://mydomain.com/flex2gateway;jsessionid

. The solution is simple but an easy oversight to make, ensure there is a trailing forward slash on your defined endpoint url i.e.

1

http://mydomain.com/flex2gateway/

Written by Simon Bailey

After a recent re-format of my macbook hardrive I was having trouble with managing my project in IntelliJ IDEA using git. This is actually an old problem I have stumbled across before when using Gitolite, hence this blog post.

I use SSH heavily nowadays and have multiple SSH keys, when trying to connect to a git repository via IntelliJ I kept getting prompted for a password and not a pass phrase which is obviously wrong, hence whats the point in using ssh! I then noticed that IntelliJ’s popup dialogue was asking for the wrong ssh key, I needed IntelliJ to use a different key to access my git repository.

Written by Simon Bailey

Tonight I had an issue with the Adobe Flash Player Settings Panel bug (my flash player version is 10,1,82,76) where in FireFox (version 3.6.10) I could not interact with the panel at all? In swoops George (Medve) on Twitter who kindly stated he had the same issue all week and the problem was related to the CSS. Low and behold when I removed the margin parameter from the html and body declarations all was cured! Cheers George :)

Written by Simon Bailey

Following reading this fantastic article a while back I totally immersed myself in getting the segregation of component logic and layout truly separated in my Flex 4 projects. One obstacle I came up against, particularly using Justin’s method, was states in my newly created component which extended a container. Now Justin has another great post in regards to states and skins, but this is specific to mxml and the container extends SkinnableContainer.as (Application in this particular link).

So whats the problem? Well obviously if you want to start defining custom states in your component and mapping them accordingly to your component skin, these states need to be declared somewhere and added to the states array (see here again to see what I mean). What I needed to do was grab the snippets of information on the web and then duplicate this logic into my container class accordingly. Here is what I ended up with:

Written by Simon Bailey

I have been having a play with IntelliJ IDEAX today and one thing missing from the previous version has now been resolved which is creating Spark Skins for specific components. I love the way JetBrains have tackled this as it involves two steps and you need not lift a finger from the keyboard! Seriously this is slick:

(1) Write your code to add a component when you define the skinClass parameter simply enter what you would like to call the skin class.

(2) Hit the hot keys alt + enter, your then prompted to define the destination for this class and that’s it folks.

A simple skin class is then created in the package of your choice, IntelliJ is clever enough to pick up on what component your creating the skin for and therefore defines the host component meta data for you. If you have not created the packages you defined, IntelliJ will create the packages and define them correctly within the skinClass attribute of your component declaration (screen shots):

Written by Simon Bailey

I have recently installed a new SSD into my Mac Pro and decided instead of moving my Home folder to a separate drive as I usually do, to optimise the speeds of the SSD I would simply shift the larger directories to a separate drive and setup symbolic links. This was all fine until I forgot to update the Music directory icon and staring at a plain folder icon slowly started to irritate me. However, a bigger irritation was that no matter what I used i.e. CandyBar or LiteIcon the default folder icon would not reset :(

So after digging around the default icon set was eventually found in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources, I then dragged MusicFolderIcon.icns into a CandyBar icon set, dropped it into the quick drop window and then finally dragged the Music folder onto the quick drop window, BAM all done and back to default icon thank you very much.

Written by Simon Bailey

I had recently put out a twitter request to see if there are any tutorials out there for setting up a simple ColdFusion project with IntelliJ IDEA and I got no response. I presumed there would be a specific routine for a ColdFusion project but it seems that there isn’t one and after having a play around, there is no need for one, its just too simple.

I have detailed below the steps you take to get a simple ColdFusion project up and running.

Prerequisites are:

(1) ColdFusion (2) IntelliJ IDEA (3) I use this CFML markup plugin which you install within IntelliJ as shown in Step One and Two.

Written by Simon Bailey

Just to note a minor gotcha to be aware of when using mx:Module’s with Flex 4. Certain Spark components are not supported within mx:Module, two of which are: + s:layout + s:states

A suggested workaround for this is to either add a view component which extends a Spark component such as s:Group to your mx:Module, or simply nest all components in the mx:Module within an e.g. s:Group.

If your aware of exactly what is not supported in mx:Module’s in a Flex 4 project, or other unsupported/problematic aspects for that matter please report on http://bugs.adobe.com/jira (and if you would list [module related] them as a comment below) so other devs are not left wasting time on why certain code is not working?

Written by Simon Bailey

Here’s another ComboBox bug (plus potential feature) that irritated me no end with a fix being made difficult due to the relevent methods I needed access to in ComboBox.as declared as private (as so many are in mx components [bangs head]!!!).

Bug: ComboBox opens in a specific direction according to its current position on the stage, so the logic is if its too close to the bottom boundary and its content is of a particular height then it will open upwards. This does function but it is inconsistent and the result is a list being cropped with options therefore rendered inaccessible [bad]. Ideally we want to override this logic written in ComboBox.as but it’s private so you have absolutely no control over the direction the list opens.

Solution: Read on →