awkward silence

I’ve been working on setting up a database for an iPhone app. I haven’t worked with sqlite before so it’s yet another new thing to learn. I’ve been going through a few tutorials on the web and was partway through this one when I took the advice of his sidebar at the end of Step 3 to keep my database definition in sql and have it built when the app compiles. He linked to this screenshot by way of a how-to, which unfortunately didn’t work for me.

First off, to find the build rules for your project, right click on Targets in xcode and select Get Info:

I also added a check to see if your db already exists to avoid build errors if it doesn’t. I decided to put it into an external file and execute that from the build rule. Here’s what my build rule looks like:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Here’s the bash shell script:

#!/bin/bash
cd ${TARGET_BUILD_DIR}
if [ -f ${INPUT_FILE_BASE}.db ];
then
rm ${INPUT_FILE_BASE}.db;
fi
cat ${INPUT_FILE_PATH} | sqlite3 ${INPUT_FILE_BASE}.db


Put it in a file (sqlbuildrule.sh, for example) and place it in your project directory and set it to executable:
chmod +x sqlbuildrule.sh

At the end of the rule, click the + below “with output files” and enter this:
$(TARGET_BUILD_DIR)/$(INPUT_FILE_BASE).db

The script will look for a .sql file in your project directory and build it with the output going to your target build directory.

If you need to edit the shell script or change the “with output files” setting of the build rule, note that the way you use the environment variables is different. The shell uses them as regular bash variables: ${MY_VAR}, where Xcode uses parens: $(MY_VAR).

I’ve started looking into development on iPhone and was a little surprised that unit testing was challenging. I found this project by Google that seems promising:
iPhoneUnitTesting – google-toolbox-for-mac – Google Code – How to do iPhone unit testing.

I’m going through Bill Dudney’s book from the Prags, which seems very good. You get up and running quickly, though it isn’t (and doesn’t claim to be) an in-depth resource on Objective C. I also got Daniel Steinberg’s Cocoa Programming book, which is a great quick start and good companion to the iPhone book.

Now I just need an iPhone…

I coach my kids’ soccer teams and needed a way to set up games as far as positions and so forth. I came up with a stencil for OmniGraffle and posted it here. Let me know if you try it and if you spot any issues or have other suggestions.

I found an example of a Document-based Mate application out on Google code, referenced here and here on the Mate web site.

It’s pretty nice, with good examples of the LocalEventMap, etc. He’s built it using the Presentation Model design pattern which seems to be a natural fit to both Flex and Mate.

Paul Williams of Adobe has a series of articles on various design patterns including Presentation Model.

And of course Martin Fowler has some thoughts on the Presentation Model, aka Application Model pattern.

It could be a nice starting point for developing multiple document applications. And the Presentation Model pattern looks like it would provide some nice benefits, keeping the views nice and simple and making them a lot easier to test.

This project also has excellent documentation and about the only info I can find on LocalEventMaps.

I’ve been using Mate for some time and liking it very much. I wanted to be able to use Flex Builder’s ability to navigate to and view the source of included types. With only having the downloaded .swc file in my /libs directory that wasn’t possible. It took me some time to sort it out, so here’s my recipe in case it helps anyone (and so I can remember next time).

This should also work for any project that you can download the source for, that just happened to be Mate for me. I’m using Flex Builder 3 — not sure what would be different if anything with FB2.

1. Download the source using the directions here

2. Create a Flex Library Project in Flex Builder, let’s call it ‘MateLib’

3. Import the source into the project, leaving out all the .svn directories, such that your folder structure looks like:

MateLib
   /bin
   /com
      /asfusion
         /mate
            /etc....
   manifest.xml

4. Right click the project in the FB Navigator view and select: Properties -> Flex Library Compiler. Set the Namespace URL: to “http://mate.asfusion.com/” and Mainifest file: to manifest.xml

5. Save and build the project.

6. In your project that uses the library, select Properties -> Flex Build Path and click Add SWC and navigate to the MateLib project -> /bin folder and select the MateLib.swc file there.

Now you can use the standard way to include Mate components in your mxml, with:

xmlns:mate="http://mate.asfusion.com/"


And you’ll be able to view the source code by command-clicking (control-click on Windows I think) a Mate component. You can also select the text, e.g. Dispatcher, and use the F3 key. And… the classes will also come up and be navigable with the Open Type, command-T, navigator.

It looks like I’ll be doing Flex RIA development, which I’m really looking forward to. Right now I need to tuck away a few links for further study…

Cairngen – for generating the basics for a Cairngorm Flex app:
http://code.google.com/p/cairngen/wiki/GettingStarted

Paul Williams – a series of blog posts on presentation tier design patterns with an eye to Flex:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/paulw/

dpUint – Flex unit testing framework with async testing support baked-in:
http://code.google.com/p/dpuint/wiki/Introduction

Prana – an IoC for Flex… useful with Cairngorm:
http://www.herrodius.com/blog/64

Steven Weber very good introduction to Cairngorm:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/cairngorm_pt1.html

Bruce Eckel articles on Artima:
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=212818
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=230610

And Getting Started with Flex at Adobe:
http://learn.adobe.com/wiki/display/Flex/Getting+Started

I finally got Capistrano running. The last hurdle was a funky one having to do with subversion. Our deployment environment is 2 web/application servers and one db server. We have another machine that hosts our subversion repository.

The issue was that each machine has to check out from the subversion server. When they went to do that, there was a message to accept the server or not. This would hang Capistrano.

To solve it, ssh into each of your web/app/db machines. From each, check out from the subversion server interactively and choose to permanently accept the svn server.

If you’re running a recent rails app and are on a host like DreamHost where the RAILS_ENV isn’t set, you’ll need to use this to run your migrations:

rake environment RAILS_ENV=production migrate

Otherwise you’ll get this:

Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock'

Or you’ll connect to your development database if you have one configured.