Floorplanner Tech Blog: Archive

FITC Amsterdam 2009

On February 22-24th the Flash In The Can event is back in town! Design, Technology. Cool shit. I will be just a visitor, but Tim is going to help Ralph with his workshop Papervision3D from the Core. If you want to meet up, give us a ping.

Jan 24th

Papervision3D forum

On request of many: Papervision3D now has a forum : http://forum.papervision3d.org/ Read more at the Papervision3D blog.

Jan 20th

Request-log-analyzer 1.0

After a complete rewrite, Bart and I are proud to present request-log-analyzer version 1.0! Request-log-analyzer is an open-source command-line tool to analyze production log files from your Rails application to produce a performance report. What’s new? More robust log parser. It parses more lines and it now combines all lines that belong to the same request, which greatly improves the...

Jan 12th

Rails and Merb merge!

Good luck to the merged Rails team and hopefully Rails 3 will kick ass! Let’s hope git will really deliver on this gig! Try to refrain from using git blame too much when resolving merge conflicts. ;-)

Dec 23rd

Using your own site as OpenID identity

My personal domain vanbergen.org is almost 10 years old. Besides the accompanying e-mail address, I’ve never used it extensively, but its one of the oldest pieces of my “legacy” that can be found on the Internet and it is the starting point of my online identity. Lately, major internet companies have embraced the OpenID standard to allow other sites to login with the login...

Dec 18th

How to remove hidden tab characters

At this moment, all the language translations of the Floorplanner 2D app are stored in a database table. Today we discovered that a couple of these translations didn’t align properly in the interface. After some investigation we discovered that they all contained a hidden tab character at the end of each string. This was probably caused by importing a malformed CSV file. I thought a simple...

Dec 17th

Working with git branches

Because Jaap finally convinced Gert-Jan, we have moved to the Git version control system for the main Floorplanner repository. Now we can use branches for different functionality far more easily. As an easy reminder to some common Git tasks I will need regularly, I have written down some Git recipes. This is basically meant for me and my fellow developers, but maybe it can help you as well....

Dec 14th

Rails 2.2 support for request-log-analyzer

I just released version 0.2.0 of request-log-analyzer, our tool to analyze request log files that are generated by Rails and Merb for performance tweaking. This new version supports the new log format of Rails 2.2, which has changed slightly. An updated gem should be available any minute now. Run sudo gem update to upgrade the newest version.

Dec 11th

Papervision3D wins Innovation Of The Year award

Papervision3D has won the INNOVATION OF THE YEAR in this year’s .net Awards! Other nominees included Google Android and App Engine, Microsoft Telescope, Open Social and Silverlight 2. I’m very proud to be part of the Papervision3D team! Read more on the Papervision3D blog.

Dec 9th

Git vs SVN for bosses

We switched to Git this morning. Before making this switch Gert-Jan (CTO of Floorplanner) asked me: “what is the advantage of Git over Subversion?”. I answered him and thought I’ll make a post of the answer as it can be useful for other bosses like Gert-Jan. Since we started using Subversion, which was a couple of years ago, using a code versioning tool helped us a lot. We could...

Dec 8th

Crossdomain JSON troubles: JSONCrossdomainRequest

This week I was doing some work on a crossdomain JSON request. This was a pitty, because I had in mind, Ajax requests could be made between subdomains, but that wasn’t the case, therefore I had to come up with a solution. Solution 1: Server-side proxy One option we had, was a server-side proxy, but I didn’t like this solution. If you are proxying your crossdomain request through a...

Dec 5th

Generating thumbnails

I would like to thank you all for helping us build our thumbnail database! I presume this statement might be in need of some clarification, so bear with me when I go into the technical details on this one. For every design that is saved on Floorplanner, we create a thumbnail in JPEG format. We use these thumbnails for the gallery, and now we have included them on everyone’s dashboard....

Nov 26th

Alchemy - first looks

Adobe has recently released a preview version of Alchemy. From their site: Welcome the preview release of codename “Alchemy.” Alchemy is a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The purpose of this preview is to assess the level of community interest in reusing existing C and C++...

Nov 23rd

Drag'n'drop from HTML to Flash

Last week we released a new Floorplanner account, the Enterprise account. With it, companies can have an online Floorplanner solution completely branded to their wishes. It includes the Roomplanner module and a custom library of their own furniture elements. Steelcase and Maxon are the first to have an active Enterprise account. The interesting part of this release, from a tech point of view, is...

Nov 6th

Printing & Big Bitmaps

Last week I started working on a new version of the print functionality in Floorplanner. The problem with the previous version was that it didn’t print shadows, it was impossible to rotate the plan to landscape and textures didn’t look very well. Overall it produced a very mediocre image compared to the visual quality of a plan on the screen. As can be seen below: [caption...

Oct 22nd

HTTP status exception handling plugin

Some time ago, I wrote about putting HTTP status code to use for your Rails application. For my reinvigorated project, I wanted to apply the same technique. Instead of re-implementing it once again, I created a Rails plugin called http_status_exceptions to easily add this functionality and I have put it on Github. For more information on how to install and use the plugin, see the project’s...

Sep 21st

Batch file renaming

I just started working on an old Rails project after having neglected it for 15 months. Most of the view files still had the good old .rhtml extension. I was too lazy to rename these files by hand, both on my file system and in the git repository. I used the following Bash commands to do the job: First, I renamed all the partials to the .erb extension. Note: I am not using .html.erb, as some of...

Sep 20th

Converting a Rails application from Gettext to...

Last week we had to convert our existing Rails application, which uses Gettext to the new I18n API in combination with the SimpleBackend. I personally never liked Gettext, there was simply not enough control over translations as PO/MO files are not native ruby or at least can be easily accessed by Ruby (like YAML files). We therefore decided to switch to the brand new, not even released, I18n...

Sep 16th

Remote branches in git

I have been using git for a while now, and I believe I have the the basic workflow under control. Committing, reverting, using local branches for major refactoring work: been there, done that! ;) However, I recently got some collaborators on my github-projects, I had to start working with other remote repositories and branches. I found this blog post, which was really helpful. I am sharing some...

Sep 13th

New cross domain findings

Today I learned a couple of new things about the use (and trouble) of BitmapData in combination with loading content from other domains. I thought we solved it a while ago, but it in some situations it didn’t work… I definitely hope this is my last post about the subject! When you load content from another domain and you want to use BitmapData, then you always have to load a policy...

Sep 12th