As I’m sitting in the WordCamp Birmingham meeting today, I’m looking around the room wondering “what does everyone have in common *except* that they’re interested in WordPress?”.
The mix of people here varies from WordPress gurus to people that don’t know what WordPress is exactly. We’ve got
- local developers
- graphic designers
- copywriters
- television news professionals
- and local bloggers
The parallel common theme is that the attendees are all interested in continuing their education. In this case, it’s new media. Last week, I attended an event in ATL (Atlanta Linux Fest), where a similar parallel common theme existed.
Traditional continuing education can’t keep up with “Internet speed”. As soon as a class can be developed, the concepts have changed. In a local event, the content changes right up to the beginning of the conference. The questions raised
can even add more content.
Attending these events can help to increase the connection between members of the local community. Non-local guests can help to cross-pollinate ideas. Mostly, the ideas and and experience from attending and presenting at these events help to establish the attendees as willing to do whatever it takes to stay current.
I’m embarking on a little Flex development, but I ran into a snag installing the Flex Builder into my *very* stock Fedora 8 system. I found a link to some comments here in follow up comment to the author of the post.
Apparently (and I’m not an Eclipse expert), the problem stems from Fedora’s choice of “Eclipse Europa”, rather than “Eclipse Classic”.
Problems:
- The install says “Choose an existing Eclipse 3.3 or higher root folder to be extended with the Flex Builder Plug-ins”
- An error message is displayed when you select the correct folder
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The installation proceeds fine from that point, but the Flex project isn’t available in Eclipse. As it turns out, you need to copy some files by hand:
cd ~/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/
cd com.adobe.flexbuilder.update.site
sudo cp features/* /usr/share/eclipse/features/
sudo cp plugins/* /usr/share/eclipse/plugins/
And that’s all there is to it – you’ll have access to the Flex Projects in Eclipse. I’ll update this post if I find any problems with this method of patching the installation
Update: 13-Apr-2008
The above works great for *creating* a flex application, but it will not compile. There is an error generated that says:
Flex 0.0 (1): Flex SDK location "/home/.../configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/bundles/159/1/.cp/devsdks/moxie" does not exist.
I struggled and struggled to find the elusive “moxie” plugin. Alas, It was not found on my computer, or in any of the jar files. It turns out you need to download the “Adobe Flex SDK” from the “Stable Builds” section of (Adobe Wiki link):
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3
- Download the file
- unzip it into a directory
- In Eclipse, Window->Preferences->Flex->Installed Flex SDKs->Add the directory you just created
- Delete the other installed SDKs for moxie (Flex 0.0)
- Enjoy!
I hope this helps someone
If you want to test to see if your installation works, add the following between the mx:Application tags in a Flex project
<mx:Canvas width="100%" height="100%">
<mx:Label text="Hello World"/>
</mx:Canvas>