Skip to main content

8 posts tagged with "adobe"

View All Tags

Improving Apache's canonical hostname rewrite rules

· 2 min read

According to the Apache URL rewriting guide, the way to handle Canonical Hostnames is like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^fully\.qualified\.domain\.name [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://fully.qualified.domain.name/$1 [L,R]

Well, those rules are not always sufficient. Specifically, what if you also owned the www.example.com.au domain, and wished to redirect it also to the primary www.example.com domain? The solution is simple - we just need to add a single $ character to the end of the match-pattern of the first RewriteCond like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^fully\.qualified\.domain\.name$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://fully.qualified.domain.name/$1 [L,R]

Now that will work nicely as long as the hosts use standard ports (ie 80 for HTTP, and 443 for HTTPS). However, some Python versions unnecessarily append the standard HTTPS port number to the Host HTTP header. Also I discovered today (after some Apache debug logging) that Adobe AIR applications have the exact same misbehavior for HTTPS, but only when running under Mac OS X.

My Adobe Flex T-Shirt

· One min read

A couple of weeks ago (well actually, back in September), I received an interesting email from Lyora MacRae of Adobe. To quote the email:

Thanks so much for reporting 3 or more bugs for Flex SDK. As a thanks for your hard work, we want to send you a free t-shirt we're designing with all the developers' names on it. Therefore, we need your shirt size and mailing address to include you!"

Custom hierarchical cursors with the AdvancedDataGrid

· 2 min read

Yesterday, I was trying to write a custom hierarchical cursor class that implements the IHierarchicalCollectionViewCursor interface. But no matter what I tried, the AdvancedDataGrid would not recognise my implemented cursor class as being hierarchical. When I extended the HierarchicalCollectionViewCursor class, the AdvancedDataGrid would happily recognise it - even I overrode every single method and property... yet, as soon as I switched the class to implement IHierarchicalCollectionViewCursor instead of extending HierarchicalCollectionViewCursor the AdvancedDataGrid would break again.

An AIR of excitement

· One min read

Last night I received some pretty exciting (to me) news about something that's just been released on Adobe's pre-release site (which I am a member of)... unfortunately I can't say what it is yet (I've been sworn to secrecy), but it will likely help with a number of technical issues I'm currently facing in a major project at work, so I'm very happy with the timing! :)

AdvancedDataGrid column switching performance

· 6 min read

At work, we've been having some significant performance issues with the Flex AdvancedDataGrid control, so my boss has begun a dialog with some of the AdvancedDataGrid control's developers over at Adobe. As part of that dialog, my boss asked me to write a brief summary of the problem - which I've done. But it has occurred to me that the problem description is likely to be very interesting to some people, so I've decided to publish it here too. And so, here it is...

Adobe AIR Camp

· One min read

I'm currently sitting in (and posting from) the first Adobe AIR Camp in Australia... there's not much going on yet, but the day is young! :)

Currently, Andrew Spaulding is introducing Flex Builder 3... since I've been using it for some time now, this part's a little slow ;)

Okay, now he's talking about using transparent images for application chrome... getting interesting... better go now :)

Licensing the Adobe AIR command line compiler

· 2 min read

The Adobe AIR command line compiler ( axmlc adds a "Flex Data Visualization Trial" watermark to the background of chart and AdvancedDataGrid controls. If you are licensed to use Flex Builder 3 Professional, then you can fix this quite easily...

There are a number of pages on the internet that explain how to apply your Flex Builder 3 Professional license to the mxml (non-AIR Flex application compiler), such as:

But none of those cover the AIR compiler, however, it turns out that licensing the AIR compiler (axmlc)is just as easy as licensing the non-AIR (mxml) compiler.

textRollOverColor in Flex DataGrid part 2

· 2 min read

In my last post I presented a simple way to customise the DataGridItemRenderer class so the Flex DataGrid control would use the textRollOverColor and textSelectedColor styles correctly. But I also noted that the solution would not fix the DataGrid header items... well, here's my solution to that problem.

First of all, it's worth noting that there are two main reasons why a custom DataGridItemRender is not adequate for the DataGrid header items. The first reason is that the renderer's validateNow() method is almost never called for header items, even though it also called correctly, and often, for the data items. And the second reason is this: the validateNow() method (both the original version, and my custom version) depends on two DataGrid methods in order to determine which text style to use. Those methods are isItemHighlighted() and isItemSelected(). However, neither of those methods work for header items - they both always return false, making them of no use in determining text color for header items.