I am moving!

I have been busy moving my blog over to BlogCFC and have decided to up and move residence!

You can check out my blog in its new home over at:
http://www.markdrew.co.uk/blog/!

Make sure you update your feeds and bookmarks!

See you there!

Sean Corfield on CFEclipse

It is great to see that Sean Corfield will be helping out with the CFEclipse project!

He will be helping us to plan a feature roadmap for the next release and is currently looking for ideas on features.

Check out his post over at the An Architect's View

Some of the features discussed in his blog were

1. Word Wrap (no, I dont like it neither as I know the guts and those guts dont wanna be touched)
2. More RDS Functions
3. Tag Insight
4. Intellisense
5. Integrated Help
6. Debugging
7. Component and Webservice Info

Any other thoughts send them over to Sean!

Flex Builder Continued....

Yesterday, and the thrust of this morning's post was that I ws having problems getting data from a cf script from the flex swf's I was creating. The solution was to add a crossdomain.xml file to the root of my local server. This crossdomain file defines what hosts we will accept flash requests from.
Check this page out for more details http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_14213

I am still left with the problem of not being able to view generated SWF's using http:// but only being able to run them from c:\Inetpub\wwwroot\yadda\something.swf

Annoying isnt it?

I coulddn't find anything that mentined that the swf's generated by Flex Builder are disabled in this manner.

Flex Builder and Macromedia Labs

Just in time for the MAX conference (where every other developer seems to be but me!) Macromedia release a new section on their site (like Google) with labs.macromedia.com, as a showcase of their up-coming products.

One of the more interesting products for me is the Flex Builder 2. Formerly named Zorn it is an Eclipse based plugin that allows you to build flex applications as you would Java (write, compile, deploy as swf) rather than using the Flex server to do the compile and deploy for you (along with a hefty price tag!)

I am using the plugin version of Flex Builder 2 which is a fantastic way to develop since I can have my CFC's in one window and the flex app in another and switch between them in one IDE.

Pretty easy to develop, it builds automatically (as you would expect in eclipse) and you can both run and debug your applications. Awesome!

I have some niggles tho:
Firstly, is that the plugin is windows only. So I can only play with it at work. I don't understand why this is since (when writing the CFEcplipse plugin) I never encountered features that I had to make Windows only.
Secondly, when running a flex app, it seems to run locally, from the file system (not from localhost) even when I changed the build paths for the project to run it through my webserver nothing runs in the swf. I am not sure if this is a limit on the alpha or something but there is nothing in the documentation.

I am re-reading the following (Flex Wiki) and will let you know if this solves the problem. Seems to be that we have to create a Proxy to get it running.

Any Ideas out there?

iPod Video and new iMac

Wow, holy cow. I mean awesome.. first it was on.. then not.. the rumours abounded, were discarded and now it is here. The Video iPod. Apple shoots, it scores with another great appliance. You get to watch the shows in a little screen, or plug it into a TV. Great stuff! you can download music videos of course, at a reasonable fee (about £1.89) but they are also saying that you can get shows like Lost (which I am completely addicted to by the way).


Also a new iMac with iSight built in and a remote that you can now browse your music, videos, CDs and podcasts from your sofa... awesome!

I have to replace my TV and I might go to straight to the 20" iMac. And my second generation iPod to the iPod movie... ahh.. now all donations accepted!