I had a few patches sitting in my list of things to do, and decided to tackle them this weekend. Thanks to all who’ve submitted patches.

Here is the new stuff and changes in this release:

• Dr. Alexander Konovalov (from the The University of St Andrews School of Computer Science) submitted a patch to support the GAP (Groups, Algorithms, Programming) Language. GAP is a System for Computational Discrete Algebra.

• Update HTML mode to better support closing tags. It was using a generic rule to just colour “end tags”. The rule worked fine in most cases, but if you were using a language that allowed for custom namespace tags, the colouring would get a bit odd.

• Fixed opening files using the “File / Open” command (i.e. opening a file not in a project) for both text and images

• Lot of cleanup work to get commands and bindings working correctly across all plugins

• Code cleanup and warning fixes – all plugins now compile with zero warnings. Added Templates to all the Maps, Lists, Sets, etc.

• Cleaned up the Afae Editor Blogger preference pane (UTF-8 now works when posting to Wordpress, I think Wordpress fixed a bug)

• Made zoom in and out on the images flow a bit more consistently

Ron Stewart: Railo 3.1 mods * ternary operator * new functions millisecond(). setTimezone() * reserved words Yes/No

OpenBD mods: * new functions structValueArray(), fileSeparator()

javascript: * fixed a typo in the jQuery UI support (“accordion”)

cfml.xml: * support for some of Railo’s CFADMIN tag attributes as they leak through blog posts * support for Railo’s “mappings” attribute on CFAPPLICATION * fixed handling of CFRETURN tag for better handling when written in XML-style * added support for OpenBD tags CFCAPTCHA, CFJAVASCRIPT, CFSTYLESHEET * added support for OpenBD “type” attribute on CFCOMPONENT tag * added support for OpenBD attributes on CFVIDEOPLAYER tag

• To use Afae you now have to be using Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) and JDK 1.5 or higher.

Enjoy!

If you are in Sydney, don’t miss Code wars tonight – which should be really fun.

I never really mentioned it either, but I’ll be talking about iPhone Web Application development, and I’ll be hanging out talking about iPhone native app development at a birds of a feather chat if you are into iPhone stuff.

I am not sure if WebDU is sold out yet, but you might be able to score a last minute ticket…

I put the system together from unused computer parts laying around the office. This would be considered an underpowered system by most people’s standards, but it runs incredibly well – even the duel(ah English… what one letter will do) dual monitors and eye candy works seamlessly. It probably wouldn’t do video editing very well, but it’s powerful enough to run everything need, and doesn’t skip a beat.

I have a list of apps that I need replacements for, and I’ll try to blog my findings as I go. However, I have my critical path apps all set.

For my Textmate replacement I am using gEdit. gEdit doesn’t do CFML by default. To remedy this I threw together these files to make it support CFML. It’s very basic and really just uses HTML colouring, but it allows the whole system (and therefore gEdit) to understand .cfm, cfml, and .cfc files.

It looks like this after you’ve installed it:

You can download the files here. You can run the install.sh file to add them to your system, or just look at that file and do what it does by hand (it’s only 3 commands).

gEdit is missing a few things to put it on par with Textmate, but fewer then I thought. I used it all day today, and everything I needed it to do it did. (It would be nice if it supported Textmate bundles, but I think gEdit is more python based and Textmate more Ruby based.)

The good news, for me anyway, is I can probably add the things I want since it’s open source :-D

When I start working on a new wild code idea, I often start out with a Git repository. If the idea goes no where, it’s an easy delete. If it turns out to be great, well, I already have a repo going and ready to share. On top of the ease of use and personal nature of a Git repository, I am also a bit of a Git fanboy so by default I often choose Git.

Anyway, one such Git project turned into something I needed to put into the work repository. As you might have guessed, the work repository is a subversion repository.

There are many posts on how to go from subversion to Git, but I couldn’t find a single one on how to go from Git to subversion – meaning start the project out in Git and then push it in to svn. The key being I wanted to keep all the Git commit history.

I kind of figured out how to do it, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the history to import. Since the history doesn’t import, this is a rather convoluted way of just committing the files to an empty subversion repository. However, in the hopes that someone will comment and say “hey buddy you’re just missing the –import-the-comments-too flag”, here is how I did it:

1. First create a new svn repository with the usual tag, trunk and branches folders.

2. Locally, in the directory above your Git project do:

$ git svn clone https://svn9.cvsdude.com/my_new_repo --trunk=trunk --branches=branches --tags=tags my_git_project_folder

This command attaches the svn repository to your Git project (so you can push to it).

1. Move to the svn trunk (now a branch in git)

$ git checkout trunk

You’ll get a notice like

Note: moving to “trunk” which isn’t a local branch If you want to create a new branch from this checkout, you may do so (now or later) by using -b with the checkout command again. Example: git checkout -b <new_branch_name> HEAD is now at 6774cdd… [your last commmit comment]

1. Now merge the master (your current code) into the trunk (the branch you are now on)

$ git merge master

You’ll see a bunch of output…

1. Push the newly modified trunk back to the svn server

$ git svn dcommit

If all went well, you should see something like

r2190 = 39282a1a373300e2f5bba5c92949171fb747ecc5 (trunk) No changes between current HEAD and refs/remotes/trunk Resetting to the latest refs/remotes/trunk

And you’re done.

The sad part about this is if you now look at the svn history you’ll only see one item. You lose all of the Git history. So, in a sense, this technique is a bit pointless, and akin to just adding the files right to subversion. However, it is fun and geeky as hell :)

Own it today!

This set of questions came in as a result of the EC2 and S3 videos I posted a while ago.

1. Is there a way to share a file system / volume across multiple EC2 instances? As in, if we have 2+ App servers running, it would be ideal if they shared a volume so that if files changed, they would be changed on all servers, instantly. If not, I suppose we could run NFS or something similar. Ideas?

It would be possible to have one of your EC2 instances be a master and share the files – just as one would do in any other “normal” situation (smb, nfs, whatever). If you’re only talking about code, you could also use something like rsync, or directly checkout from your source control to keep code in sync.

Another thing you can do for assets is write the data to S3 and share it via buckets. While this approach requires quite a bit of infrastructure and error handing on your part, it also gives you unlimited data storage and an “automatic” content delivery platform.

The last project we did we used the S3 approach. We used message queues to inform parts of the application about changes, and also to retry on failures. However, that project has massive data storage and delivery requirements.

2. Are we correct that making any configuration changes to an instance necesitates re-bundling that instance into a new AMI afterwards? Otherwise, all changes are lost the next time it’s shut down and fired back up.

Yes and no. You can build a custom AMI that has everything you want on it (or buy / rent a premade one), and then save all your configurations to a mounted EBS “Elastic Block Store”. An EBS basically equates to a hard dive you mount to the AMI. You can use the EBS just like any hard drive attached to a “normal” computer, and it’s storage persists.

It’s awesome on Linux because you an just mount the EBS anywhere (like in /var/www, /opt/coldfusion, or /etc/config), but you can achieve the same effect on Windows as well.

In other words, you’ll always lose changes to the C:\ when you bring the system down, but not lose the D:, E:\ etc.

(You’ll want to know how to build an AMI at some point though – system updates / upgrades and what not.)

3. We have some legacy windows only apps, so we are going to be running windows instances and linux instnaces, but we’re starting with the windows ones (assuming they will be more difficult)… Have you noticed any differences between the two that you want to mention? Have you worked with the windows instances much at all?

The windows ones are a bit more expensive, and they seem to take a really long time to start (3-4 minutes vs. 30-45 seconds on Linux), but once they get going they seem to be just like any other box. You can terminal service in to manage them – if you didn’t know it was an AMI you wouldn’t know it was an AMI :)

I’ve also never built a custom windows AMI, but I hear that it is easier (when it works). Building a Linux AMI can be completely scripted, and I don’t think a windows one can (though, again, I’ve never built a windows one)

4. We are a bit concerned with the complexity of making changes to instances and needing to take them down and re-bundle them for those changes not to be lost… I suppose we could do so to copies of the AMI so that we don’t need to take down production instances, but it still seems overly cumbersome. Do you know of a decent plan/flowchart/graph/play-by-play of how other companies/people have worked with EC2 servers as a production environment?

I can understand your concern, and the best remedy is to get in there and play. You’ll find that if you configure you infrastructure correctly, use EBSs correctly, you can bring up whole new production instances in 30 seconds (or so). Need a test deploy server? Bling. Done. You can do new releases by reassigning the IP to a new running instance… Anyway, I think you might want to read up on EBSs because it sounds like will alleviate a lot of your concerns.

As for the plan / flowchart … that’s the kind of stuff I get paid for :-D

Min’s descriptions on these videos are the bees knees.

Register now – I highly doubt you’ll be sad you did.

WebDU Registration twitter.com/webdu

You most likely don’t want to miss it.

WebDU Registration twitter.com/webdu

Here is a list of more specific changes…

Updated ASP mode * Reworked references to embedded JavaScript, CSS to get better highlighting on the opening tags * Reworked embedded HTML tags and close tags to mirror changes to HTML mode

Blog mode * Reworked references to embedded JavaScript, CSS to get better highlighting on the opening tags * Reworked embedded HTML tags and close tags to mirror changes to HTML mode

CFML mode * Changed mode name from “coldfusion” to “cfml” * Changed how the javascript and css spans work * Reworked references to embedded JavaScript, CSS to get better highlighting on opening tags * Completely reworked CFML mode to provide – explicit highlighting of valid CFML tags, CFML close tags, and valid tag attributes on a per tag basis – better handling of CFML, CFQUERYPARAM, and CFML comments within SQL in CFQUERY tags – includes coverage of CFML tags/attributes from current CFML engines ColdFusion, Railo, BlueDragon, and OpenBD as of 02/2009 * Rudimentary highlighting of CFML code embedded within SQL, JavaScript, and CSS contained within CFML files

ftl mode * Reworked references to embedded JavaScript, CSS to get better highlighting on the opening tags * Reworked embedded HTML tags and close tags to mirror changes to HTML mode

html mode * Reworked references to embedded JavaScript, CSS to get better highlighting on the opening tags * Reworked HTML mode

jsp mode * Reworked references to embedded JavaScript, CSS to get better highlighting on the opening tags * Reworked embedded HTML tags and close tags to mirror changes to HTML mode

php mode * Reworked references to embedded JavaScript, CSS to get better highlighting on the opening tags * Reworked embedded HTML tags and close tags to mirror changes to HTML mode

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p>rhtml mode * Reworked references to embedded JavaScript, CSS to get better highlighting on the opening tags * Reworked embedded HTML tags and close tags to mirror changes to HTML mode

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p>shtml mode * Reworked references to embedded JavaScript, CSS to get better highlighting on the opening tags * Reworked embedded HTML tags and close tags to mirror changes to HTML mode

html embed include

• Reworked HTML mode to specify all valid HTML tags including for HTML5;
• Definition of common (pre-HTML5 and new stuff from HTML5) core attributes (id, class, etc.), events, and i18n attributes.

html_spans

• Reworked definitions of spans for HTML tags and HTML tags that handle delegation to appropriate rulesets; mods in conjunction with html.xml, inc/html.ixml, inc/html_close.ixml

javascript embed include

• Updates to include changes within jQuery 1.3 and jQuery UI 1.6 versions (as of early 02/2009)
• Reworked definition of spans for the SCRIPT tag used in other modes that could include JavaScript to get appropriate delegation and better handling of the syntax highlighting for the tag and its attributes.

tsql embed include

• Data type “name” not highlighted as a SQL data type, based on it also being a common tag attribute for CFML’s CFQUERY tag and the presence of both caused wierdness in the highlighting (this is definitely a change made based on my use of AFAE for CFML development rather than SQL development)

apache conf mode

added .conf, default, ssl, and .htaccess to the apache colouring mode.

If you use Afae, pass a thanks to Ron for all his hard work.