Boyzoid's Blog & Stuff

My good friend, Dan Wilson, pointed out to me a short while ago that there was some spam that had made it onto the Flex Blog aggregator, All You Flex Are Belong To Us.

It seems that one of the Feedburner RSS feeds that was being used for one of the blogs was taken over by someone else. I have updated the feed in question and have deleted the 'spam' entries.

Sorry about any issue this may have caused.

I hate to say this, but if you sent a message via the contact form at AllYourFlexAreBelongToUs over the last few months, I just now got the messages and fulfilled any requests to have feeds added. 

I chalk this up to a change in mail servers, a rogue rule in my email client and my own inattentiveness causing me to miss the messages.  If you sent a request to have your feed added and you do not see it show up on the feed list tonight, please let me know.

Sorry for any confusion or frustration.

Sometime around the New Year, Joe Rinehart's wife, Dale, was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS).  For those who do not know Joe, he is the author of Model-Glue and a tremendous asset to the ColdFusion community.

Myself and several other members of the ColdFusion community decided that we wanted to pool our resources and try to help offset some of the large medical bills Joe and Dale will surely begin to receive.

If you would like to help us help Joe and Dale, please visit http://www.helpsupportjoeanddale.com/ and make a small donation.

Thanx in advance!

Recently, my wife's desktop was acting up and for about 2 days I was unable to play music while I was working.  I forgot how difficult it is for me to code in silence (or near silence).  This got me thinking, when I need to focus and just crank out code, there is a certain album I listen to, James Taylor LIve (CD1 and CD2). For some reason, that album always puts me in the zone and I can code like a madman.

So, when you need to be heads down, and crank out code like its no body's business, what do you listen to?

CF.Objective() starts in a few weeks on May 1. Coincidentally Iron Man is being released the following day. If you would be interested in seeing the movie with some of your favorite (or maybe not so favorite) ColdFusion geeks, leave a comment here, and be sure to subscribe.  I will post details of when and where we will be going to see the movie.

A while back I launched AllYourFlexAreBelongToUs.com, a Flex blog aggregator. So far, the sire is doing better than I could have hoped.  I am now ready to take the next step.  I want to offer "I am aggregated by...." buttons for my aggregatees ( I just now made that up) to add to their sites.  There is one big problem, my design skills are...how should I say this...pathetic.

If you have design skills that surpass a 4 year-old and are willing/able to help out, it would be much appreciated.  The only thing I ask is that the buttons stay true to the color scheme on the site.

What's in it for you?  Well, honestly, I don't have much to offer except my never ending gratitude and credit for designing the buttons.  But be rest assured your work will be viewed by millions thousands hundreds dozens of people.

If I happen to get more than one submission, I will probably put it to a public vote as to which one will be used.

Thanx in advance!

A while back, I started working on a custom Flex component that would allow for easy pagination of data in an array collection.  I am happy to announce that I have made quite a few updates, the most obvious being that the PagableArraycolelction now supports sorting and filtering.

For more information, get out the project site on RIA Forge. 

We were recently discussing setting up development environments in the #coldfusion channel on DalNet IRC.  This is a discussion that pops up form time to time, so I figured I would share how I set up my development environment.

I use Apache for my development web server, and for each project, I set up a new 'virtual host' so that each project can run form its own web root.  I really have no good explanation for doing this other than its the way I like running my projects.  I give each project a 'serverName' like blog.dev. This just helps me be aware of whether I am on dev or production, and makes it so I have to type less.

Then I set up a new entry in my HOSTS file for blog.dev and point it to 127.0.0.1.

To make editing httpd.conf and HOSTS easier to edit, I set up a project in Eclipse that points to my {apache root}/conf folder.  Inside of that project, I create a linked file to my HOSTS file.  Now from within Eclipse, I can edit my httpd.conf file and my HOSTS file.

I typically will structure my project so that I have a structure that looks similar to:

{projectRoot}
     flex-src (if its a Flex project)
    support (this is where I put project documents, associated files, artwork, etc)
     wwwroot this is the web root for my project, and where I point Apache to)

Obviously, as the project dictates, I will add other sub-directories. Also, when using SVN, {projectRoot} will typically be the 'trunk' of the repo.

So, how do you set up your development environment?

UPDATE: Someone asked in the comments for a way to restart Apache from inside Eclipse, well, thanx to Ant, that is very easy.  I attached an Ant file to this entry, you can get it from the 'Download' link below.  Drop this in your {apache root}/conf folder and when you want to restart Apache in Eclipse, right-click the file and choose 'Run As.. --> Ant Build' .  You may need to change the name of the service.  DISCLAIMER: This is offered as is and I make no warranties.  Offer void where prohibited.

Not too long ago, I started working on a Flex project.  The application is not huge, but bigger than anything I have worked on to date.  One thing I wanted to do was find a Flex framework to use for the project.  I had looked at Cairngorm, Model-Glue: Flex and some others.

During my research, My good friend Jared clued me into a lightweight Flex framework, easyMVC, that Simeon Bateman was working on. It was nothing formal at the time, but Simeon had been using it on some projects.  I asked Simeon if he would be willing to share the framework, and he graciously did so.

I was, and continue to be, amazed at how easy it is to use, and more importantly, how lightweight it is (I think its only 8 classes).  It gets out of its own way, there is no perception of creating multiple files that do the same thing, there is no configuration file, it just works, and works well.  It was easy to get up to speed using it.  I decided to use the framework for my project.

After using the framework for a bit, I realized that the more I used it, the more I liked it.  The more complex the application became, the easier it was to use the framework, and, the more I liked it. In late November/early December, Simeon had mentioned to me that he was going to release the framework publicly and earlier this month made the announcement.

I am very happy Simeon has released the framework publicly as it means there will most likely be support for it in the future.  To date, I have not run into any issues where the framework did not allow for something I needed to do.  I am not saying its perfect, just that I have not yet hit its limitations.

Just so everyone understands, I am referring to this easyMVC, not this EasyMVC. Unfortunately, the EasyMVC by Tom Bray was not one that appeared on my radar when I was researching frameworks, but it has been added to my list of stuff I need to check out.