I have been informed that as a celebration of completing 5 years, Packt Publishing are giving away free ebooks to everyone interested.
I am just spreading the word here. Below is the original press release.
Five years ago, Packt published its first book, Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management. In the years that followed, Packt has published over 200 books on many different subjects and technologies.
We think it’s important to take the time to celebrate and thank the people who have made this possible. Therefore as our way of saying thank you for your support over the last five years, we have decided that over the next few weeks, Packt will be offering new and existing customers’ five exclusive offers.
The PEAR Installer Manifesto is one of the eBooks that we are offering to our readers. This book shows users the power of this code management and deployment system to revolutionize their PHP application development.
To download a free PDF copy of this book, simply visit http://www.packtpub.com/account and login to your account, or create one if you donít already have one, and scroll down to your download area. Here you will see a link to the eBook, which you can download as many times as you like. In addition to this book, you can also download other eBooks on various technologies for free.
You can find more information on this offer by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/article/celebrate-with-us-as-packt-turns-5
I have been working on this project for the last few months and we have been successful in launching this on time as per the schedule.
The URL is http://www.mazdausedcarlocator.co.uk/ – It has got both a Flex version and an HTML version. I personally love the Rich Experience (Flex version) as it provides a really smooth interface for anyone who is looking for a used Mazda car. The HTML version is no less either.
For those who are interested, this is all ColdFusion and Flex with some jQuery love attached to it.
I would like to thank the whole team at 2ndByte for being supportive throughout and making this happen. It was fun to be part of this project.
As part of my daily journey to different sites, I tried opening rubyonrails.org 20 mins ago and found this!!!
I immediately googled for this and found this TechChrunch Article.
Wow, how can someone let that happen ? Amazing!
If you are using ColdFusion XPath functions to search/parse XML strings, you will probably have come across this one at some point. Not all, but most of the XML files have namespaces in them e.g. xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”. If you use Xpath on a string that contains namespaces, chances are that you will get back the namespaces as well and sometimes you dont want these at all. You just want to deal with the real data. More »
This weekend, I thought of revisiting the Coldfusiondocs.com application which I didn’t get the time to even touch for last so many months. I thought using Cairngorm to re-write the app would be ideal as it’s the most widely used Flex framework around.
So, I went ahead and re-wrote the whole thing using Cairngorm (took me one full day) and in the process optimized/fixed the existing minor problems as well. And I also thought that, since this is a project for the community, why not release the code to the community as well. So, for those who are interested, here is the Project with the source code. And yes, project contributors are most welcome. There is loads we can do with it.
A note for those code critics : I am not a Flex guru and definitely not a Cairngorm guru. So, please keep the code critics to be postive ones please. This doesn’t mean my code is bad, it just means it “might” not be the best code around. Also remember, this is not a paid project anyways.
I have been using this excellent jQuery Form Plugin lately and I came across a little gotcha today. First of all, this jQuery Form Plugin allows you to easily and unobtrusively upgrade HTML forms to use AJAX. The main methods, ajaxForm and ajaxSubmit, gather information from the form element to determine how to manage the submit process. Both of these methods support numerous options which allows you to have full control over how the data is submitted. More »
I have been using ColdBox for a few months now and I absolutely love it. Althought I havent used all the features it has to offer, I like the URL rewriting feature a lot.
In one of my projects, my routes.cfm had quite a few routes added that looked like this.
Now, basically, what this does is sends the request to dspStatic action which reads the contents of the page from database and passes on to the view. I wanted to set a variable for which pagename to get from the database in the route file itself so I could share the same action for different pages. Thats when I looked at “matchVariables” attribute. I used it as documented and it wasnt working.
Apparently, it was introduced in 2.6.3 and I was using 2.6.2 . Thanks to Luis for clarifying this to me. But there is also an undocumented way of doing this with earlier versions.
So, you can pass your extra variables in the route file and they would be available in the request scope. Thats pretty cool I think!
I thought this little tip might save someone some troubleshooting/debugging time.
I had a situation today, where I wanted to replace part of the class of a given DOM element. To be more precise, the DOM element I was dealing with was like this :- More »
So, in an attempt to get my dev environment setup properly for RoR development, I started looking for best IDE’s for RoR development. I am a heavy Eclipse user (I use Eclipse and Flex Builder all the time), I thought there must be some Eclipse based IDE surely. And I found RadRails which is an open source IDE for Eclipse or Aptana.
In my Previous article on Installing RoR, I spoke about this excellent article which I followed completely to build my first RoR app in just a few mins. This article talks about using the Xcode Organizer for RoR development. Now, thats a Mac Only IDE and I would rather use something that is Eclipse based as I am so much used to it.
So, are there any other better options available? What do you guys use?
I just read the announcement on Ben Forta’s blog that Adobe has decided to give away Flex Builder 3 to unemployed developers so they could use their free time to develop a new skill. Well, as much as I wish that no developer ever gets unemployed, given the current economic conditions, I think you cant really help it. I know some pretty darn good developers who are out of work these days. Having said that, even I will be looking for work in the next couple of weeks as my current assignment has only 3 weeks remaining on it.
So, Kudos to Adobe, for having thought of this and giving away free Flex Builder 3.
