Anuj Gakhar's Blog

Anuj @ Flex, ColdFusion and other RIA stuff….

Stress Testing your website with Apache jMeter

Jun 23

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Testing | 13 Comments

I recently got a chance to work with jMeter to stress test one of the Projects I was working on. jMeter is an open source software like all other Apache Projects. It is written in 100% pure Java and works as a desktop application. The installation is pretty easy and straightforward as well. Download the package and unzip it and that’s it. To run the application on Windows, double click the “bin/jmeter.bat” file and to run it on MacOS, double click the “ApacheJmeter.jar” file.

In this post, I will mainly describe the processes I followed to setup a Test Plan in jMeter. I think the learning curve with this application is very minimal, as once you understand what the basic terminology is, that’s pretty much it. At the top of the hierarchy is something called a ‘Test Plan’. This is what you add all your sub-actions to. Here is how the initial screen looks like once you have opened it up. Read the rest of this entry »

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jQuery DatePicker Plugin and Facebox Gotcha

Jun 22

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Javascript | No Comments

I have been using the excellent Datepicker Plugin by Keith Wood in one of my projects, along with Facebox and came across a gotcha today.

The Situation :-

I am basically using a link on the main page to open up a popup style window using Facebox. This main page itself is loaded via an AJAX call as one of the tabbed page content, not that it matters but I thought I would mention it. And in the Facebox window, I have a form which has some Date fields in it. I am using the mentioned Datepicker plugin to bring up a nice looking calendar for those fields.

The Problem :-

The DatePicker calendar popup doesn’t show up when you click on one of the Date fields, as it should. But when you close the window, you can see the remnants of the popup calendar, implying that it indeed opened up but was below the Facebox popup window, therefore, not visible. Read the rest of this entry »

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My Bucket List

Jun 21

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in General | 3 Comments

This morning, while driving to work, I somehow started thinking of the movie The Bucket List. And I decided to make one of my own! And I also thought why did I not think of this before. It is a great idea to have a list you can refer to and keep marking items off the list as you finish them. Gives you a feeling of satisfaction. Well, to me, anyways.

So, I started building my list. Here is what I came up with. I will keep on adding to this list as things keep coming to my mind but here is a start :-

  • Do a Parachute Jump from an Airplane.
  • Ride in a Hot Air Balloon.
  • Buy a brand new BMW X5 (or a better model by the time I am ready to buy).
  • Go to Niagra Falls.
  • Go to Las Vegas.
  • Do a couple of hours Flying and try and do a solo flight one day. Although flying Solo is not as strict as just flying.
  • Bungee Jumping (Done this already!) – but need to do again.
  • Go on a Cruise Holiday for atleast 2 weeks straight. Never had that long a holiday that didnt involve work and didnt involve family visits.
  • Visit Leh Ladakh (http://www.ladakhadventure.com/) in India – possibly in a self-driven 4×4 vehicle.
  • Visit atleast once all the Seven Wonders of the World.
  • Have the dedication and devotion to lose weight and bring my weight according to my BMI. This is a big one!

This is it for now but I might add more to this list. So, how about others? Does anyone maintain such a list? I would love to see what others have on their list.

P.S. – For those who dont know or have not seen the movie – A Bucket list is a list of things you want to do before you die.

CF/Flex Connectivity in Flex Builder : Invalid root. The WEB-INF/flex folder must contain either flex-config.xml or services-config.xml.

Jun 8

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in ColdFusion, Flex, Flex Builder, Mac | 4 Comments

I was setting up a new Project in Flex Builder with Application Server Type as ‘ColdFusion’. I had the default values in the Flex Builder wizard. But the Wizard wont let me go past the second screen. I kept getting this error :-

Invalid root. The WEB-INF/flex folder must contain either flex-config.xml or services-config.xml.

And I was sure that the WEB-INF folder actually had the correct files under it. Read the rest of this entry »

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Swiz Framework : Invoking a WebService call

Jun 6

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Flex | 4 Comments

As I blogged before, I spent the weekend trying to get my head around Swiz framework. The project I did uses HTTPService and WebService calls to fetch data into the UI. While this sounds pretty straightforward, I came across a little gotcha which I thought I should blog about here. Read the rest of this entry »

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First Take at Swiz Framework

Jun 6

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Flex | 7 Comments

I came across a project at work that was written using Swiz so I decided to spend the weekend getting my head around Swiz Framework for Flex. Swiz is a framework that provides Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection as its killer feature. I have been using Cairngorm for too long now and I was pleased with how Swiz handles the events, handles the dependency Injections and makes life so much easier.

In order to learn something, you always have to write some code with your own hands to actually see whats going on. So I decided to re-write coldfusiondocs using Swiz. Its currently written using Cairngorm and it still is using the Cairngorm version on the live website. For those of you who want to see what I ended up doing, I have committed everything to the SVN repository. I have created a new tag called coldfusiondocs_swiz which has all the code. You are more than welcome to review the code and suggest any improvements or changes. The project is open source anyways and its always good to have extra pair of eyes looking over. :)

Anyways, back to Swiz, here are a few things I learnt while doing this mini-project. :-

  • All Swiz expects you to do is define the Bean Config in the main Application file. After ofcourse dropping the .swc library in the ‘libs’ folder. There is nothing else you need to do, framework wise. Everything else is pretty much framework independent.
  • There are no imports required from the Framework source and the Events are native Flex Events, which I think is, one less thing to worry about.
  • The Event handling and Mediation leaves the developer with only the application logic to worry about rather than firing events and mapping them to commands etc.

Overall, I think I could get used to this quite easily. The framework is still not as stable and mature as some of the other frameworks but I can see it going in that direction.

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New look ‘n’ feel

Jun 3

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Blogging, General | 1 Comment

I have just now given a new look ‘n’ feel to my blog. Fortunately, its easy, pretty darn easy with WordPress, given the wide amount of themes available.

Now, all I need to do is find someone to actually sponsor the free ad space on the right :) :)

Hope you all enjoy the new look.

P.S. With different blog hosts coming out the market, it’s easier for bloggers to customize their template as they offer various tutorials.

Enabling AutoFilters on an Excel Template Dynamically

Jun 1

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in ColdFusion, General | 3 Comments

I had a requirement to generate an Excel report based on some filter criteria. Since I am using ColdFusion for the project, I will be using ColdFusion code to demonstrate what I did but this can pretty much apply to any language that can run loops and write files.

My requirement was to have Excel’s Auto-Filters enabled when the user downloads the file via the browser.  After searching a little bit, I realized its not that straight forward. I will probably blog about the harder way of doing it later, but here is what I ended up doing which turns out to be very simple and easy to do as well. Read the rest of this entry »

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jQuery Validator Plugin and notEqualTo Rule (with Multiple Fields)

May 24

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Javascript | 5 Comments

A reader asked me a question today on how to use the jQuery Validator to validate if 8 email address fields have a unique value. I have blogged about this before but that was for only 2 fields. Simply checking if one field is not equal to another. But here, we have a different situation. We need to check if all the 8 (or however many) fields are different from each other.

So, I thought I will blog about this and post the solution I came up with. Feel free to correct/improve. What I did was wrote another custom validation rule in additional-methods.js which looked something like this :- Read the rest of this entry »

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Flex : Tooltip on Fixed Width DataGrid Columns

May 21

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Flex | 2 Comments

I was displaying some data in a DataGrid and a requirement came up to show tooltips on the columns which had more data than the column width. Since increasing the column width was not an option, the ideal solution was to show the the ellipses (“…”) at the end of the column and the rest of the text to be shown as tooltip on the DataGrid Column. The first thought that came to my mind was to quickly write up an ItemRenderer. But then as explained here, you can simply use mx.controls.Label as your ItemRenderer as the Label class already had a text Property and it has the truncateToFit set to true and it shows the tooltip by default. Read the rest of this entry »

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