Sapien will be running a New Year’s Eve special on PrimalScript. As far as I know they wont be advertising this anywhere but on the 31st of December from 9:00am till 11:59pm, pacific time, you will be able to purchase the download version PrimalScript 3.0 for $99. Before anyone asks, yeah it is the 3.0 release but you will get the 3.1 release for free once that is out of beta. They cant really sell beta software.
Also, a new build of PrimalScript is available. If you are using the beta you probably want to upgrade. Here is a list of changes in this the new build.
Continue reading ‘PrimalScript special pricing and new beta out’
Christophe Coenraets posted an entry on his blog demonstrating four different techniques to write a simple temperature converter application.
The purpose of the entry was specifically to demonstrate four different ways to accomplish the same thing–showing how flexible Flex really is. The goal for this application was to separate the ActionScript out of the MXML files.
I’d like to follow up on this entry and demonstrate a fifth approach. This is something one of the Flex engineers proposed earlier and in my opinion is the cleanest method. Instead of using an <mx:Script> tag and including functions that get dropped into the current class, we can create a Controller class and link it through tags. This keeps tags in MXML, ActionScript in external files, promotes OOP programming, and simplifies reuse.
Continue reading ‘Separating ActionScript from MXML: Approach 5′
I’ve received a bunch of questions about PrimalScript since the public beta was release and most of them deal with just getting started. I thought I would prepare a short intro to PrimalScript that some people might find helpful.
PrimalScript is a fast and fully featured IDE. It supports many many languages, as such you may find some things in there that you may have no use for (A good example is the windows scripting features). After installation there is very little you will have to do to get PrimalScript working–it automatically adds the Flash MX 2004 help files and will detect the AS Class path.
Continue reading ‘The PrimalScript gold mine: lots of hidden gems’
Many ColdFusion applications can benefit from Office integration–in fact many of our clients flat out require that we support Office integration. In Integrating ColdFusion with Microsoft Office I review six different options and demonstrate the pros and cons of each. You’ll learn when and why to integrate with Office and which options are best for a given situation.
Continue reading ‘Integrating ColdFusion with Microsoft Office: Breezo and examples’
I wrote a DisplayInColumns custom tag recently for a project and have found it to be extremely useful. The tag minimally accepts as parameters a query and a formatter and optionally includes the number of columns and table attributes. The formatter is a UDF that is called to format each record in the query–referred to as a callback.
Continue reading ‘DisplayInColumns ColdFusion custom tag’
PrimalScript from Sapien Technolgoies is now available as a public beta! Some of you may have already seen Sam and I post about this editor, if you have not here are some details of what features it brings for ActionScript 2.0 (It also supports 30+ other languages and introduces support for Flex, JSFL, and FCSSAS) .
Continue reading ‘The best ActionScript 2 IDE on the planet starts public beta’
In response to a support request for our charting components I was looking into how a v1 component utilizes a v2 data source, such as the results from a WebServiceConnector. In stepping through the code, I noticed something surprising: the XML returned from the web service is deserialized on an as-needed basis instead of all at once. In the XML world this is called “lazy deserialization” and it’s a big feature I’ve never heard anyone mention as related to Flash MX 2004.
Curious? Here’s how it works…
Continue reading ‘Lazy deserialization improves WebService performance in Flash MX 2004′
I couldnt sleep for some reason Sunday night so I decided to look through the File Format Specifications that Macromedia published recently. To my surprise there are a few things in there that I found interesting.
The cool chapter to check out is the Whats New in Macromedia Flash (SWF) File Format 7. In this chapter, there is mention of ScriptLimits which is a tag that sets the Maximum recursion depth and the script timeout seconds of a swf. Usually the MaxRecursionDepth is set to 256 as anyone whos had the player loop a few too many times, and the ScriptTimeoutSeconds is responsible for that dialogue that pops up after 15 seconds.
It turns out that in the new player you have the ability to control those settings, wherein before you had to always make sure your movie behaved within those restrictions. I dont recommend people modify these settings, but if it is ever needed its good to know it is there. Also there is mention of the default value of ScriptTimeoutSettings which apparently varies by platform (between 15 to 20 seconds). Im not sure if this is for Mac/Windows or actually for low-performance devices like pdas but I didnt know about this variation before.
There are some other interesting things in there. If you have never looked at the file format specs, I definitely recommend it if you cant sleep and feel like getting deep into the byte code of your precious swfs.
I know that I usually post Flash specific posts but this was too cool and I wanted to make sure I had it down somewhere in case I ever needed it. It is a DHTML implemented DataGrid that is cross-browser compatible too. I found it pretty impressive http://www.activeui.net/examples.htm
We’ve been using Yahoo instant messenger for a few years within our company–we’re all spread out amongst several different offices. We’ve run into issues before where characters get converted to smileys unintentionally–as often happens with code–or with messages never being received, but today for the first time we actually had a message sent incorrectly.
Chafic’s window is on the left and mine is on the right. Notice the code in the middle, <html get’s converted to Zhtml. Not sure what caused that.
