I mentioned that I was excited to be joining the Seattle CFUG after the move, and it looks like I’m going to have a pretty cool first meeting in February. Ben Forta is going to be in Seattle on the Monday, February 13th from 7:00 to 9:00. The press releasesite so if you’re in the Seattle area, I hope to see you there!
TweetI read over at Ian Skerrett’s blog that Eclipse won the developer.com award for Development Tool of the Year. What does this mean? I don’t follow the stuff on developer.com, so I don’t know exactly what the honor means, but regardless, I thought it was worth a mention. The list of nominees for all categories is here.
TweetI’ve been swamped with things at work getting ready to leave, so I haven’t been able to really follow some of the cooler stuff coming out of CES, but it has been difficult to miss the looming prospect of GoogleOS and a Google driven, web-based office application. My favorite take came from Richard McManus over at ReadWriteWeb who equivocated GoogleOS to Moby Dick.
Now I can extol the virtues of the Web as a platform, or Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call what’s happening on the web right now, but the fact is, as Flash developers and members of the Adobe community, you’ve been doing these things for years. Macromedia has been a forward-thinking company since its inception and the new look Adobe seems to be embracing that. With that said, if Google does come out with a web-based office suite, it would be a huge boost to Flex and the Flash Platform.
When Google does something, they add a sense of legitimacy to whatever it is they’re trying and most importantly, they get the community buzzing. Gmail begat advancements to Hotmail, Google Maps started a frenzy that culminated in the release of the phenomenal Yahoo Maps. And by opening up their APIs they allowed developers to do some cool things that extended the penetration of their applications and opened them up to new user bases. I’d argue that they also ushered in this new wave of AJAX applications by taking an old technology, showing what it could do, and putting it in front of people.
Now imagine if Google released a killer web-based office application. Imagine if it got companies to start using it and more and more people started thinking about ways to enhance existing applications for the web. Flex is a natural tool for that task and any Flex app will be able to rival (or work seamlessly with) any AJAX-based application. Now take it one step further, companies may need applications built for the web but that will work offline like a desktop application – enter Apollo.
As Google gets the ball rolling, more people are going to jump on the bandwagon and will start looking into web applications at a higher level. Flex 2 will be there to fill that need and by the end of 2006, we’ll be calling it the year of the Web. The desktop won’t become obsolete by any means, but when people see what web applications can do, they’re going to turn to more powerful ways of delivering them. A combination of Apollo and Flex 2 looks like a way to do that.
TweetI wrote this a little while ago for the developers in our group because I really enjoy using CFEclipse but I found I had to muddle my way through figuring out how it worked. The main reason for this is that I had never used Eclipse before and didn’t have a grasp on the Eclipse platform. I’ve come a long way and I wanted to give our developers a pretty straight forward quick start guide to setting up Eclipse to use CFEclipse for the first time. This is probably way too basic for most of the people out there scouring the blogs, but if you have some team members who might benefit, feel free to send it to them. I’ve created a FlashPaper version and a PDF version
Every day I use Eclipse I see something awesome that I didn’t know about before. This is both good and bad. On the one hand, every day I find out a new way to help my development. On the other hand, it often takes a lot of Google searches and tweaking the preferences to get to that point.
I think one of the reason beginning developers don’t use CFEclipse is because it isn’t as easy to get started as it is with Dreamweaver and the documentation isn’t geared towards someone who is just getting involved in development. If you’ve thought about setting up Eclipse but found it too counterintuitive to set up, this may help. I’ll say time to completion is 20-30 minutes depending on download time.
The first thing you need to do is grab a Java Runtime if you don’t already have one (to check, open up a command prompt and type: ‘java -version’. You’ll need to have at least version 1.4.2 or higher). This is the one I would suggest: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html
Next you need to get the Eclipse SDK 3.1.1 which is available here: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/index.php
Eclipse is just a zip file, there is no installation executable, you simply unzip it into any folder you want, and run eclipse.exe within that folder. Once you do that, you’ll see the Workspace Launcher. Check the box next to ‘Use this as the default’ and push ‘OK’.
You should now have a pretty purple screen. Use the arrow in the top right hand corner to go to your workbench. The workbench starts out in the “Java Perspective”. Perspectives in Eclipse are just different views customized for different plug-ins.
The first thing we want to do in the workbench is install CFEclipse. To do that go to Help->Software Updates->Find and Install… Select the ‘Search for new features to install’ and click next. On the upper right hand side, click ‘New Remote Site..’ Type “CFEclipse” (without quotes) in the Name box and “http://www.cfeclipse.org/update in the URL box. It should look just like this
Click OK then click Finish. It will search for installable features, and then prompt you to select the features. Click the plus sign to expand the choices and then check the empty box next to the “Stable CFEclipse” (the bleeding edge release is actually out of date) and click Next. Accept the license agreement on the next screen, click Next, then click Finish. It will download the plug-in then prompt you to install it. Click “Install All” and when it prompts you to restart the workbench, click “Yes”
Now CFEclipse is installed, but we need to set it up. Click the button next to the “Java Perspective” in the upper right hand corner and select “Other…”
Select the CFEclipse perspective
The last step before you start coding is to set up a project which we will link to something on seven-dev. To do that, go to File->New->Project… Expand CFEclipse, highlight CFML Project
and click Next. Name your project something informative, and then uncheck the ‘Use default’ box under Project contents. Browse to the mapped directory where your files are stored, and click Finish.
If you expand your new project, you’ll see all of your files. Open one and start coding away with code folding, code completion and syntax highlighting. You should make sure to check out other Eclipse plugins because that’s the real beauty of Eclipse, being able to do almost all of your development in one tool. Brajeshwar has a great article on the Web Tools Platform and you can search for all kinds of plugins over at Eclipse Plugin Central
TweetI have been away from the blogs for a while because I had the week off and I was visiting my parents in small town Colorado, so I’m not sure how many of these have popped up, but here is my list of New Year’s Resolutions for Flex. Some are just a personal goal others could be described as something I’d like to see the “Flash Platform” or the community accomplish.
1) Major Flex penetration. With a price point of less than $1,000 I really want to see some awesome applications created by people who couldn?t afford the buy in of Flex 1.5. I know that everyone has the alpha now and there is some cool stuff over on the Flex alpha wiki, but once we get a real release, and more importantly, people start downloading the new FlashPlayer, I think we’ll see Flex adoption in a big way by more great developers. I know a lot of people hate the AJAX/Flex comparison but this next generation of Flex has the potential to really rival AJAX in the small business/basement developer space. The kinds of people who are doing the cutting edge stuff.
2) A great Flex 2 Enterprise Services application. This is pretty self explanatory, but from what we’ve been told about FES, it can make a huge splash if used correctly. The collaboration ability it brings will be a big step for the Flash platform and may be able to fulfill some of the goals we saw with Flash Communication Server.
3) More code on this blog. Working with Flex at my job has been a real blessing, but I also haven’t really had a chance to show what I’ve put together because it’s kind of NDA. And as awesome as Flex is, after working with it for 8-10 hours a day at work, I don’t have as much desire to tinker at home. With the new job, and the ability to compile Flex into a .swf I can post on my website as an application and allow people to use, I will have a lot more energy to post code samples and show some of my work. I am pretty far, talent-wise, from a lot of the Flex/Flash bloggers out there but I do think I have some cool ideas and I have a lot of Flex experience.
4) Some Flex case studies. I think seeing the stuff that you guys come up with is awesome, and I would love to help you show it off. As Flex applications become more public, and more of you can talk about what you’re doing, I want to help you show it off both from a developer standpoint and a “Flex strategy” standpoint. There are some cool Flex applications now, but I haven’t seen a lot of discussion with those developers or the reasons they chose Flex. Part of that may be because Flex customers have been big, and Macromedia/Adobe does an excellent job of working with them at early stages.
5) A killer Flex app for outdoor enthusiasts. I’m pumped about the move to Seattle because I’ll be in one of the epicenters of technology but also because there are tons of geeks who rock climb, backpack, hike and camp. In Philadelphia I couldn’t do that, but when I lived in Wyoming, that’s all I did. I want to build a Flex application for this site that will allow people to come look at my trip reports, download GPS waypoints, check out gear reviews and submit their own trips. It’s probably a little overkill to use Flex, but I want to make the user experience great. A true combination of my nerdiness and my cowboy-countryboy-ness.
Of course what are resolutions for if not for breaking, so next year we’ll see how many of these came to fruition. I do think it’s going to be a good year for Flex and a big turning point in the web platform in general. I’ve been convinced we’re pretty far away from leaving the desktop entirely, but the applications are just going to become better and better and Flex is going to play a huge part.
TweetI just got back from a really long two days of traveling and I have some advice for everyone. Do not fly into small Colorado airports. It’s not that the airports themselves are bad, it’s just that in these airports, what can go wrong, will go wrong.
For instance, our United flight was delayed in Aspen because of some mechanical failure, which meant it was late getting to Denver and then later getting to our airport in Grand Junction. This caused us to miss our connection from Denver to Philly yesterday. At first, this didn’t seem like a huge deal. The woman in Grand Junction was very nice and tried to get us the best possible flight home as soon as possible. She booked us on a US Airways flight that left Denver at 7:30 AM the next day and got into Philly at 1:00 in the afternoon. She told us she oversold the flight by one seat, but as long as we checked in early, we’d be fine getting seats.
We kept our original tickets on the off chance that we could catch our original flight, but as the announcements came over the loudspeaker it was clear we weren’t going to make it. We finally made it to Denver, went to United customer service, who were very helpful and put us in a hotel with some meal vouchers. Unfortunately, this hotel was a 30 minute shuttle ride from the airport which meant that to check into our flight the next day we’d have to take a 5:00 AM shuttle.
Our wakeup call came at 4:30, we got ready and went to the airport to check in. Then a funny thing happened. I’m a Silver Preferred member at US Airways, so I got in the short line and gave the man at the counter my information. Then he told me that he didn’t have us on the flight. I was confused, but gave him the confirmation code, which he looked up and then told us that the United agent who booked the flight hadn’t actually checked with US Airways and so even the one seat that was open was now sold and they had a full flight which meant we were out of luck.
Then we had to wait in line for 2 hours from 6:30 – 8:30 in the morning because United had cancelled a morning flight from Denver to Chicago O’Hare which meant tons of people were trying to get help with new flights. When we finally talked to someone who was also helpful but we had to fly from Denver to Orlando and then Orlando to Philly in order to make it back today.
Now, we’re finally home and very tired. I also don’t trust flying into small airports anymore.
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