No, not the website!

The API. I'm working on a new Flex website for my wife's pottery business, and have come to the check out process. I've found a few posts on flexcoders, much the same content on Adobe's forums, as well as pretty much the same people posting in Paypal's Developer Forum.

I've seen mention of using a proxy to connect Flex to PayPal, fine, that makes sense. Where can I find the web service API? SOAP examples? I've gone through a ton of pages, downloaded enormous PDFs, I've looked and looked, and really just hope I've looked in the wrong place.

Hopefully someone can provide a clear answer for me. I don't need anything fancy, i don't think I need web payments pro, I simply want to be able to accept paypal payments, maybe take credit cards. I don't mind setting up SSL and all that, but jeez Paypal, could you make it harder?

 

Anyone? Beuller?

I've known about visibone for years, but hadn't given it much thought. I had one of their mouse pads, for a while and left it behind at a contract job, so it occured to me to track down a new one.

I had the octagon, and it was a little warpy so I wasn't bummed to lose it. I'm no designer, but every once in a while it's nice to have a color chart nearby when I want to make a font something other than black.

This new model mousepad is a way better quality than the previous one I had. It 's much thinner and feels much more sturdy. I'm a fan of multi use tools, so this is great! A mousepad and color chart, poy-fect!

Take a look, they've got a ton of products, so take a peek

Useless, but cool. Such is the life of most cool visual tools it seems. That said, I stumbled on this little gem when loading my twitter homepage, and they had an add for "find out what's new" or something. At any rate, check it out.

I just found it two minutes before posting, so I haven't played much with it, but when you click a friend's little tile, it zooms into it, and shows what they posted, kinda neat.

The whole thing draws pretty damn sweet when it loads.

Saw this on Rob Rohans blog. I have to say, I 100% agree with his outrage (irritation? Anger? annoyance?).

Yes, interviewing a coder is hard because the proof is in the puddin' but the solution isn't to ask them to write an app on paper, whiteboard, napkin, etc. It's to learn about the person, are they a fit? Code is code, if you hire some one who sucks, let them go. The bigger issue in hiring, is finding the fit, the personality.

Ok, so this posting is a bit over the top, but when I was last looking for a job almost every single place had me write code either on the whiteboard, or on a piece of paper. Often times I refused to do it because I didn’t see the point in it, and when I asked what they were testing me on they often said something like, “to see if you can code.” If that were true, then the experiment is flawed from the get go. I rarely use a pen anymore, let alone write code on anything but a keyboard.

I've been there, recently. After doing the exercise, and hanging up the phone I went to my computer and worked up the code I had just written. The IDE helped me see a few things I had wrong, a function name here, using a cast instead of tostring(), etc. minor things, things I'm sure I was penalized for, but would have never been an issue because in the real world I'd have run it, seen the app not work and fixed my code, simple as that and the real programmers do it.

After that I decided to do what Rob did, I won't be answering those questions any more. I've been coding a long time, talk to my peers, co-workers, past clients. I don't code on a whiteboard at home (My Office) what would it show the potential employer besides my bad penmenship and penchant for getting dry erase marker all over me? I have tons of books, Amazon loves me, I can barely remember my cel phone number, I'm not even bothering to remember every function and param in Flex, CF, or any other language.

I've been on both sides of lots of interviews, I've never asked to see code, or have code written in front of me, I don't care. A new hire will sink or swim, same as any job, if they can't code they get let go. Simple. I've always been much more worried about whether I could sit next to some one without wanting to throttle them.

In reading a post recently on Universal Mind's blog about getting FDS installed on a mac, it occured to me, i should post my set up, not only for my reference in the future, but in case anyone is wondering how to do CF and Flex on a mac.

I followed the Definitive guide, with a lot of help from Sim, to get jrun and CF installed. I run MySQL for my database because... well Microsoft isn't sharing the M$ SQL love with the mac users of the world :( For my "enterprise manager" I use Navicat. Not free, but worth the price. Great app. Truth be told, I now wish all my prod DBs were MySQL so I wouldn't have to fire up Parallels to do prod DB work. Kinda sucks.

I moved from VSS while still on the PC, favoring now, subversion. Love it! It's great, my apps are source controlled off site so I can get them when needed (I do maintain local backups just in case) but I can check code out on the mac, or when using Parallels/XP, there as well.

I run Mac dreamweaver because I wrote a review of Studio, which had Mac and PC licenses. I don't think I'd buy it. Of course I use FlexBuilder 2.0.1 also. in stand a lone mode with CFEclipse (Truly great, get it, now, do it.), Subclipse, and JSEclipse installed as plugins. It's a great environment.

Back to Subversion (SVN). I was using zigversion, which was great, but didn't support the latest SVN release, and was not in the least bit, feature rich. Not their fault, and it's free. I did some googlin' and found SmartSVN. I haven't ponied up for the advanced features yet, the free ones being enough, but I probably will.

I also use ServiceCapture so I can see what CF is saying to Flex, which helps a lot sometimes.

I was using Lingon for my servers, but (again with Sim's influence) I moved to jsut doing it command line. I use iTerm and set bookmarks to the stop and start command of each of my Jrun servers (jmc admin, cfusion, clientcode, FDS, etc...) that way I have a console open and can see what CF is up to, and if need be, restart the service. It's nice and very easy.

So that's pretty much my set up. If I'm reading this because I did a format/fresh install and forgot something, I'm welcome, if you're looking to make the switch to a mac, hopefully this and the links herein help make it less arduous.

With much help from Simeon I'm all set with CFMX and jrun on my MBP.

I initially followed (again with some nudges from Simeon) the Definitive guide. And now that I'm done, have gotten adventurous.

The guide calls for using Lingon, which does just fine, except I'd rather not run the servers when I'm writing, surfing the web etc. No need to waste resources when they can be put to other uses :)

Some googling led me to a post from Sean, that (it took me a while to realize this) was almost 3 years old. Before I could even start doing what Sean prescribed (*nix n00b here) I had to learn what a shell script was and how to write one.

That done. I started playing with what Sean described. And then Simeon came to my aide yet again with an example script he uses to fire off servers. He's more of a Command line(r) than I am, so I took that and what Sean described 3 years ago and came up with what's below. It's mostly the same app Sean wrote about, except the command line to fire off CFMX and java are  different.

So to start my servers

[More]

You may or may not know I've recently moved to a mac. I've had one for writing for a while now, but just a few weeks ago I got a MacBook Pro and do all my work on it.

Using Parallels I've got XP running in a nice little window on Monitor two :)

That said, (and this is as much for me as anyone) I've recently moved to Tomcat for my app server.

I've been a loyal Jrun user since ColdFusion went to java. Having seperate instances for client projects and internal me work, even an instance for a client with a special set up. Jrun afforded me great flexibility in having multiple CF setups. HOWEVER. jrun is a PITA to use!! It's been a thorn in my side since I started using it.

Every time I clicked "start" on a CF instance i cringed hoping it's result ing "Running" vs that huge green jrun alert box indicating that somethign had gone wrong...

Well two days ago was the last straw. I was in Starbucks working away when the MacBook Pro seized. I think it actually had a stroke. Well XP in it's little window was not happy. I finally had to do a repair from the XP CD. Everything was fine... except jrun. It was not happy. Wouldn't load. OK, I uninstalled, reinstalled. No love. uninstalled again, rebooted, deleted files, reinstalled the JRE. Still no jrun love.

Finally my pal Peter came to my rescue. Suggesting that while he could probably find the info on jrun, I might want to try TomCat. "OK" I said. BTW, he sent me this link to help.

Well that easy. below is the steps he walked me through. WAY EASY!

1. install CF. Use these setting. J2EE/War setup. RDS or not, up to you, I do it.
2. Rename cfusion.war to cfusion.war.zip and expand the file. so now cfusion.war is a folder.
3. Install Tomcat. For me it's C:/tomcat_55
4. Copy cfusion.war and rds.war (which you don't have to expand) to tomcat_55/webapps/
5. rename rds.war to CFIDE.war (all caps)
6. in your cfusion.war rename the following files. to .jar.bak or just .bak. We don't want these files being used. Their old. Don't want em.
   
1. WEB-INF/cfform/jars/commons-logging.jar
2. WEB-INF/cfusion/lib/commons-logging-1.0.2.jar
3. WEB-INF/cfusion/lib/commons-logging-api-1.0.2.jar
7. Start TomCat

Bam, you're up and running. There's tweaking you can do for directory browsing and such. in this file. C:\Tomcat_55\conf\web.xml

I haven't yet, but will be. There's also an admin you can DL from apache.org, I haven't tried it yet iether but will.

But at least I have Cf running.

What I haven't figured out, mostly because I haven't had the time (lots of projects, good/bad) is how to get FDS running. but should be easy enough.

Enjoy

6.

Today is your last chance to register for MAX, better hurry, if you're waiting until the last possible micro second. I've been registered since.... oh I guess about 2 minutes after Forta announced that it was open for registration... I can't wait. Several ex coworkers will be there as well as people I'm working with now. Can't wait to meet face to face and see again.

And the Shiny MacBook Pro will get to do a little traveling.

This is mostly so I don't forget, but if it helps you, well that's cool too. I had to google search every which way to sunday, then searched the house of fusion CF-Talk list before finding my answer.... Thank you steven Erat!

The jist is when you use CFHTTP to talk to IIS it may send it's reply back in a compressed state. CF no likey that very much and you'll end up getting the dreaded "Connection Failure". However the solution is simple. Add these two params to your CFHTTP and viola!

Which according to Steven (who knows more about IIS than I do, clearly) tells IIS not to send it's reply in a compressed state. BAM!! no more "Connection Failure".

Like I said, this is as much for me, as it is for you. I just don't want to waste time searching again.

After listenning to this weeks podcast, I may unsubscribe.

Michael and Bryan spent almost an hour, talking out of their asses about Flex.

I saw Scotts post about the show, but didn't read it until I had a chance to listen for myself. He's right on every single point he makes.

It's clear from listenning to them, they've never built a Flex app, never really even looked into what might be involved in building a Flex app.

They talk about their 3-4 k Line javascript application and how it can only run in the latest browsers... It seems to me, had they known something about Flex, that app would be built in it. I'd be willing to be that a Flex app built to the same spec their AJAX app is built to would be; Done quicker, provide a better user experience, be easier to maintain in the future, run on any browser (flash player required obviously).

FDS is a 1.0 product? I've not heard anything like that. Nor had any problems using it.

FlexBuilder is like Dreamweaver? What the hell? I wonder if they know Flex2 is out?

They claimed to be speaking objectively, and hopefully no one bought that. They spoke with thick biase towards AJAX, biase that not only cast Flex in a poor light but provided nothing useful to a developer thinking about which path to take.

Flex is a language, a technology
AJAX is DHTML.

"Pick the right tool for the right job" ... as long as it's AJAX?

Don't do something for the "cool"??  I've always thought that was the whole point of AJAX. I worked on a project with some really nice AJAX features, built because the client asked for sexy.

"AJAX is more seperated from data, Flex isn't" I don't know where someone would come up with a statement like that. I can't even think of a comparison for the sheer lameness of a statement like that.

"Any argument you can make for one, you can make for the other." How come you guys didn't do that?

I don't think I ever heard them mention one time that Flex was a good choice. Lot's of "Flex may be the right choice" Weak sauce, guys.

My blog ate the first two posts, so I'm tired to typing the same things over and over so I'll end with.

Michael and Bryan, if you're going to speak on a topic, research it. Build an app in it. Don't step up to the mic and look foolish. It's clear you know absolutely nothing about Flex. it was in beta for months, you coulda played with it then, it's free now (in most cases) to play with at least as a developer. Due your homework.

I guess I haven't been paying attention to the BlogFusion dev blog enough. I typically check it once a month or so, Jake hasn't been posting much. Turns out in the last two weeks or so I guess, Jake has sold or given away or something, BlogFusion. Two new guys are taking it over, and commercializing it. I'm of two minds on this. I know you have to make money to be in business, but BF's open-ness what why I picked it for the various blogs I've created. Jake provided an incredible starting place, and I could run from there. Now it seems Dave and Jim plan to lock the code up and sell it as a closed system. I can't tell if they're going to sell it encrypted, or sell it as a hosted service, maybe they don't even know.

Based on what I've read so far, it looks like 4.5.x was my last BlogFusion purchase. I'll start making enhancemnents to this code base and go from there. Sure wish they had waited one more version :) so much of what I have to do, Jake did in his work towards 5.0

Oh well. I thank Jake for all his hard work up until now, and wish Dave and Jim the best of luck in the future.