prag·mat·ic - dealing or concerned with facts or actual occurrences; practical.

Java, ImageMagick and Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command)

2009-12-01T12:11:00.008+01:00

Today I needed a to show a 50MB EPS file in the flash player on the client. I chose ImageMagick (a c++ image manipulation library) to convert the image to a jpeg because there really aren't any good java libraries who can do this kind of stuff without draining all of your resources on the server.ImageMagick wasn't hard to install at all, the guide on http://www.imagemagick.org is pretty clear and

Flex Accessibility Option

2009-11-16T14:37:00.005+01:00

A couple of days ago I updated to the latest nightly build version of the flex sdk (4.0.0.11686) because of some bugs I encountered. After updating my code everything seemed to run smoothly and the bugs I previously had where fixed in the nightly build.After a run through our build server and a deploy to the test environment, the application seemed to have stopped working. The only clou I got was

10 steps to improve your Vista installation

2009-05-16T12:55:00.007+02:00

Finally, I switched to Vista, I decided to give it a try. I never used Vista before, but I heard (a lot) of complaints from co-workers who had all sorts of problems with Vista, mostly performance troubles. I did some research on the internet and tweaked my Vista install in a pretty simple way and greatly enhanced performance and the overall annoyance level of Vista, even without disabling the

Oracle buys Sun!

2009-04-20T15:36:00.000+02:00

http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/index.jsp#Well is it good, or bad news?

Follow my blog!

2009-04-16T20:47:00.001+02:00

Hey lets make this blog a little more communicative using the google friend connect features of blogger. Everyone reading this blog please click the FOLLOW button at the top right corner to join my blog as a 'follower'. This is a great new neat feature of google :-)greetingz

Remote object reference pooling in Flex

2009-04-07T12:29:00.000+02:00

Ever tried to compare object by reference when using remote objects and failed? Or wondered why you have so many instances of the same object in memory.. This blogpost will describe why and when this happens, and offers a solution including source code.The problem appears when building RIA applications based on the domain driven design principle. Typically you will have a domain layer in your

Scroll behavior in flex

2009-02-05T11:19:00.002+01:00

Most of the sites we build are using textarea's to display multiple lines of text. However all scroll functionality is handled internally by the TextArea component (or more exact the underlying TextField). Which means if you have a page that scrolls and you have a TextArea component somewhere, the scrollwheel won't work if you have your mouse directly above the text in the TextArea.Fortunately

A simple bamboo notifier tray icon

2008-12-20T13:22:00.007+01:00

We build all our software using the continuous integration tool Bamboo. After searching the internet for a while I still couldn't find a simple tray icon notifier for bamboo, so I decided to create one myself. You can find the project located at: http://bamboo-notifier.googlecode.comBamboo notifier is an Adobe AIR application that runs in the system tray on various platforms, it notifies you of

Using the flex framework RSL's in Flex 3 using Ant

2008-11-29T19:53:00.003+01:00

Using RSLs will save you over 300kb of your swf filesize. Flexbuilder has build in features to compile your swf using the rsl libraries, but offcourse we are building on our build server using ant. Using the flex frameworks RSL's from ant is easier said then done. Appearantly this Ant mxmlc target does not implement this feature yet. This feature is shipped with the next flex version (Flex 4

Flex not working properly in Google Chrome

2008-09-09T12:51:00.001+02:00

For some reason flex isn't working in google chrome when u use the history enabled methods. It seems like google chrome automatically redirects back to the previous page when you change the location url in the browser. For example try www.parleys.com with your google chrome browser. Try navigation around and you will see you can't get away from the 'home' page of parleys..Chrome is build upon

EXIF Info Hell

2007-11-01T19:47:00.001+01:00

Kevin Hoyt has written some nice examples in his blog (http://blog.kevinhoyt.org/) about using EXIF info in AIR applications. I've been writing an application that is using EXIF info to get the jpg thumbnail from it without having to read the entire file.. Now this is working as a charm BUT..There are multiple version of the EXIF standard and there are different manufacturers using it different.

Albelli photobucket launched!

2008-04-22T16:28:00.001+02:00

written by Marcel PanseThe X-Editor is finally live! The X-Editor (pronounce cross-editor), is a multi-platfom photobook editor written in flex 3 using Adobe Air technology.It is launched today under the brand albelli (www.albelli.com) and uses the new photobucket API.You can read the official press release here: Albelli photobucket press release.I'm very proud to be a part of this for the last

Some thoughts about CMS, Webdav and SVN integration

2008-11-29T18:50:00.004+01:00

Most projects use some kind of content management system to create and edit content for our applications. In this post I want to share some ideas on a Subversion and Webdav based content management system. Please read on after the break!There are a lot of projects written in java with some frontend technology like JSF, Flex or AJAX. Most of these web-applications need some sort of storage

Smoothing your images in flex

2008-11-27T18:02:00.005+01:00

Do you have jagged edges in your image when you show an image in flex?There is a solution!Using the Image tag in mxml to show your images you can set a property calling 'smoothing', when you set this property your images will look much better in your browser. The thing is this property is not available from mxml. They way to go to set this property is as follows:

Upgrading to Flex 2.0.1: JUST DON'T

2007-03-16T11:42:00.000+01:00

Great, i saw there was a new release of Flex builder on the Adobe site the other day.. I am currently using Flex Builder 2, and there is a new release called 2.0.1. So i thought, ok thats a small bugfix or something, nothing major (hence the 0.1 version). So i downloaded the update from the adobe site and i ended up with downloading a 144MB update. Hmz that can't be right for a small bugfix/code

Creating a hybrid flex / java project in eclipse

2007-01-17T09:22:00.000+01:00

One of the problem with FlexBuilder, which is integrated in the eclipse IDE, is that you will need a Flex Project in your workspace to make use of all the cool FlexBuilder tools.You can't just integrate flex in your existing java-app, because the FlexBuilder won't recognize the project as a Flex project.I've looked into the differences of these projects and it really isn't that hard to create a

Hibernate annotations: The composite primary key with foreign keys references

2006-04-28T08:48:00.000+02:00

written by Marcel PanseA very common database design pattern is when you have a many-to-many table which creates a 3th table to create the many to many. You don't have to create a POJO for the 3th table but simply map the many-to-many between the two tables. But what if you want an extra property in your 3th table. You have to create a POJO with a primary key over multiple columns. But the

How to keep your hibernate POJO's clean from annotations

2006-04-27T20:20:00.000+02:00

written by Marcel PanseI've been reading a lot on blogs on the internet about annotations blurring your code in your java classes. Everybody states that you should be carefull about overly misusing annotations because it will easily blur your code. But if used correctly annotations will clean up your code and make stuff much easier to read. Using annotations instead of the hibernate mapping files