dirtystylus

FDT 3.5

Finally installed FDT 3.5 yesterday. I don’t write Flex Apps, so the MXML support is nice to see but doesn’t really affect me. I noticed a lot more templates, and today I was pleased to see that the quick fix to rename a class also automatically renames the constructor if it is present. It always annoyed me that this wasn’t the default behavior in FDT 3.2.

I also recommend the three-part online training course on FDT by Alan Klement. More details here. Alan’s blog is also a great resource for FDT tips and also general Flash development topics.

CakePHP and Model File Names

Another example of the little things that you learn when picking up a new framework: filenames for your CakePHP Models should be lowercase. For example, section.php and not Section.php.

I’d been working on a small CMS for a friend’s site, and even though everything worked perfectly on my local MAMP install, when I uploaded it to the production webserver for testing I kept getting an error when retrieving items that had an association with another model:

Notice (8): Undefined index: Section

In this case I had a Section Model that had an association with many Items. Section hasMany Items, in other words. When retrieving the Items listing the respective Sections could not be retrieved.

After I renamed my model files to lowercase and flushed the /app/tmp cache the associations were recognized, and the listing of Items showed the relationship to the associated Section objects.

I think this happened because I hand-coded a few of the Model files before switching to bake to scaffold things.

Oh, and a final note to self: the AMF/SWX CakeSWXPHP plugin appears to require PHP 5. Couldn’t understand why the AMF calls were failing until I checked the PHP version on the remote production server. Sure enough, it was still running PHP 4.

Project Names for Ant Build Files

Just posted this over at the DS Tech Blog: Project Names for Ant Build Files. Completely obvious, yet somehow it’s taken me a year to realize this. It’s not usually an issue when you only have one project open, but today I was staring at three build files in the Ant panel, all named “project”. So, just another small step towards better workflow.

Flash Runtime Assets

My friend Andy Hatch has been working on utility classes for runtime asset loading in Flash, specifically runtime fonts. Runtime fonts are a particularly tricky thing to get right, but this looks like a clean, simple solution to the problem.

We Choose the Moon, FWA S.O.T.D.

Update 2009-08-04: We Choose the Moon was chosen as FWA Site of the Month!

We Choose the Moon is today’s FWA Site of the Day. The moon landing is tonight, after which the site will shift to post-live mode where you can investigate each of the stages separately.