IntelliJ syntax highlighting tip for Javascript

IntelliJ IDEA 10's default highlighting of an unknown variable/symbol is annoyingly non intrusive. It took a while to find, but the setting to change it is "Weak Warning" under Editor: Colors & Fonts: General. I find IntelliJ's scoping/variable finding (what do you call that?) to be excellent, so why an unknown symbol is only a Weak Warning is a little confusing, but here you have it.

Upgrading to FlexUnit 4 for larger projects using FlexUnit .9

FlexUnit 4 is a much more powerful solution to unittesting in Flex than flexunit .9 was, but the documentation is a little sparse for right now. I've found over an over again the promise that it's backwards compatible with .9, and only one place that showed an example. Unfortunately, the code in that solution doesn't really work for larger projects that have many test classes. It took me a minute to realize that FlexUnit 4 doesn't need to be told specifically how to run a given test case, it will take a look at it and try to guess whats needed. The solution, then, because quite simple. Build a Suite like so:

// Metadata tells FlexUnit4 that this is a Suite and
// specifies a runner to use with it
[Suite]
[RunWith("org.flexunit.runners.Suite")]
public class FlexUnit4TestSuite
{
    //simply make public variables inside the suite
    //with the test cases or suites that you want
    //run.
    public var baseMediatorTest:BaseMediatorTest;
          // ...
}

Then you pass this suite into the test runner like so:

public function onCreationComplete(evt:Event):void
{
   core = new FlexUnitCore();
   core.addListener(new UIListener(uiListener));
   core.addListener(new CIListener(1028, "localhost"));
   core.run( FlexUnit4TestSuite )
}

Much more maintainable.

Google finally revived collaborative note taking

Yes!! It took longer than it rightly should have, but Google has finally re-enabled the world to do collaborative note taking, my hands down favorite part of my early PyCons. See this for example. I miss SubEthaEdit all the time. I hope that the SubEthaEdit guys aren't forgotten, now that Google's picked up the collaborative editing torch.

This is a very, very powerful, useful tool. Thanks Google!

Soda.. or Airline?

I knew it! Pepsi changed their logo last year, and when they did it, they put up all these crazy viral ads (for lack of a better term), that just had the logo a couple times in random words. One had like two or three on one bill board. I'm a little behind the times, not having TV, nor really being a soda drinker (Coke, when I do, thankyou), and I was trying to figure out why in the world any airline would advertise like this. I spent a good week wondering which airline it was.. Northwest? A new American Air logo? Finally, I see a new Pepsi can. Oooh, it's for Pepsi. That's the worst soda logo I've ever seen in my life. Here's an excellent breakdown, and they agree with me, it looks like an airline logo. Ahh, satisfaction.

Obama == Hope?

Stumbled across this.. on Flickr, a related tag to "Obama" is "hope".

PureMVC Gotcha

Don't send notifications that you're expecting a response to in your mediator's constructor (or during construction). Instead, override the onRegister() function and call them there. Your Mediator won't receive notifications it's interested in until after the registration process is finished. Seems pretty obvious, but you can loose track real quick of what's going on in the background when you're using a system like PureMVC that just seems to work.

Crazy Flex DateField Insanity

So, I've been busily putting together a Flex application at work, and we ran into a curious issue where Flash would infinitely loop and crash itself/the browser. (Not tested in Air) To give a little background first, we're following the convention of keeping our data in data objects (or data models), and binding both the visual component to the data model field and the data model field back to the visual component. All of our code is dynamic, so it's written in Actionscript, not MXML.
The problem occurred when we had two DateField interface components pointing to the same data model field. The two DateFields would be hooked up to a single data model field, and we saw the following behavior:

• If we bound the DateField.selectedDate to the model.birthday (as an example), with one DateField Instance, all would work. Underneath, it set off the bindings twice when you changed the selectedDate, but that was OK. With multiple DateField Instances, it would crash as it tried to create the second DateField. (This happened when we preinitialized the DateField and without preinitializing the DateField) Underneath, it would set off the bindings between the three items infinitely.
  
• If we bound the DateField.data to the model.birthday, it would never infinitely loop, but model.birthday wouldn't get updated when DateField was changed. I think that the code for DateField.data is screwy, but according to the documentation, it seems like this is the property you should bind to.
  
• If I tried binding the DateField.data to the model.birthday and the model.birthday to the DateField.selectedDate, it would also loop infinitely.
  

Finally, I created a ChangeWatcher on the DateField for when the selectedDate changed. On change, it would call a function that checked to see if DateField.data == DateField.selectedDate, and if not, it set DateField.data = DateField.selectedDate. At first, this didn't work quite right, but I changed it to check the DateField.data.time, which is just the number of seconds since Epoch, and that magically worked.

My theory is that Date comparisons are broken or behave oddly, and if you just compare Date.time, it works as expected. I'm assuming this is why the binding went forever, but I can't be sure.

Hope this helps someone else.. some also possibly helpful links:
http://devel.teratechnologies.net/steve_examples/Flex_BindingProblem/DateTest.html
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-15618

Ant Property Trickery

I needed to change a property in my ant build task. (Backstory: Flex has poorly documented ant tasks, and they seem to require that you set FLEX_HOME as a property so that the tasks know where to find the Flex compiler. I have 2 sdk's that I want to use, one has a code coverage tool called FlexCover built in, but I can't pass in something like FLEX_COVERAGE_HOME, since the ant task silently uses FLEX_HOME anyways.) Ant properties cannot be changed once they are set.

My solution? Import the build.properties file which does not set my target property (FLEX_HOME), then in my tasks, set the target property depending on which one I need (FLEX_REGULAR_HOME or FLEX_COVERAGE_HOME).

PureMVC Documentation

So, at work we're doing a big Flex project in PureMVC. (I don't know anything about ActionScript, nor Flex, so this should be interesting). We chose PureMVC over Cairngorm because it looks like it might support the huge code base we're going to have cleaner. Plus, I can wrap my head around the framework a little easier.. probably from my Python MVC roots. I think people just think Cairngorm is simpler because they're used to it.

Anyways. I just wanted to point out that PureMVC has some of the best documentation I've ever seen. I printed out the pdf of the Framework overview, double sided to conserve paper, and it has exactly one page of written text and one page of diagrams per section, so you get the text about the view, and on the facing page, all the UML.

The little things make me happy.

Regular Expressions

Does it ever strike anyone else as odd that regular expressions are like Microsoft Office? (Except much more useful and less aggravating) I mean, 95% of regular expressions use only 5% of the regular expression syntax, meaning that there's enough time between looking up a particular syntactical construct that you forget it and have to look it up again. My two favorite reg exp tools out there, though I'm sure there are more:

• http://www.tote-taste.de/X-Project/regex/syntax.html
• http://mochikit.com/examples/mochiregexp/index.html

Internet Explorer 7, Clears and Floats?

Working on a project, I'm have a form, where labels (containing fields) are all floated. In order to force a label to a new line, I put a class on it with "clear: left", but that, for some reason, causes the words to be smushed to the left. If there's a label text with a space in it, IE7 renders it as

first
second

instead of

first second

Anyone run into this before? I'm not css problem savvy enough to know what to Google for. I ended up just putting br's with a "clear: both" class on them in between rows, but it's not as clean as it was before.

PyCon 2008: Collaborative Notes?

I'm in the keynote at PyCon 2008, and I'm wondering if there are going to be people doing the SubEthaEdit Collaborative note thing this year. The last con I went to (2005), we took quite a few of these notes, and it was really a lot of fun. If you guys are out there, drop me a note: I'm Linden Wright on Bonjour and Kusmeroglu on AIM.

Grails Date Trick

If you have a Date field in one of your domain classes, for instance:

class Person{
String Name
Date Birthday
}

and you're struggling to figure out a way to get stuff into it without explicitly creating a date and converting strings or integers into it, Grails provides a handy (yet not documented?) set of properties for you. In our example, I could set birthday_year, birthday_month, birthday_day, birthday_hour, etc.. I found this by digging in the scaffolded views and figuring out how they render the tag. Now, maybe you don't have to dig.

Font choices, anyone?

I've run into this a couple times, and I find it quite handy, so I'm sharing it for all. It's a list of common windows fonts, their mac equivalents, and the fall back font-family specifier. Plus, everything is in it's own font, so you can see what you're choosing.

Just another css developer's link. I'm on a roll here.

Color Scheme Generator by WellStyled

Perhaps one of the best color scheme tools I've run across. Simple clean interface, great set of options. I like the rest of WellStyled's website as well, an interesting way to deal with multiple languages.

Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet

I took latin in high school and college (after a failed attempt to take Chinese.. love drawing the characters, hate trying to translate spoken Chinese), so the latin text popular to layout designers and typesetters always appealed to me. Here's a useful site that will generate as much of the text as you need, in paragraphs, lists, bytes, etc. I've used it a couple times before, just thought I'd share it with everyone. (Hint, View Source to copy/paste the useful stuff). Ah, good old Lorem Ipsum. As an aside, someone took thequickbrownfoxjumpsoveralazydog.com. Is it strange that that phrase reminds me of my childhood?

Gotcha: Grails Auto Recompile Doesn't Do GSP

Grails does the auto recompile thing, much like Turbogears etc., but it doesn't seem to work for gsp pages, in particular, main.gsp. Which can trip you up, if you're trying to make a couple simple changes to your first Grails app.

Gotcha: Grails Capitalization

So, apparently Grails doesn't like Controllers starting with multiple capitol letters (i.e. TLAcronym). If you create a domain class with all lowercase, it will capitalize it for you, but if you try to create TLAcronym, it happily plays along. Then if you generate-all or do scaffolding for that domain class, you won't be able to access your controller. I've raised an issue for this here: GRAILS-2541.

Acegi on Grails Tutorial

So, neither the information on the Plugin Page for the Acegi Security Plugin, nor the info in the acegi tutorial actually work completely. Here's a real tutorial for doing this. (Step 6 is where the existing documentation fails)

Step 1. Install Grails

Step 2. Download the Acegi Security Plugin. (I downloaded version 0.2 it as a zip file, to %GRAILS_HOME%/plugins/)

Step 3. Create a new Grails Project, and cd into the new project folder:

grails create-app SecurityTutorial
cd SecurityTutorial

Step 4. Add the Acegi Security Plugin. Note that you can install plugins by name using some lookup service, but the Acegi plugin won't be found.

grails install-plugin %GRAILS_HOME%/plugins/grails-acegi-0.2.zip

Step 5. Installing the Acegi Plugin will add some new scripts to your project:

• create-auth-domains [PersonDomainName] [AuthorityDomainName: this creates the domain model needed by the plugin, Person, Authority, and RequestMap classes, login and logout controllers, as well as the login view. You can give optional names as arguments to replace Person and Authority.
• generate-manager: creates the scaffolding controllers to add new Person, Authority, and RequestMap object in your database
• generate-registration: create a register and captcha controller, as well as matching views, and an emailer service.

Run each of these commands.

grails create-auth-domains
grails generate-mapper
grails generate-registration

Step 6. Setup BootStrap.groovy to contain some sample data, as follows:

// ProjectFolder/grails-app/conf/Bootstrap.groovyclass BootStrap {

   def init = { servletContext ->

// get a AcegiSecurity AuthenticateService
def authenticateService = new AuthenticateService()
// use it to create an encoded password
def md5pass = authenticateService.passwordEncoder("pass")

// Create two sample users
// NB: you must specify all the Person attributes, otherwise
//     Grails will fail quietly to add these to the database
def user_root = new Person(username:"root",
   userRealName:"Root User",
   passwd:md5pass,
   enabled:true,
   email:"root@example.com",
   email_show:true,
   description:"Desc").save()
def user_admin = new Person(username:"admin",
   userRealName:"Admin User",
   passwd:md5pass,
   enabled:true,
   email:"admin@example.com",
   email_show:false,
   description:"Desc").save()

// Add some sample Roles, add the users to those roles
def role_superuser = new Authority(description:"Superuser",
   authority:"ROLE_SUPERUSER")
role_superuser.addToPeople(user_root)
role_superuser.save()

// See AcegiConfig.groovy, at the bottom, there's a defaultrole
// setting, you must make one to allow registration to work.
def role_user = new Authority(description:"User Role",
   authority:"ROLE_USER")
role_user.addToPeople(user_admin)
role_user.addToPeople(user_root)
role_user.save()

// Create some Request Maps
new Requestmap(url:"/captcha/**",
  configAttribute:"ROLE_SUPERUSER").save()
new Requestmap(url:"/register/**",
  configAttribute:"ROLE_USER").save()

   }
   def destroy = {
   }
}

We also have to edit the RegisterController.groovy to fix a bug.

// ProjectFolder/grails-app/controllers/RegisterController.groovy                    // Line # 159-161
        person.save(flush:true)
        def parMap =['j_username':person.username,'j_password':params.passwd]
        // change this line:
        // redirect(controller:'login',action:'../j_acegi_security_check',params:parMap)
        // to this:
        redirect(controller:'login',action:"auth")

Step 7. Run the application

grails run-app

Step 8. Play around. Notice that you when you try to go to the register controller, it asks for a login, then, since you're already logged in, the register controller just shows you your info with a redirect(action "show"). Go delete the RequestMap for the register url, make sure you logout, then try again. See how the captcha is broken? Go remove the captcha RequestMap, and try again.

Thankyou Markmail

So, I've been trying to dig through codehaus's mail archives for the Groovy Lists. Oh wow, what a terrible interface, and miserable search. A lucky Google search later, and I stumble on Markmail's Groovy Site. Not only do I find the mail thread I was hoping for which solved my problem, but a fantastic interface to some of the larger tech mailing lists that has a fantastic interface and great search. The date restraints and graphs are nice, but even nicer: Awesome, awesome thread display, really nice interface for checking out attachments, perma-links, and powerful search features. Good job guys, I saved enough time to write this :)