Nice to see the Dev blog is still here, and that I can remember my login. Here is a useful debugging trick I learned for PHP, hopefully it’s not in one of Phil’s link posts.
echo '<pre>'.print_r($app,true).'</pre>';
this bad boy will give you all of the values of an array, variable etc.
more to come soon.
And onward to the December LinkPost! I don’t think I’ll get around to posting the January LP until tomorrow or next week, but in this one we have more jQuery goodness, vectors, brushes, fonts, and more!
Wow… Apparently I have been busy this winter. I thought about just skipping the last few posts and doing a monster LinkPost, but then I decided to still cut it up by month. So let’s get to November shall we? Read more…
Got a sample article from NFJS that looked at the two libraries. Thought everyone might enjoy having a look at it. I thought it was pretty good if a little long winded. DETAILS only FTW!
Ajax Library Smackdown: Prototype vs jQuery by Nathaniel Schutta
Firefox 3.6 dropped today, and I jumped on board and installed it immediately. Then to my surprise, shock, and horror, my favorite Firefox CSS fix failed. a:focus{ -moz-outline: none;} no longer works in 3.6. I tried google-ing (futile effort on the day of the release might I add) for a solution and nothing. But fear not, I played around and found one.
instead of a:focus { -moz-outline: none; } you use a:focus { outline: none; }. Seems that they no longer require a Firefox only declaration (although you may want to use both -moz-outline and outline so that less-than 3.6 users still don’t see those fun dotted boxes).
Hard to believe, but the E-com DevBlog is now over two years old. Time sure has flown and we are now reaching out to developers all over the globe. I started this blog with one of my co-workers so we could keep track of what we learned and hopefully pass it on to others. It has slowly evolved into a little bit of knowledge passing, and a monthly/bi-monthly/quarterly posting of useful weblinks (yes I know I haven’t posted Novembers LinkPost, or the December one.. it’s coming! I promise!).
In the spirit of keeping new useful things coming, and in the hope of a great year, I have completed an Adobe Air app called “VidCalc”. Basically it’s a tool to help you figure out video ratios (so you don’t skew them when you try to resize), the file size of a constant bitrate encoded movie, and how long it will take to send a file down the pipe. I could explain it in greater detail, but you should probably go check out the project page to find out for yourself.
Have a great new year!
While working on launching a new site I suddenly realized that I didn’t have a vm or extra compy around without flash installed. Yes I could have just changed the swfobject params to a higher version of flash to see what my error message would look like, but I was wondering if there were any good plugins or ‘quick-fix’ tools to use for testing various versions of flash on a page. That’s how I stumbled onto Sephiroth’s FlashSwitcher plugin for firefox.
Flash Switcher in Firefox Tray - (with my other tools 
)
The plugin is fairly huge (14mb) but it makes sense as he’s cramming 3 version of flash for 3 different operating systems in it. What it does is puts a little flash logo in the bottom right of your window. When left-clicked it shows you other versions of flash that you can test with (9.0 r124, 8.0 r24, or 7.0 r63). If you click on one, it will remove the currently installed version of flash and install the one you clicked on. IMPORTANT! before you click on one of the flash versions in the menu, use the sub-menu to “Save as…” your current version or it will be removed and you’ll have to go download it and install it again. Once you’ve “Saved as…” it will keep your current version and list it with the others.
Flash Switcher with sub-menu active
Hopefully this will be useful to those of you playing with various versions of flash, or if you want to do a test for users without flash (just click remove to uninstall flash from your browser).
I’ll make this short, lets say you have a lynda.com license and you are using their very fine service to enhance your understanding of AIR by means of Flex. You download the exercise files (cos you’ve got the cool account) and you throw them in your file system, install flex builder 3, you are all set. So you crack open flex builder and import the flex project archive you received from lynda.com, only the problem is when you click run nothing happens and when you click debug it tells you “error while loading initial content”. You google like a mad-man trying to find an answer and get everything from, ‘upgrade your flex sdk’ to ‘kill a chicken… twice’. Turns out that while these may fix some issues, what you really need to do is fix your namespace. Seriously that’s it, just change the namespace.
Open your config .xml file and find this line:
<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.0"> |
See the “1.0″ on the end? That’s your problem, see you are probably developing with AIR 1.5 (and why wouldn’t you?), not AIR 1.0. So change the line to read
<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.5"> |
Save the file and relaunch/debug your app. It should run like a champ now. On the upside, maybe lynda will find this post and fix their example files. Until then, this trick should keep you going.
So it turns out that it’s November. I have no idea what happened to October but it’s gone and I don’t think I’ll be getting it back. I suppose that the lapse in time has more to do with a project I’m working on than actual missing time September and October had some pretty good releases, only a couple of font resources, but plenty of image and jQuery links. Also you should find an abundance of miscellaneous links 
Keep in mind that it was September or October when the links were found, so some context may be broken on my descriptions. As always, some links may be broken, but let me know in the comments and I’ll try to get them fixed right away.
Being somewhat new to the Apache Axis webservice world, I’ve been looking for a solution on how to upload a file via the webservice. I found some MIME and DIME formats and there was even some cool looking technologies about MTOM (see here).
In the end the simple answer I found, on the same page linked to above, was to encode the file as a Base64 string and put it in the request like a normal string. Then on the service side it is simply decoded.
For example:
On the client side:
String base64Encoding = Base64.encode(byteArrayFromFile); . . . //In the XML request .append("<ns1:encodedFile>") .append(base64Encoding) .append("</ns1:encodedFile>") |
And then in the service:
String base64String = request.getEncodedFile(); byte[] byteArray = Base64.decode(base64String); |
And then with the byteArray you can save it or do whatever you need.
