Inside Web Development http://www.insidewebdev.com Articles and tutorials for web professionals Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:02:20 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6 en Away3D 2.2: The RailAway Express http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/10/07/away3d-22-the-railaway-express/ http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/10/07/away3d-22-the-railaway-express/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:00:37 +0000 Knut Urdalen http://www.insidewebdev.com/?p=159 The Away3D team has just released version 2.2 of Away3D. And what a point release they have put together!

First you should take a ride with The RailAway Express, a fantastic demonstration of the new runtime model generation and animation features (only 780kb in size, almost everything in the demo is code generated). The demo is put together by Fabrice Closier with some help from Andre Michelle and Joa Ebert on sound.

Second you should start playing with some of the new features that includes:

  • Triangle caching
    Major performance enhancement on rendering large scenes with static objects and camera (works on per canvas)
  • Collada bones
    The collada parser now support animation data through an animationLibrary (similar to materialLibrary)
  • Bounding boxes and bounding spheres
    Allowing you to calculate better collision detection in real time
  • PathExtrude, PathAnimator and PathDuplicator
    Let you extrude geometry from a path and move objects along a path
  • Simple shadows
    Automagically generates a nice little real time shadow on the ground for you

In addition this release includes:

  • Obj exporter
  • Separated geometry classes
  • Corrections to multiple view interaction
  • Custom renderer definition on ownCanvas objects
  • Fixed mirroring in 3ds files
  • Elevation2AS3 function
  • ElevationModifier class
  • Non-destructive scaling properties on objects
  • Non-destructive movePivot on objects

Training: Essential Away3D Techniques

If you are serious about developing with Away3D I would suggest that you attend to Rob Bateman’s upcoming Essential Away3D Techniques course which takes place in October 22nd and 23rd.

See full program here.

Where do I learn more?

]]> http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/10/07/away3d-22-the-railaway-express/feed/ PixelBlitz: A new game framework for ActionScript 3 http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/09/21/pixelblitz-a-new-game-framework-for-actionscript-3/ http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/09/21/pixelblitz-a-new-game-framework-for-actionscript-3/#comments Sun, 21 Sep 2008 21:43:20 +0000 Knut Urdalen http://www.insidewebdev.com/?p=136 The PixelBlitz Engine is a new 2D game framework for AS3 created by Norm Soule and Richard Davey. The main goal of the project is to make game creation easier and quicker for AS3 developers.

PixelBlitz started as a bitmap blit engine. Norm Soule describes the process of bitmap blitting as:

The process of drawing everything to offscreen bitmaps and then rendering one bitmap to display the visual elements. The end result of this is speed. It is much faster than using the traditional display List approach, when doing anything that is graphically heavy.

The development has just started, but the library has already a wide range of features available:

  • Sprite handling
  • Pixel blitting
  • Pixel-level collision detection
  • Layer effects
  • Bitmap fonts
  • Game related math
  • Keyboard handling
  • Mouse handling
  • Parallax scrolling
  • Filter effects
  • Low memory footprint
  • Superfast!

In addition, rumor says that at least the following feature are planned:

  • Tile map support
  • Physics
  • More effects
  • Sound manager

PixelBlitz is licenced under an MIT license which means you can use if both for commercial and non-commercial projects.

The latest version is always available in the Subversion repository.

]]> http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/09/21/pixelblitz-a-new-game-framework-for-actionscript-3/feed/ Using Eclipse Ant with Phing http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/08/16/using-eclipse-ant-with-phing/ http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/08/16/using-eclipse-ant-with-phing/#comments Sat, 16 Aug 2008 14:33:50 +0000 Carl Mathisen http://www.insidewebdev.com/?p=72 Apache Ant in integration with Eclipse. The Ant view pane allows easy access to the build automation tasks your project may have defined. In the PHP world, we have a build system based on Ant called Phing. This article will show you how to easily access your Phing tasks in Eclipse [PDT].]]> If you develop Java applications, chances are you’ve used Apache Ant in integration with Eclipse. The Ant view pane allows easy access to the build automation tasks your project may have defined. In the PHP world, we have a build system based on Ant called Phing. This article will show you how to easily access your Phing tasks in Eclipse [PDT].

If you’re new to Phing, please check out Phing.info.

Phing: build.xml

The example below defines a single task: help in a file called build.xml.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="example" basedir="." default="help">
 	<target name="help">
    	<echo>
	    Welcome to the phing script!
	    ----------------------------
	    You may use the following commands:
 
	              phing   &lt;target name&gt;
 
	    where &lt;target name&gt; can be one of the following:
 
	    - help    : this page
    	</echo>
  	</target>
</project>

In the terminal, navigate to the folder where build.xml issue the following command “phing help”. This will execute and output our help text. phing is nice, but if you’re using Eclipse, you may want to access the tasks from the IDE itself.

Ant: ant-build.xml

Eclipse comes with Ant support integrated as default. To use Phing with Eclipse, we will create an Ant XML file to wrap around our Phing task. Create the following file in the same folder as build.xml.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="example">
	<property name="phing.command" value="phing" />
	<target name="help" description="Shows help information">
		<exec dir="" executable="${phing.command}">
			<arg line="help" />
		</exec>
	</target>
</project>

The property phing.command tells Ant where to locate phing on your machine. In my case, phing is located through PATH, but you could also specify the absolute path to your phing executable.

The example only has one task, which is help, the same as the phing example above. This wrapper executes a console application with arguments (arg line). Executing help will only run phing help, in the same folder as build.xml is stored.

To double click the help command in a GUI, we need to set up Ant in your Eclipse project.

  1. Open your Eclipse PHP Project where the XMl files are stored
  2. Turn on Ant view: Window -> Show View -> Other… -> Ant
  3. Drag ant-build.xml from the file explorer into the Ant View
  4. Double click example -> help to run the task. The results will show up in the Console view

Ant view

]]> http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/08/16/using-eclipse-ant-with-phing/feed/ How to vertically align content in CSS http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/08/16/how-to-vertically-align-content-in-css/ http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/08/16/how-to-vertically-align-content-in-css/#comments Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:15:57 +0000 Carl Mathisen http://www.insidewebdev.com/?p=52 vertical-align: middle in a block of CSS without it ever working? You too, huh? This article will show you a method on how to center content properly with CSS only.]]> Have you ever used vertical-align: middle in a block of CSS without it ever working? You too, huh? This article will show you a method on how to center content properly with CSS only.

The table-cell method

The CSS specification declares that vertical-align only refers to table cells. When applied to other elements, like in most cases - divs, the alignment will not work. After all, we want to mimic the <td valign="middle"> attribute. For this to work, the parent element needs to have a given fixed height. The content you want to vertically centered does not have to have a fixed height.

Here is how to center an image in a div with only CSS (and CSS expression for Internet Explorer).

<html>
	<head>
	<style type="text/css">
	.content
	{
		width: 200px
		height: 200px
		display: table-cell
		vertical-align: middle
		text-align: center
		border: 1px solid red
	}
	.content img
	{
		margin-top: expression((200 - this.height)/2)
	}
 
	</style>
	</head>
	<body>
		<div class="content">
			<img src="wordpress.png" />
		</div>
 
		<div class="content">
			<img src="prado.png" />
		</div>
	</body>
</html>

display: table-cell og vertical-align: middle in the .content declaration seems like the correct thing to do. And it is, but unfortunately display: table-cell doesn’t work on Internet Explorer versions prior to 7.0. Expressions for CSS (Dynamic Properties for Internet Explorer) can help us fix this problem. Watch this:

margin-top: expression((100 - this.height) / 2);

Explained: [the height of the parent element] / [the height of the image we want to center] / 2. The result leaves us the margin spacing we need between the img and the edges of the div. If we set this calculation as margin-top, the img will be centered. In the results below, we clearly see two different img elements in size being placed in the middle of the parent div, with the same block of CSS code.

Expected result

This solution has been tested in IE5/6/7, Firefox 2/3, Opera 9 and Safari 2.

]]> http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/08/16/how-to-vertically-align-content-in-css/feed/ How to transfer your MacPorts environment to a new Mac http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/08/12/how-to-transfer-your-macports-environment-to-a-new-mac/ http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/08/12/how-to-transfer-your-macports-environment-to-a-new-mac/#comments Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:54:02 +0000 Carl Mathisen http://www.insidewebdev.com/?p=40 Do you use MacPorts for your development? In a need for a new Mac, but do not have the time to set up your whole development environment all over again?

I’ve just received my new MacBook Pro, and thought I’d share the problems that occured during the automatic file transfer from my old MacBook Pro to the new one, both running Leopard 10.5.

I was a bit sceptical of this whole automatic tranfer process, because my PHP 5, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL were all installed using the package system MacPorts, and I wasn’t sure if the automatic transfer would recognise these installations and just transfer normal OS X applications and files.

Luckily, during the transfer, you get the options to chose which files you want the installation to transfer. Remember to select the checkbox called “all files and folders on Macintosh HD”. The transfer was flawless in all aspects for me, regarding OS X specific applications. It copied all of my files in the /opt-directory - MacPorts still worked!

There were some small adjustments i had to do to make this work from the transfer installation with my old files. This is right after the first booting of the new system:

Apache

I tried to start Apache the normal way:

$ sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start
(48)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address [::]:80

Oops. Seems like the “Web sharing” option in Mac OS X is turned on by default. I went to System Preferences -> Sharing and turned off Web Sharing. Tried again.

$ sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start
httpd: Syntax error on line 114 of /opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf: Cannot load
/opt/local/apache2/modules/libphp5.so into server: dlopen(/opt/local/apache2/modules/libphp5.so, 10): Library not loaded: /usr/lib/libltdl.3.dylib\n Referenced from: /opt/local/apache2/modules/libphp5.so\n Reason: image not found

Now I though that maybe my MacPort installation was corrupted during the transfer, but after some googling I realised that libtldl is a dependency of MacPorts, coming from XTools. Strange - XTools weren’t copied with all of my other files. I whipped out the Mac OS X Install DVD Disc 2 and installed XTools.

$ sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start

Ahh yes, my Apache working!

System settings

But wait a minute, where are my local hostnames? Seems like the tranfer process neglected my /etc/hosts file. Copied it over and everything was A-OK.

PS: By a coincidence i still used Mac OS X’s default vhost apache config file with my MacPorts Apache installation from the days before installing MacPorts. The default config file was erased and replaced by a default apache config file by the installer.

/private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf # Default Apache config file
/opt/local/apache2/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf # Default MacPorts config file

Conclusion

  • The transfer copies all of your files to the new Mac.
  • All default configuration files there’s no GUI to modify will be replaced by factory settings.

Avoid using default OS X config files if you can. This advice can easily be followed by using MacPorts, as all of MacPorts’ content should be placed in the /opt-folder.

Hopefully this short post will be of help for others considering to make the jump to a newer computer.

]]> http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/08/12/how-to-transfer-your-macports-environment-to-a-new-mac/feed/ RIP PHP 4 http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/08/10/rip-php-4/ http://www.insidewebdev.com/2008/08/10/rip-php-4/#comments Sun, 10 Aug 2008 16:09:00 +0000 Knut Urdalen http://www.insidewebdev.com/?p=10 The PHP development team has just released the last release of PHP 4. It has gone over 4 years since the release of PHP 5 and the adoption of PHP 5 vs. PHP 4 looks quite positive with the availability of PHP 5.1 and 5.2.

This is an important milestone for everyone that rely on PHP in their business. As a web professional using PHP I assume you already have been using PHP 5 for some time. But if you for some reason have any web applications running on PHP 4 you should definitly consider upgrading.

See also:


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