With Income Tax Returns approaching, now is as good a time as ever for me to blog about IExpense Online (IEO).

IExpense Online is the creation of my friend and co-worker Michal Glowacki. It is one of those Flex apps that really showcases what can be accomplished in Adobe Flex with a little creativity and dedication.

Built entirely in Flex, Cairngorm, PHP and MySQL, IExpense is a Free Tool which allows users to intuitively and intelligently manage their expenses and make sound budgeting decisions. You can try it out by logging in as a guest or creating a free account.

So make the most of your tax returns and check out IExpense Online (IEO).

I recently made a number of updates to my collections API which include some minor changes to the existing code as well as a few additional classes and interfaces which have been added.

The most significant updates involve three additional operations which have been added to the IMap interface which are as follows:

I have also added two new additional IMap implementations to the collections API; LocalPersistenceMap, which can be utilized to provide an IMap implementation into a local SharedObject and ResourceMap which allows developers to work with a ResourceBundles via an IMap implementation. All IMap implementations; HashMap, ResourceMap and LocalPersistenceMap have been updated to implement the new operations.

The IIterator interface has been renamed to Iterator. In addition the remove() operation has been omitted in order to enforce that a concrete implementations can not modify an aggregate. Additionally, ICollectionViewSortHelper has been renamed to CollectionSortUtil.

Some design decisions worth mentioning involve the inclusion of multiple IMap implementations; HashMap, ResouceMap and LocalPersistanceMap. Initially I identified an AbstractMap from which these classes would extend, however I realize some developers may want to minimize dependencies as much as possible therefore I decided to simply have each concrete map implement the IMap interface rather than extend an abstract map implementation.

The source, binary and ASDocs for the new Collections API can be downloaded here.

The Collections API is published under the MIT license.

Since the initial release of Cairngen 1.0 there has been an amazing amount of interest in the project and your feedback has been very encouraging. In addition I have received a number of extremely valuable customizations from community members, many of which have made it into subsequent releases.

In order to provide a solid foundation to help facilitate a collaborative Open Source initiative for the Cairngen Project I have decided to move the project to Google Code.

Moving Cairngen to Google Code allows for a number of significant development benefits for the Cairngorm Community. This includes regular development updates, access to all releases, availability of all source code revisions, better documentation, defect lists, feature requests and much more.

I am currently accepting requests for new contributors so if you feel you have added new functionality which would provide benefit to the project visit the Become a Contributor page. All comments on the project are welcome and encouraged. In addition I strongly recommend the if you have any issues with Cairngen, especially environmental issues you should log them to the Issues Page.

Along with the new Cairngen Google Code Project I have also released Cairngen 2.1.1 which aligns the source project with the new SVN repository.

So go check out all of the new information on Cairngen at the new Cairngen Project Home.

When building localized Flex applications with ResourceBundle there are a few tricks you may not be aware of which can come in handy should you need them.

I have had quite a few people ask how multiline values can be specified in a properties file. This is a pretty common question and luckily the answer is very simple: backslash (\).

For example, suppose you have a properties file which contains a string resource with a really long value, like a paragraph. Typically the property value will just be one really long String on one line. However you can use the backslash (\) character to continue the value on multiple lines in order to make the properties file more legible, such as in the following example:

So if you have properties with very long values remember to use backslash (\) to help clean up your resources.

example