With PDFs becoming more and more prevalent in todays world, if you are doing any sort of exporting or sales, generating PDFs is probably going to find its way into your program. Using iText, you are given a large amount of functionality in order to create custom PDFs on the fly. This article will be focusing on how to generate an PDF for a sales receipt. With this, I will show how easily you can setup tables, images, barcodes, and links.
Read more…
Marcel java, tutorial howto, itext, java, tutorial
I love writing for this blog. It really wasn’t that long ago that I started taking it more serious and try to make time in my day to post new content. Whenever I post a new story, I check my stats within wordpress to make sure that the correct article was posted, see if things are getting recognized, etc. Usually, depending on the time of day/night, after the first halfhour/hour, ill get roughly 20 or so hits. After posting my last article at 11:30pm EST on a Monday, I followed my standard routine to check. I quickly noticed that I was at 250 hits in 30 minutes of posting. Automatically I thought ‘well something is wrong”, then I realized that I was getting a large amount of traffic from Reddit, as it apparently caught some attention there. Now that the time has past and Reddit has forgotten about me, so I wanted to do a “back to normal” article and show what you get whenever your story becomes popular on Reddit.
I remember back when I enjoyed trolling through posts on Digg, I would always get offended if someone blatantly posted on article there to get hits. “They just want ad revenue!”. Other times, I would click an article and get the ‘bandwidth exceed’ message. “Bandwidth exceed” was at least a sign the server didn’t crash, sometimes it would just crash the server. I use GoDaddy, so I wasn’t too concerned about that, but still. Here is how all these things turned out, before and after.
Read more…
Marcel Opinion, Random Notes
This is a new series that I will be starting, called “Don’t do this”. Basically it is a spin on another series I started called “Learn this”, but it is more of an observation of things that I have had to learn a lesson from.
In this article, I want to discuss the dangers of allowing junior developers to “cowboy code“, or do whatever they feel is right. The junior programmer does not know what “right” is, or better yet, has not shown you what right is. A lot of people might think this is common sense, but it isn’t. I have seen it too many times and lately I have been trying to become more aware of it. Ignoring this is not only bad for the code base, but it is bad for you, the client and the actual junior employee.
Read more…
Marcel Best Practices, Don't do this, Opinion Best Practices
How many times have you hopped into Flex’s source code only to see the modifier “mx_internal”? No public, private or protected, just mx_internal. It is everywhere in there. But what is it? Turns out, according to Adobe, it is a namespace used to flag functions and properties within the framework that may change in future releases. Obviously, since they might change, Adobe, with all its motherly goodness, hides these properties and functions from us behind this namespace. This does not mean we cannot access them though. We just have to jump through a few small loops. This article will go over how and when to use mx_internal, but also what to be careful about when using them.
Read more…
Marcel Best Practices, Flex, Opinion, Random Notes Actionscript, Flex
It is hard to deny that the Google Maps API has a lot of built in functionality to it. I enjoyed writing the last article and I felt it was time to get into it a little more. In my last last article on the API, I focused primarily on how to add a marker to the map and also how to create a custom infoWindow. This article’s main topic will be on how to plot PolyLines on a map, how to get the distance between them, and using Markers to had a little bit more usability to your application.
Read more…
Marcel Flex, Google Maps API, tutorial Actionscript, Flex, howto, tutorial