Category: Software Development

Flex Builder alternative — IntellJ IDEA 7.0.3

The next version of IntelliJ IDEA– 7.0.3 — will have built-in support for Flex development.

Among other things, it will support:

  • Smart code completion for MXML and AS files, with cross-resolution of code symbols between them, even inside of mx:Script blocks and attribute values
  • Automatic code formatting, highlighting and styling
  • On-the-fly code validation with instant quick-fixes
  • Search for perfomance bottlenecks, bad code practices
  • Refactoring

Here is a tutorial using IntelliJ IDEAfor Flex development. You’ll need to sign up for the early release program of JetBrains to get the beta of IDEA7.0.3.

More information can be found on this blog post by JetBrains.

This is a great news for those who like to use IDEA as their preferred development environment. Also, it is good to have choice!

Price-wise they are at par — the personal edition of IDEA is USD 249, which is the same as Flex Builder.

Setting Current JDK programmatically on Mac

A few days back I was looking for a way to change the CurrentJDK symbolic link on my Mac. I had found this nice script somewhere (don’t quite remember where). But is is very useful.

#!/bin/sh

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions

CURJDK="`readlink CurrentJDK`"echo Current JDK version: $CURJDK

if [ "$1" == "" ]; thenecho Installed versions:lsexitfi

VERFOUND=`ls | grep $1 | head -n 1`

if [ "$VERFOUND" != "$1" ]; thenBASE="`basename $0`"echo Error: Could not change JDK-- version $1 not installed!echo Run $BASE without arguments to see a list of installed versions.exit 127fi

echo You must now enter your Mac OS X password to change the JDK.sudo ln -fhsv $1 CurrentJDK

Save it as a file name of your choice. I saved it as “SetJDK.sh”. Give it execute permissions, and run the script.

AnyEdit: useful plugin for code formatting in Flex Builder / Eclipse

Over the past few days I’ve been searching for a Eclipse/Flex Builder plugin that would let me trim the unnecessary spaces left at the end of lines in the code that I work on.

I found a very nice extension called AnyEdit that performs the task of trimming extra space very well. I’ve been using it for a few hours now and it’s worked very nicely.

AnyEdit can trim trailing spaces on any text-based file type editable in Eclipse/Flex Builder
Another task that the script performs very well is the ability to convert tabs in to spaces (and vice versa).

It also has some other nice features, like case conversion, chars to HTML entity conversion, etc.
You can download the extension from the AnyEdit site.
It’s a must-have.

Adding the PATH variable on Mac OSX

This is another one of those blog entries where I want to blog for the sake of remembering tedious details…

The issue that I was facing was how to add a directory to the PATH environment variable on my Mac.

I wanted to add a path to MySQL install. So I’ll use that example. The following command in a Terminal window created my .bash_profile file. If the file already exists, it would have added to that file.

echo ‘export PATH=/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH’ >> ~/.bash_profile

The PATH information is stored in /Users/username/.bash_profile file.

TODO/FIXME extension for Flex Builder

Found this wonderful TODO/FIXME extension for Flex Builder today that shows TODO/FIXME tasks in the Tasks view — much like what one gets in the Java perspective.

Prior to using this extension, I was leaving all kinds of visual and searchable markers in the code so that I could search for them at a later point of time to finish off tasks or fix issues. But with this extension all that will be a thing of the past!

Thanks to Dirk Eismann for this wonderful extension.