This is strange and I am not sure if anybody else had the same  experience . Today morning when I opened Flex builder to continue my work on an AIR  application after couple of builds and runs the application stopped launching. I tried several times and was confused as to what could have happened to the application that was running perfectly last time. Then I tried debugging it only to find a prompt which says -”Process terminated without establishing connection to debugger”.

To find a fix to this I turned to the only hope for all developers GOOGLE and found that there was a similar issue reported to the Adobe BugList http://tinyurl.com/d3ws5h but this issue was reported only for MAC machines and mine was windows.

It suddenly struck my mind that it was after the application threw a runtime error all this started and curiously I opened the taskmanger and BINGO!! here it is adl.exe is still running. I ended adl process in the task manager and everything was to normal. The adl.exe which is located inside the bin folder under sdk folder of the Adobe Flex  installation directory is the factor which launches your AIR application (something like C:\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks\3.4.0\bin).

Now what could have happened is when the application threw a run time exception even though the application was closed the instance of adl.exe was still running in the system which prevented the next launch.  This might not be proper fix but surely which can get you out of trouble. I wonder if anybody else had faced the same problem if yes, do let me know if you had some other way to fix this.

Ilan Avigdor, a colleague of mine, has posted a top notch and very interesting set of posts regarding resource modules in Flex.

You can read the Adobe livedocs atricle here, Ilan’s detailed explanation and code example here and his detailed instructions on how to use Flex Builder to compile these resource modules instead of manually here.

Flex Builder and Flash Builder both have the ability to setup a few aspects of your BlazeDS project for you. In a previous posting I explained how to set up a BlazeDS project in Flash Builder. When you select “Use remote object access service” you’re telling the IDE to set up a few things for you. Selecting this keeps you from having to import the BlazeDS libraries, add configuration files and set a compiler option that points to the config files.

It sounds nice, but it may not be the best solution. Flash Builder seems to be a bit buggy when you choose this option. As of this posting it seems to incorrectly set the web context for the destination call when making the actual AMF call. More specifically it seems to use the “WebContent” value instead of “WebContext”. The result is that the calls are made to http://localhost:8080/WebContent/messagebroker/amf instead of http://localhost:8080/MyProject/messagebroker/amf. While this may be a bug in the beta version of Flash Builder there are other reasons not to trust this to your IDE.

When you set this up automatically, the config files are put into your WEB-INF/flex directory for you. When you edit these files, Flash Builder prompts you asking you if you really want to do this since they are generated files. Typically you would just hit yes and update the files. Here’s the rub. If you go under the project properties and change the server configuration the IDE may delete those files from the directory. In FlashBuilder if you remove the BlazeDS support after a project has been set up it removes the config files. Why would you do this if you were writing a BlazeDS app? Well maybe someone (me) was trying to fix the destination issue I previously mentioned by changing the WebContext setting. This setting happens to be locked down in an automated setup.

Finally when your application gets all growed up and wants to move out, you’ll probably want to move the build process to a command line utility. At this point you’ll have to know about the libraries, config files and compiler options anyway. So why wait, just set it up on your own to begin with.   FlashBuilder isn’t really doing that much anyway.

Set it up yourself

So where to begin. Lets talk briefly about the three main styles of setup that you’ll come across online. First is what we already mentioned, having Flash Builder setup things for you in a combined Flex J2EE project. The second way many sites discuss is creating a project for flex and pointing it to an existing server that’s running BlazeDS.  This is a more prevalent option and highlights the separation of concerns that actually exists in any final solution. The third method is to manually create a combined Flex J2EE project. This third option is more ideal for smaller projects.

Lets look at setting up Flash Builder with BlazeDS manually. Go ahead and create a new flash project. Select J2EE for server technology, but DON’T select use remote object access. I have WTP installed so I have Flash Builder create my web app for me by selecting Create combined J2EE/Flex project using WTP.

Finish the set up as usual. Now you’ll need that BlazeDS war everyone talks about. If you don’t have it yet go get it from the Adobe Release Builds page. You can just grab the Binary Distribution. The Turnkey version just includes a lot of stuff we don’t need right now.

Once you get the War we’ll need to import it into our project. Go to File –> Import then select Archive file under General. Locate the directory where you put the blazeds.war and switch the file type to *.* then select the war.

Now we don’t need everything in this war, sure you can import it all but lets keep things clean.

Deselect the META-INF, classes and src directories. Also you’ll need to change the import into folder field from <project> to <project>/WebContent.

Hit Finish and say yes to overwriting web.xml. See that wasn’t so bad and you just did most of what FlashBuilder did, simply by importing that war yourself.

There is one other thing we need to do before we’re done. The web.xml tells Java where to find the configuration files but we need to let flex know also. It’s pretty easy, just follow my lead.

Open up the project properties and head to flex compiler. See that field additional compiler arguments?  We’re going to update it.

We want to add a compiler option pointing to the configuration files. You can use either a path that’s in the classpath  or a physical location on your drive. We’ll use the latter. Update the Additional compiler arguments to include the following –services “C:\dev\MyProject\WebContent\WEB-INF\flex\services-config.xml” where dev is your workspace directory and MyProject is your project name. 

Hit OK  and you’re done.

Setting this up manually is a good practice and will make things easier later when we migrate to Maven and Ant. Stay Tuned!!!!

I wanted to change the color scheme of Flex Builder to something more pleasing to the eyes. I’m used to coding with the default color scheme but I wanted to try something new and perhaps as a bonus help me code longer by reducing eye strain and conserving battery by replacing the power hungry white background.

So I started looking for a nice color scheme and found a lot of really good ones. I settled with the Vibrant Ink theme. I thought the process would be as straightforward as downloading a color scheme preferences file and importing it in Flex, similar to the theme pack in TextMate. But most of the preferences files I downloaded apparently only works with the vanilla version of Eclipse with Java, only some colors are being changed in Flex Builder producing an ugly combination of uncoordinated colors.

I ended up doing everything manually, changing each syntax element’s color in the Flex Builder Preferences window. I also needed to know the exact color of each of the elements in the theme so I inspected the source of the theme preferences file and used a handy color picker tool as well to grab the colors from screenshots of the theme.

Here are the colors for each of the syntax elements. I couldn’t find exact counterparts from the theme for some of the Flex related elements so I picked my own colors for them. You can use this as reference for your own customization. It will only take you a few minutes to change everything.

I was honored to be a guest on RIA Radio during the recent Adobe MAX show. I joined the hosts, Garth Braithwaite, Leif Wells and  Zach Stepek, along with fellow guest Kevin Schmidt. We discussed the announcements from the Day 1 keynote (Flash for the iPhone, Flash 10.1 on mobile, TVs, and netbooks.)  Throughout the entire show, they sat down with a lot of cool folks, so take a listen.

Listen to this podcast ( mp3). You can also subscribe to the RIA Radio Podcast in iTunes.

Recently I thought of updating the Flex SDK, for my flex builder 3. Thought of sharing the steps with all as I took quite some time to discover how to do it.

First download the flex sdk from here. Then unzip the files and name the rename the folder to 3.4.0 or simply keep as it is. Copy this folder and paste in the following location, C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks\. After that run flex builder. Go to Project –> Properties, then click Flex Compiler tab. Then click on Configure Flex Compiler… link. Then click Add button, browse for the Flex SDK location (eg: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks\3.4.0), automatically Flex SDK name will come, or you can rename to some custom names also. That’s all we have successfully installed the new flex builder SDK. Now select the new SDK check box and click Apply. That’s all. All our applications will be compiled using the new Flex SDK.

Happy Flexing…

When I first heard that ColdFusion 9 will have Object Relational Mapping which is otherwise known as ORM baked in, I really did not know what to make of it. While I really did like the idea of portable SQL agnostic DAO code, I dreaded the configuration hell that I encountered with Hibernate and NHibernate. While I did have an okay experiance with the Castle Project’s ActiveRecord implementation of NHibernate, it did not feel very intuitive, at least to me.

Today I spent the better part of the day coding with the new release of ColdFusion and I was blown away with how much it has improved, particularly when used in conjunction with the Eclipse based ColdFusion Builder/Bolt IDE. I particularly love the new ColdFusion(CF) Builder IDE, it looks very polished and has code completion capabilities that felt more like Visual Studio which is a step up from cfeclipse. ColdFusion Builder also has very good integration with ColdFusion servers as it now can start, stop and monitor the ColdFusion servers which is a very big step up. Previously I had to jump between the CF Web Admin/CF Server Monitor and Eclipse/Dreamweaver when I was doing CF development which is very tedious. With this now I can do most of the stuff from within CF Builder which makes life very easy. I tried installing it on my instance of Eclipse that has Flex Builder 3 and it works great. I smell fun times on the horizon when coding apps.

Now back to the main point of this post, Adobe’s implementation of Hibernate which in true CF tradition, is very intuitive and simple. I was seriously having loads of fun playing with it. Here is some of the stuff I did today :

* I will be putting in my 2 cents/commentary on the benefits I see as comments in the code as I believe it is easier to understand that way.

Application.cfc

Books.cfc

Writers.cfc

index.cfm

Sample Output

As you can see above, it is is really easy to retrieve items from the database now with the new ORM framework baked in. The entityLoad(“Writers”) method basically did this :

SELECT a.*, b.* FROM Authors a INNER JOIN Books B ON A.AuthorID = B.AuthorID

Notice that now it is possible to write ColdFusion Components totally based on CFScript which is quite close to ActionScript/JavaScript/ECMAScript. I person love option of writing classes in CFScript but I still think that CFML still has its place. I know I for one prefer to loop though collections using cfloop.

I will blog more about other CF 9 ORM methods and setups in the days to come.

1 I forgot about — but a very useful one.

Virtual word wrap, from http://ahtik.com/eclipse-update/.  Nice

Recently there have been a few questions raised in the Flex Forums relating to code-hinting problems with Flex Builder. A quick search on google reveals similar issues reported on other forums and blogs.

The problem is known to occur for users of Flex Builder version 3.0.1 who are compiling with version 3.2 or later of the Flex SDK. The solution to the problem is to install the Flex Builder 3.0.2 updater available here.

The cause of the issue is a recent change to the flex-config.xml file that ships with the SDK. Both Flex Builder and the mxmlc compiler use this configuration file during compilation. The change in question is the addition of the “targetPlayerMajorVersion” token into a couple of path-elements. This token is substituted with either “9″ or “10″ depending on the Flash player version you are targetting in your build. This in turn causes the compiler to include a particular version of playerglobal.swc during compilation. Although the addition of this token did not prevent earlier versions of Flex Builder from performing builds, it did interfere with code-hinting for many of the core Flash API classes.

If you are unable to install the updater you can also fix the problem by manually removing the targetPlayerMajorVersion token from your flex-config.xml file (located in the frameworks directory) and replacing it with either “9″ or “10″ depending on your target player version.

Have a look at my little test app here.

On the numeric stepper, keep increasing the scaling.

You’ll find at about 1.26, a strange thing happens – you lose the bottom line.

As usual in my adventures with the Flex SDK, it’s a bug.  But this time I don’t think it’s a bug in the Flex SDK.   I believe it is in the text control in Flash Player.

Anyway, there is a bug report, and it’s here: SDK-16876.

If you encounter this issue with showing controls on the screen, you can probably get around it by setting an explicit height on the Text control.  However, what happens if you want the Text control to grow it’s height?  Setting an explicit height simply isn’t going to work if you don’t know at runtime if the Text control will hold 2 lines or 20.

But there is another sting in the tail of this particular bug.  You may be able to work around this issue on the screen by either sizing components or not scaling them.  But there is one time where you will have to use scaling…..

Printing.

And that’s where I hit this problem.  I can’t use any of the existing solutions in my app because I need the Text control to grow to show all it’s text, and I need to print that Text component, so it needs to scale properly.

My test app uses a copy of the Text component, and I have updated it a bit.   I have added a new function:

private function getCalculatedTextHeight():Number
{
    var textHeight:Number = 0;

    for(var i:int=0; i < textField.numLines; i++)
    {
        textHeight += textField.getLineMetrics(i).height;
    }

    // SDK-16876
    // Comment in this line instead of the following one
    // to fix the issue.
    // return Math.ceil(textHeight) + 4;
    return Math.ceil(textHeight);
}

It seems that there is a rounding error somewhere, because if you add 4 to the height returned by getCalculatedTextHeight(), the problem goes away. The downside is that Text controls appear a bit larger in height, but the major plus side is that all the lines in my Text controls now get printed.

I thank you.

Ted Patrick has posted an interesting information about the open source project FlexPMD which is a tool to find out the worst parts of your code. The tool alerts and points out the bad coding practices that you have followed in your Flex project which I believe is a great thing,  given that while developement you tend to leave behind complex, redundant code and unused variables/piece of code which might give you the expected output but may be not considered as the best practice.
There is also a Flex application FlexPMD Rule set creator which enable to set custom rules for your application, that can be exported and used. The FlexPMD can be downloaded in three forms - CommandLine, Ant Task, Mac OSX Automater.
Once we start development on a  project,  in the initial stages most of us do rather take care to follow the best practices and try delete the unwanted code / unused code, but as soon as the code gets larger and more complex and as the project manager start talking only about delivery dates, it is always a time taking and horrendous process to sit and go through the code and remove all those rubbish stuffs that we have written. Now,I am going to download and try out this tool, if it works well then my code will look pretty in and out. What do you guys think ?
For more info – http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexpmd/FlexPMD

Recently while working with Flex Modules I came across an interesting find. Whenever I was setting the module’s height and width to “100%”, it was simply ignoring. So after googling a lot I came across the following tech note from adobe.

http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flex/2/releasenotes_flex201_sdk.html

Here it is clearly noted that, “Module ignores percentages for width/height, always sizing to content”. And the work around for this is to add percentWidth="100" percentHeight="100" instead of height=”100%” width=”100%”.

Example:

<mx:Module xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" percentWidth="100" percentHeight="100">

So, while developing modules, whenever we need to set height and width to 100 percentages, we need to carefully implement like above.

Happy Flexing

Origins:
Because of the character of a project, I move it from time to time between many Flex Builders. I have the source files on SVN.

Problem:
After one of the Update/Commit processes I’ve lost ability to build components.

Solution:
At the beggining, after creating a module I got it compiled straightaway in appropriate directory. I moved myself to another location, updated the project toghether with new components. But something strange happened. All the components are not built.
It’s quite simple to build them, but took some time to find. Use Project properties -> Flex Modules. You can add there all the modules/components that are missing for your project.