Anuj Gakhar's Blog

Anuj @ Flex, ColdFusion and other RIA stuff….

Packt launches fifth annual Open Source Awards

Aug 26

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Blogging, General | No Comments

The 2010 Open Source Awards was launched today by Packt, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source project. Now in its fifth year, the Award has been adapted from the established Open Source CMS Award with the wider aim of encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding all Open Source projects.

WordPress won the 2009 Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award in what was a very close contest with MODx and SilverStripe. While MODx was the first runner up, SilverStripe, a Most Promising CMS Award winner in 2008, made its way to the second runner up position in its first year in the Open Source CMS Award final.

The 2010 Award will feature a prize fund of $24,000 with several new categories introduced. While the Open Source CMS Award category will continue to recognize the best content management system, Packt is introducing categories for the Most Promising Open Source Project, Open Source E-Commerce Applications, Open Source JavaScript Libraries and Open Source Graphics Software.  CMSes that won the Overall CMS Award in previous years will continue to compete against one another in the Hall of Fame CMS category.

These new categories will ensure that the Open Source Awards is the ultimate platform to recognise excellence within the community while supporting projects both new and old. “We believe that the adaption of the Award and the new categories will provide a new level of accessibility, with the Award recognizing a wider range of Open Source projects; both previous winners while at the same time, encouraging new projects” said Julian Copes, organizer of this year’s Awards.

Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Open Source projects for each category at www.PacktPub.com/open-source-awards-home . The top five in each category will go through to the final, which begins in the last week of September. For more information on the categories, please visit Packt’s website www.PacktPub.com/blog/packt’s-2010-open-source-awards-announcement

Contacts

Julian Copes

PR Executive, Packt Publishing

julianc | www.PacktPub.com

About Packt

Packt is a modern, unique publishing company with a focus on producing cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike.

Packt’s books and publications share the experiences of fellow IT professionals in adapting and customizing today’s systems, applications, and frameworks. Their solutions-based books give readers the knowledge and power to customize the software and technologies they’re using to get the job done.

Detecting Item Clicks on a Spark List

Aug 18

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Flex | 3 Comments

As I am using the Spark List component extensively in my current project, I have come to understand some of the differences between a Spark List and MX List. I thought it would make sense to post my experience with this.

With MX components, you have an itemClick Event on your List component. So you can capture clicks on Individual items. Something like this :-

    <fx:Script>
        <![CDATA[
            import mx.events.ListEvent;
            protected function myList_itemClickHandler(event:ListEvent):void
            {
                trace(event.currentTarget.selectedItem.label);
            }

        ]]>
    </fx:Script>

    <mx:List width="200"
        id="myList"
        itemClick="myList_itemClickHandler(event)"
        dataProvider="{ds}" />

So, this is cool. However, in Spark, there is no such event. In a Spark List, you have to listen to the change event which fires off an IndexChangeEvent every time the List Index changes – which makes sense. So, your code will look like this in this case:- Read the rest of this entry »

Conditional Debugging in Flash Builder 4

Aug 15

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Flex, Flex Builder | 1 Comment

I have started using Flash Builder 4 recently and the one feature I am loving the most is the Conditional Debugging. Using conditional breakpoints in Flash Builder 4, you can configure a breakpoint to trigger only after a certain number of loop iterations. For instance, you can halt the application on the third time a breakpoint is reached. You can also use a conditional breakpoint to suspend the application when a particular expression either changes or evaluates to true. In the next walkthrough you will make the breakpoint that was set up in the first walkthrough conditional by adding an expression. Read the rest of this entry »

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Flex 4: Understanding DataGroups and VirtualLayouts

Aug 2

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Flex | 5 Comments

As I have recently started working with Flex4, I have started to use some of the new components from the Flex 4 SDK. One of them is the DataGroup class. A brief explanation of the class is below (from the docs) :-

The DataGroup class is the base container class for data items. The DataGroup class converts data items to visual elements for display. While this container can hold visual elements, it is often used only to hold data items as children. The DataGroup class takes as children data items or visual elements that implement the IVisualElement interface and are DisplayObjects. Data items can be simple data items such String and Number objects, and more complicated data items such as Object and XMLNode objects. While these containers can hold visual elements, they are often used only to hold data items as children.

DataGroups allow you to do something called Virtualization. What that means is, if you have am ArrayCollection with lets say 50 items in it and your DataGroup is only showing 10 items at a time, then Flash Player will only render 10 visual elements on the screen and as you keep scrolling up or down, those renderers will be recycled within each other. In other words, there will only ever be a few visual renderers created based on the size of your visible component.

Lets take an example to get a better understanding of this concept :- Read the rest of this entry »

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Accessing a URL with Flex and YQL when there is no crossdomain.xml

Jul 23

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Flex | No Comments

If you are making a HTTPService call in Flex, you need to make sure that the domain specified in the url attribute is the domain from where your application was downloaded or there is a crossdomain.xml file granting access to your application’s originating is available on the domain specified in the HTTPService url attribute.

Take a look at the following example. Trying to load a XML file :- Read the rest of this entry »

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Quickly Empty Trash on MacOS

Jul 20

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Mac | No Comments

So, I often end up in situations where there is just too much data in my Trash and emptying Trash on a Mac can take ages. The annoying bit is – while Trash is being emptied – you can not delete anything else meanwhile. I ran into a situation today where I needed 40GB space on my disk and the only way to do so was to empty trash which had about the same size of stuff in it. Deleting via the Finder window can take ages as it counts the files and deletes them, it almost seems like an endless process.

Apparently, you can do so via the Terminal window


cd ~/.Trash
rm -rf *

That command recursively and silently deletes everything in Trash within minutes.

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Getting UK GeoCode Data with YQL and ColdFusion

Jul 16

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in ColdFusion | No Comments

I stumbled across YQL today and although I had heard about it in the past, today was the first time, I actually sat down and read the documentation and went through some of the example apps. I am amazed at how powerful it is and am just imagining the wonderful applications that can be built using YQL. It opens up the doors to pretty much anything using a SQL like syntax. Read the rest of this entry »

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Free jQuery: Novice to Ninja Ebook (24 hours only)

Jul 12

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Books, Javascript | 5 Comments

I have just found out SitePoint is giving away free PDF copy of this jQuery book. I have just downloaded mine, go ahead and download yours. :)

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Time Based URL Rewriting

Jul 7

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in General | 2 Comments

I have used several URL Rewriting engines in my career and one of my favorites is the Apache mod_rewrite. It is a very powerful rewrite engine and today I learned something new about it. Basically, I was browsing the Practical Driving Test Booking page and I noticed a message saying that this system is only available between 6AM and midnight. That’s when it occurred to me that URL rewriting could be used for doing such a thing.

I started looking for this and sure enough this is one of the features of mod_rewrite. Here is the code to achieve this :-

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR}%{TIME_MIN} >2359
RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR}%{TIME_MIN} <0600
RewriteRule ^index\.cfm$ /systemdown.html [L]
The above code makes sure that the time is more than 23:59 and less than 06:00 and if it is, rewrites index.cfm to systemdown.html and the URL stays the same. No code changes required at all.
Now, that is cool!

Sorting XML with XSLT and ColdFusion

Jun 28

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in ColdFusion | No Comments

I came across a requirement today, where I had to sort a XML file by one of the attributes in one of its child nodes. I did some searching and came across these excellent posts by Ben Nadel.  Obviously, that gave me some headstart and it was clear that XSLT was the way to go.  I have not used a lot of XSLT in the past so my knowledge is a bit limited in this area.

After reading a couple of articles on the subject and understanding some basic stuff – here is what I came up with. Read the rest of this entry »

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