Peter Elst

What an excellent start of the week, just got my essential Macromedia Central survival kit (t-shirt, a couple central reference posters, USB Flash drive with the central sdk and white paper, …) Big up to community manager Mike Chambers and the entire central team!

Looking forward to finishing up a really cool central app and some components I’ve been working on. Hope to have those ready for public viewing in a week or two.

Tomorrow I’m heading off to London for a couple of days. I’ll be attending a sneak-peak meeting on Macromedia Flex by Ben Forta, catching up with Aral and probably doing some other cool stuff. I’ll be sure to post some photographs when I get back!

ActionScript Hero has just reported some great news, a developer edition of mySQL 5.0 alpha is available for download which includes support for stored procedures.

I remember working on a project a while back involving Microsoft SQL Server and it took me quite a while to get my head around the concept of stored procedures. I’m looking forward to using it with my PHP apps, it’s a really neat way to handle more complex or repetitive series of queries.

I’ve been playing around with PrimalScript for the last two days and I’m really starting to like it. Looks like this editor is going to be my best friend in 2004, its absolutely packed with useful features!

Those of you familiar with SciTE|Flash will probably have heard of Flush which automatically triggers Flash to test your movie. If you do any coding outside the Flash IDE you realize what a timesaver that is, no more switching between programs to test your work.

Now I’m using PrimalScript obviously one of the first things I wanted to do is get something similar in place. I came across a post by Chafic Kazoun that suggested using JSFL to trigger test movie and setting it up as an external program in the debug and release configuration for your project.

Lazy as I am, I didn’t really look forward to the idea of having to set these properties for every single project. A little while later I came across a solution that does the trick for me, in the options window you can specify a “Compile/Syntax check” executable for each supported language. If you choose ActionScript and point this to a JSFL file that triggers test movie you’re all set!

Here is a quick runthrough of how to set this up:

- download compile.jsfl and drop it in your PrimalScript install folder
- go to Tools > Options > Environment > Languages
- choose ActionScript
- from the dropdown menu on the right select Compile/Syntax check
- just under that dropdown menu browse to your install folder
- type “compile.jsfl” and click Open (only .exe’s are shown when browsing)
- press OK

That’s it! Now if you’re editing your ActionScript simply use CTRL+F7 or the compile button to test your code. Just like with Flush you’ll have to have a document open with an #include statement to the ActionScript file you’re editing.

Feel free to leave your comments on this or any other PrimalScript pointers you might have!

[update] I forgot to mention that you’ll also need to specify the JSFL file as the “Script Interpreter” for ActionScript in order for this to work.