First Flex 4 book released

The first Flex 4 book (Hello! Flex 4) has just been released this month in the UK. I haven’t read it yet, so no way I could give any reviews on it, but from the interwebs, I can see it’s contents are really good. A must buy for the festive period.

Date Formatting with Flex

(Photo: adactio)

Flash on the iPhone

(Photo: William Hook)

Not really Flash running from websites on the browser, but at the MAX Conference 2009 that is happening this week, Adobe has just broken the news that Flash developers will now be able to create applications for the Apple Iphone using Action Script 3.

It’s a form of pre-compilation done via Adobe Flash CS5 (the new version coming up)

There is already some apps available on the app store. they are: Chroma Circuit, Trading Stuff, Fickleblox, Just Letters, South Park, That Roach Game and Red Hood. All created with a pre-release build of Flash Professional CS5.

Adobe has also announced on Monday Flash 10.1 which will be the new version of Flash coming for all the major smartphones (with the exception of the iPhone).

We can only hope now that as a next step, Adobe releases a flash version that can also be run on the Apple iPhone

IPTABLES - Opening server ports to specific IP addresses

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Updating Java on Centos

(Photo: tutchiio)

A more elaborated jQuery Drag & Drop (with cloning)

I’ve decided to get back at jQuery draggable and droppable to a personal project I’ve been working on. In the past, I’ve demonstrated how to do basic drag and drop, but this time I needed something a little bit more elaborated.

I won’t spoil my personal project by showing what it before it gets done, but I’ll show here an example of what I wanted to accomplish which will use pretty much the same functionality, but in other application.

The idea is:

I have a stage where I have a bunch of components that should be dragged from one side to another. Those components have to be cloned, and not totally dragged as I might want to use them more than one time.

A sketch of it would be on the lines of:

As you can see, my icons need to stay on the left, but a clone of it can always be dragged to the right. This is not a finished version, but show pretty much all of the steps I had to follow in order to accomplish it. It’s not a simple solution, and did involve loads of researching and asking around. The jQuery’s documentation is not really vast, and does not cover (and should not really) every single example.

I start with importing all my necessary libraries from Google Servers.

Sticky JavaScript Persistence

On my last blog post I explained how to create a drag and drop using cloning, so you can can drag & drop multiple objects

I’ve recently been working on a personal project where I need some persistence on the client’s browser.

Recursively delete folders with Python

Auto-Generating DTDs

I’ve used this DTD generator tool a long time ago, but today I had to use it again, so I thought I should put an entry on my blog about it and keep it archived for future reference.

Download the file dtdgen.jar and copy it to your [java_installation]jrelibext (assuming it’s on your classpath)

Test to see if you can run java stuff by opening a command line and running: 

Speed up yor website - Part 2 - The Free CDN

To continue with our series of website optimization tricks, I’ll talk a little bit more about Content Delivery Network (CDN), and will talk you though the steps of creating a totally free CDN for your website.

Basically, as I’ve already stated on my previous post, a CDN is an external network which specializes in serving static content. It normally consists of a few servers spread around the world, so the data will travel the shortest route to get to their destination based on Geolocation.

In other words, if you’re in Japan, why should you have to wait for the data to travel from Europe, if there’s a server just next door to you.