Author Archives: pgfeldman

Christine 12.28.2010

  • Continued working on Mavenizing AirFileImageApp
    • Received 3 errors:
      • Content error in AirFileImageApp-app.xml. Changed generic “this text will be overwritten…” to ${output} and error fixed.
      • Received Error 303 : assets/BlackEye16.png (32, 48 & 128 too) Icon Missing from package. After looking into several possibilities (none of which applied to this issue), commented out the icons for now and it worked. This also ended up eliminating the 3rd error which said “failed to execute flexmojos-maven-plugin3.8:sign-air”
    • Ran several clean installs and they all build the application successfully.
    • Will write up exactly what was done to get application to execute via maven
  • Downloaded lastest MavenAssist patch. Still have the same issue where app is not reading archetypeRepository from settings and using 4.0. The app just does not want to play nice.

Mike 12.28.2010

  • Thought about architecture overnight and decided what I’m using now is good and all it is missing is defining how applications will interact with each other.  This will mainly depend on how our users will want to define actions.  Will they define very specific actions or should it be more automatic like the old global selected item stuff?
  • Worked on the reportwidget.  Started by loading in xml at runtime which creates an app and adds it to the screen.  Now I’m going to define a ReportWidget App in xml and load it at runtime and see if I can get some text / datagrids to appear.

Phil 12.28.2010

7:30 – 5:30 VISIBILITY

  • Meeting with Katie C. went well. I showed her the entire VISIBILITY suite, and she walked though what her group needs. She’s going to get together with her division chief and schedule a demo
  • Trish found a bug(?) with user data, where a phine number with an extension can’t be stored in the DB. Let Dong know about it.
  • Working my way through protocol buffers.
    • I have to say, this is getting complex. So far you need cygwin and the gcc compiler to *build* the protoc.exe compiler. Right now I’m running the config utility that is determining *how* it will make the executable….
    • And now I need make. Getting that. Done (Cygwin is pretty cool sometimes). Running.
    • Failed CommandLineInterfaceTest.WindowsOutputPath test. Seems to be that the checks don’t understand cygwin’s way of referencing the c drive (cd cygdrive/c as opposed to cd C:/). Reading the blogs, this appears to be tolerable. The install seems to work.
  • And before I go and try this, I’m going to look for some simpler binary transfer mechanism. This is OK if you’re Google, but I’d like something that doesn’t add complexity to an already complex concept.
  • Started building a war file for a test servlet project and ran into Christine’s problem. It turns out that when we’re adjusting the pom file after it’s creation but before eclipse:eclipse is run on it, the number for the flex-mojo plugin is coming from the flexVersion variable instead of the flexArchetype variable from the User Settings. Fixed that, and uploaded the new code into subversion.

Dong Shin 12.28.2010

  • working at home….
  • continue working on MySQLDataManager and MySQLDataObject
    • retrieves data in XML and add dynamic properties to each row (Object) of the data
    • dynamic object in DefaultDataObject may not be very usable…. need to change it to the properties of the Class itself
  • PPM Changes for adding phone extensions
    • DB changes
      • ALTER TABLE `users` ADD `unclass_phone_ext` VARCHAR( 4 ) NULL AFTER `unclass_phone`
      • ALTER TABLE `users` ADD `class_phone_ext` VARCHAR( 4 ) NULL AFTER `class_phone`
      • ALTER TABLE `funding_requests` CHANGE `financial_poc_phone` `financial_poc_phone` VARCHAR( 35 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NULL DEFAULT NULL
      • ALTER TABLE `funding_requests` CHANGE `technical_poc_phone` `technical_poc_phone` VARCHAR( 35 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NULL DEFAULT NULL
      • ALTER TABLE `funding_requests` CHANGE `nsa_poc_phone` `nsa_poc_phone` VARCHAR( 35 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NULL DEFAULT NULL
    • Added extensions to AddUserForm
    • Add/Modify works
    • Added extensions to all contacts in Funding Request
    • Added extensions to SelectProjectWindow, ProjectMgmtPanel, ProjectViewerPanel sot that the extensions shown on Financial Data

Christine 12.27.2010

  • Worked with Dong on MavenAssist issue. Problem is that flexmojos-maven-plugin 4.0 was being used by maven, rather than 3.8 (which is specified in settings). It appears MavenAssist isn’t reading my archetypeRepository settings. Immediate fix: added in archetypeRespository setting into MavenAssist archetype command so that flexmojos-maven-plugin 3.8 is found and used, rather than latest one.
  • Reading through AirFileImageApp code
  • Reading up on how to run a Flex Air application via Maven. Made first attempt and all went well until reached digital signature of application. Reading up on manually creating the certificate for flexmojos-maven-plugin:sign-air to work. Created cert, but sign-air still failed to execute

Tom.DeVito 12.27.2010

Notes on self-extractors

Here are some ways to make self-extracting files in windows and linux.

Windows

  • No free viable solution so far…  Was going to use IExpress(this is what i was talking about last thursday), but you can only add files not directory structures which needless to say is terrible.
  • WinRar can make self-extracting files but they will not auto execute an installer.
  • Winzip self-extractor(not what comes with the standard winzip package) is a very good option but files made with the trial version are not licensed for distribution.  Full version cost $50.00

Windows is super annoying when it comes to compressing and decompressing files.  For whatever reason all of the more standard tools either don’t support directory structures or are not accessible via the command line.

Assuming that you are not trying to make a self extractor, and just want to compress or decompress files from within your program, the files found on this site will help:

http://stahlworks.com/dev/index.php?tool=zipunzip

Just drop them into your programs root directory and call it through the shell.  A lot of people like 7-zip for command line compressing and decompressing, but 7-zip needs to be installed in order to work whereas the zip.exe and unzip.exe files are completely self contained.

Linux

Linux is comparably much easier than windows.  I am pretty sure that all linux distributions come with tar.  Basically all you do is tar the file and then vi into it and add your self executing script to the beginning.  The tutorial above tells you to make a script that will run after decompression but this could be a program too.

Dong Shin 12.27.2010

  • helped Christine with Maven stuff
  • Nexus Maven Repo Server unstable?
    • 1.8 crashed after 20 mins.
    • back to 1.7 from 1.8, looks stable now….
  • Continue working on DataManager and DataObject
    • MySQLDataManager and MySQLDataObject extended from base class
    • base classes modified to support more variables/methods
    • testing DataManager and DataObject

Mike 12.27.2010

  • Investigating the Flex Text Layout Framework
  • The Good:
    • The mark-up language looks very similar to HTML and classes exist for importing and exporting from several sources
    • The language can be read by many existing flex components including TextArea, RichText, and RichEditableText
    • A fairly nice open-source text editor component exists
  • The Bad:
    • Simple things like lists with bullets are not yet supported
    • FlowText does not actually flow around things until 2.0 is released with the Flex 4.5 SDK along with many other needed features
  • I plan on making a Report application which will be able to contain other applications such as a rich text widget, advanced data grids, charts, and anything else we come up with down the line.  It will lay them out according to whatever layout the user wants and hopefully look just like a report would on paper.  I think the first iteration will read a config in from a xml file and the next version may have editing similar to a wiki page.
  • When working on the report widget I started thinking about how widgets will communicate with each other so I decided to refresh my memory on some existing popular flex application frameworks:
    • Cairngorm – not very dynamic out of the box
    • PureMVC – Could work but it completely ignore the built in eventing of flex and makes its own publish/subcribe methods…. so every view component needs to be wrapped in another layer to translate events.  This is, of course, a good idea to make reusable widgets but if you’re already doing all this extra work for your widgets, why not use your own architecture instead?

Phil 12.27.2010

8:00 – 4:00 VISIBILITY

  • I hereby declare that this is the festival of Contractorious. It covers the time between Christmas and New Years at Government facilities
    • Monday – The Festival of Light Traffic: Here we revel in the ability to drive anywhere at any time, at or above the posted speed limit
    • Tuesday – The Celebration of Easy Parking: In which we park close enough to the buildings we work at so we do not freeze to death in our sojourn across the Parking Lots Most Remote
    • Wednesday – No Meeting Day: We would gather to celebrate this, but it might be misinterpreted as a meeting
    • Thursday – The Day of Just Showing Up: We celebrate by just making it in. Observing this by napping at the desk or by leaving early is acceptable.
  • Had some scary flashbacks to text flow containers. Did find a useful article: http://devgirl.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/flex-4-and-the-text-layout-framework/
  • Starting to try some test applications with the DJ_Project
    • SimpleWebBrowserExample – Too cool. Handles flash and everything
    • Walking through the code for this example.
    • Working on the HTML Editor example. I needed to go out and get the zip files for CKeditor, FCKeditor, and TinyMCE editors, and add then to the classpath so that the app could find and launch them. Not sure how it’s doing that yet. I’m gussing that it’s related to the same way that the browser is incorporated. Not sure that it matters for what we’ll be doing, which is more along the lines of raiding eclipse for components and then adding them in in a more direct (i.e. integrated to work with compiler/debugger output). We’ll see.
  • Last thing to check out is a way to communicate between the IDE and the Client. Aaron suggested that Google Protocol Buffers were cool, easy and fast. Looking into them now.

Christine 12.23.2010

  • Making some progress on the MavenAssist / environment issue. Earlier, rather than running the archetype command through MavenAssist, I set up the project then ran the command via terminal. Project created successfully and I was then able to use MA to view the POM and use some of its other features.
  • Question: is there a problem with http://www.fgmdev.com:8081/ ? Couldn’t set the POM of the project. Received “Unable to set repository. Path = [http://www.fgmdev.com:8081/nexus/content/groups], name = [pulbic/] error = Connection refused”. Tried to access URL in browser and same thing.

Mike 12.23.2010

  • Came up with a decent restore animation for panels: create a small bitmap copy of the panel at the dock’s location and then quickly transition it to the panels restore location while increasing the image to the panels original size, add the panel back in to the container under the bitmap, finally remove the bitmap
  • Moved the animation and physics engine stuff in to the flex desktop framework and got them working
  • Met with Allen and looked at a sample report for the QuadChart application.  We will need for a starter demo:
    • Datagrids with grouped columns and rows
    • Ability to color columns and rows either by name or by the data they contain
    • Rich text with layout controls
    • A piechart or something that displays selected data from the datagrids would be nice
  • Started experimenting with AdvancedDataGrids and checking out their capabilities
    • Grouped columns is definitely possible
    • Grouped rows can be done by rolling up the data in to a kind of Tree/Datagrid hybrid, can then sum up leaf values in to branch
    • Coloring rows / columns / cells is not  a problem
    • Rich Text should not be an issue
  • Anything beyond is a very static demo is going to require a data backend

Phil 12.23.2010

8:00 – 4:30 VISIBILITY

  • Spent some more time looking at firefox plugin development.After a long talk with Mike, tentatively decided that it was better to go with the DJ Project approach and build a Java wrapper. Spent the rest of the day finding the CVS repo, reading documentation and pondering.

Dong Shin 12.23.2010

  • upgraded Nexus Repo to 1.8.0.1, enabled security so that anonymous doesn’t have full auth anymore. It was also unstable going down without warning, will keep monitoring…
  • working on MySQLDataObject to extend DefaultDataObject

Christine 12.22.2010

  • Apparently I was missing Flex SDK 4 plugin (had hero 4.5 and flex 3.5). Downloaded and added to Eclipse. Now FGMUtils works.
  • Still looking into flexbuilder goal error with MavenAssist create project.

Dong shin 12.22.2010

  • display DB meta info in Tree format
  • created dynamic form based on table meta data
  • creating TableDataObject and TableColumnDataObject

    • <Row NAME=”test” SCHEMA_NAME=”test” TYPE=”DATABASE”>

    <Row DATABASE_NAME=”test” NAME=”doubletable” TYPE=”TABLE”>

    <Row COLUMN_DEFAULT=”” COLUMN_KEY=”” COLUMN_NAME=”value”

    COLUMN_TYPE=”double” DATABASE_NAME=”test” EXTRA=””

    NAME=”value” TYPE=”COLUMN”/>

    </Row>