I've been playing around with the Adobe Flex SDK lately. I decided to try putting together a simple isometric engine.
The engine uses a masking technique rather than sorting the tiles. This makes it very flexible by allowing the tiles to be any cuboid shape and size. Also they aren't restricted to a fixed grid size so can be placed in any arbitrary location.
It's still very early days but it's looking good. Here's a simple preview.
I needed a nice looking javascript search result script for a site I'm working on and after looking around for a while I couldn't find anything that really did what I wanted. So, I took it upon myself to write a nifty jQuery plugin that does exactly what I want.
The plugin is named Search Light. You can view a demo of it and download it using the links at the end of this post. Please let me know what you think of it.
As I have been playing around with the awesome Cappuccino framework, I decided to add my own little extension to the framework in order to support Google Maps and abstract away the API into a more Obj-J/Cappuccino fashion. I've dubbed it MapKit. It's very early days but you can add map views to your project quite easily and it's straight forward to fall back to the usual Google Maps API to do anything that's currently unsupported in MapKit.
You can get MapKit from github. Also available is a simple "Hello, World" example to explain how it's used.
As I'm doing Django project deployments on a frequent basis, I've taken the time to look into using Fabric and Pip to automate the process. With a bit of experimenting I believe I've come up with a nice clean way to do this. My fabric deployment script allows me to deploy a project to a new server and because I use virtualenv to keep things segregated from each other and the base Python system I'm free to use Pip to install anything that the project should require.
So here's how I do it. On my local machine I first installed Pip and Fabric.$ sudo easy_install pip $ sudo pip install fabricOn the server I had to install Pip and virtualenv.
$ sudo easy_install pip $ sudo pip install virtualenv
Assume that goes to plan, the next step is to create a deployment script (fabfile.py). Here is my fabfile.py which is hopefully commented well enough so you can see what it's doing. It should make more sense after reading the rest of this post.
Fabric is very simple to operate. Basically you pass the functions you want to call into the "fab" command line script.
For example the following command will execute the "staging()" then "deploy()" functions.
$ fab staging deploy
The "staging()" function in my script sets up some initial settings such as the server to deploy to (config.fab_hosts) and the name of the Django settings file. But substituing this for "production" I can easily send the deployment to my live server.
When my site is first deployed on the new server which currently only has Pip and virtualenv installed on it I will need to create the virtual environment and install all the required packages using Pip.
Pip knows what to install because I pass a "requirements" file to it. This is a simple plain text file which lists the packages to install. I store this in the root of my project and name it "requirements.txt". Here's an example of what I use:
Django==1.0.2-final MySQL-python>=1.2.2 PIL==1.1.6 simplejson>=2.0.9 python-memcached>=1.44
To setup my project on the new server using my fabfile is quite simple. All I need to do is execute:
$ fab staging setup
This calls the "setup()" function which does the following:
Once that has run its course the server is ready to deploy to using the command:
$ fab staging deploy
With my fabfile this will do the following:
Some of this stuff may be only essential to my projects, but I hope it gives you and idea of how Fabric works and once you get it going it saves a lot of time and effort.