Free Alternative to Flex Builder

It's been a long time since I last played with Flex. I feel like starting from square one.

This also means that I have a more difficult path ahead of me, with my Flex Builder trial license already expired.

Fortunately, it's not that hard to setup basic mxml auto complete functionality with a plain Eclipse installation with XML support.

First we need to define the .mxml file association in Eclipse (Preferences > General > Editors > File Associations).



Then map this file association to the XML editor (see screenshot below).



Add the Flex 3 schema (flex3.xsd) to Eclipse's XML catalog.



Try creating a test mxml file and open it from Eclipse.

Test.mxml

[sourcecode language="xml"]



[/sourcecode]

You will most likely receive an Unsupported Type error.



Complete the process by adding the content type definition (shown below).



Close the mxml file and re-open. You should now be able to see the auto-complete functionality in action.



Hope this helps and let me know if you encounter any problems.

If you're a student or a full time Flex developer, you shouldn't even bother trying out the outlined steps.

Flex is free for students. But, if you make a living out of developing Flex apps, you might want to consider buying a license.

Related resources:

• Setting Up Eclipse For Flex 2


• Flex and ActionScript 3 Books


• Installing AXDT (Eclipse AS Plugin)


• FlashDevelop IDE

SEO basics

I've been creating web applications for quite some time but never got interested in SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) until now.

The primary reason I think is that most (if not all) of the web applications I've been developing are for internal use only (think Java and banks).

But this outlook changed as my wife and I started playing with a Christian Music Site called Sling & Stone Music.

For starters, I've converted most of the dynamic URLs to use mod_rewrite to somehow make them search friendly.

I was thinking of buying a book for this purpose but luckily I found some very good articles from IBM developerWorks on the said topic.

Here are the links:

• Search engine optimization basics, Part 1: Improve your standing in search engines


• Search engine optimization basics, Part 2: SEO keyword and infrastructure strategies


• Search engine optimization basics, Part 3: Get your Web pages into search indexes


• Search Engine Optimization basics, Part 4: Improve search marketing for large sites

Hope you find them useful!

Pro Java EE 5 Performance Management and Optimization eBook for $10

I'm very pleased to announce that one of the books recommended for the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect (SCEA 5) exam is currently available as a bargain book from Apress daily deal site.

Pro Java EE 5 Performance Management and Optimization ...

Offer only valid for the next 24 hours.

Tick tock.. Tick tock...

Debugging cron tasks

Being a *nix noob, I found it really hard to figure out the problem I had with a cron job last week.

The fact that sendmail was disabled in the machine I was working on also didn't help (no emails were sent during failed cron task execution).

To workaround the problem, I found a useful tip from this post which enables console logging for cron.

add this line to /etc/syslog.conf

cron.debug /dev/console

I then got an error from the redirect logs which said:

sudo: sorry, you must have a tty to run sudo

This was easily fixed by commenting out the line below from /etc/sudoers (a tip from another blog post):

#Default requiretty

Hope this helps!