Flex had great documentation

These days I do a lot of HTML5 programming and on the server-side the technology I mostly use is the Spring Framework. Using the Spring Framework I often have questions or need to look up answers to specific hurdles I might encounter as I code and I typically turn to the online documentation. Unfortunately I have found that the online Spring documentation is not the best. Often the sections of the documentation describing a specific feature are brief or provide no concrete example. For such a widely used framework, this is disappointing. I thus often find myself simply googling my question and finding the answer that I need in that manner.

This reminded me of course of the good old days of Flex development where I would go directly to the online documentation and find what I needed right then and there. The documentation was complete, it had a great amount of detail on each and every feature of the framework and had great examples for each component thus making it easy to understand how things work or how to get started creating an application.

New Apache Flex web site

Now that Flex is a top level project at Apache, the enterprise level framework get a nice shiny new web site. Great looking web site, easy to navigate, with access to lots of documentation and links to the rest of the community. So if you are just starting with Flex or been a user for many years already, go check it out!

A little inspiration from a fellow Greek

Just ran across this short video which is basically an interview with Less Rain founder Vasillios Alexiou a fellow Greek ... enjoy :)

Flex lives!

We haven't heard much Flex news lately but as of this month Apache took Flex out of incubation and made it a top-level project! Apache Flex now has also reached version 4.9 and contains the following changes:

• New localizations for Australian, British, Canadian, Greek, Switzerland (German) and Portuguese
• The SDK natively supports the Flash Player versions 10.2 through 11.5. Previous versions were locked to a single version.
• Better support for Vectors, including new VectorList and VectorCollection classes.
• Inclusion of the new PostalCodeFormatter and PostalCodeValidator components for more consistent internationalization.
• The TLF (Text Frame Framework) was updated to version 3.0.33, and is now baked in the SDK. No need to download it separately.
• Support for Java 7 for compiling the SDK.

Also Spark versions of the following components are coming in a future version: Alert, ColorPicker, HDividerGroup, VDividerGroup, Menu, MenuBar, and ProgressBar.

Turn OFF register_globals in PHP

Having now used two different hosting companies for PHP web site hosting, I would like to quick describe the configuration issue that have occured with both hosting companies. They both set PHP's register_globals configuration variable to On, which can have undesirable effects on your application and make you easily second guess why your application is behaving in a certain way.

When register_globals is set to On, this means that your variables are registered globally and available on every page. So if you declare a variable called $userCount and assign it some value in a page called script1.php and then have another variable with the same name ($userCount) but with a different meaning on another page (say script2.php), it will initially take the value assigned when script1.php was executed!

So let's say script1.php performed the following assignment:

$userCount = 5;

When script2.php executes, if it also has a variable called $userCount, its initial value will be 5! Very confusing!

So take my advice, if you can configure PHP yourself on your web hosting site, then set register_globals to Off, or ask your web hosting company to do this for you. 

Also note that the register_globals configuration variable has been removed as of PHP version 5.4.

Adobe's Create the Web Tour - Montreal Edition

Adobe is passing by Montreal on Thursday December 6th, 2012 for the "Create the Web Tour". At this event you will get a chance to see the various Adobe Edge Tools in action and also how to create mobile apps using HTML, JavaScript and CSS using PhoneGap.

So all really cool stuff and if you want to attend follow this link to register, there is still places available.

Brackets is now Adobe Edge Code

I recently wrote about Adobe's foray into creating an HTML/CSS/JavaScript code editor called Brackets. Since then Adobe has created the Adobe Edge Tools and Services platform, which contains a suite of tools to help developers build better web applications and as such, Brackets has become Adobe Edge Code within this suite. The difference between the two is that Adobe Edge Code integrates with other Edge tools such as Edge Web Fonts and PhoneGap Build; while Brackets remains the open source version of the code editor. The open-source Brackets web site is still maintained on GitHub.

You can currently download the preview of Adobe Edge Code from the web site to give it a try if you are interested. I wrote about some the features in a previous post here. Also, if you want to see the editor in action, there is great demo video that can be found on YouTube right here.

Enjoy!