Everybody has a favourite HTML editor on a platform, but does anyone have a favourite on ALL platforms? Well at least on the personal computing platform, that is. Well, I must tell you that my favourite HTML editor has been Aptana, which has served me well since I stopped using Dreamweaver exclusively. For me the major attraction of Aptana is its cross-platform nature. I can start work on my Windows laptop, then continue it on my MacBook and then finish it off on my tiny little Linux laptop the HP 2133 Mini note.

At the completion of my install of Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) on my netbook, I found that Aptana just would not load. It would show the logo for a couple of seconds then it would just come up with an error. After scratching my head for a little while, I tried to look up an answer on Google and I found this thread on the Aptana user forum.

So basically, the issue is the version of xulrunner that Jaunty comes with. Currently it is version 1.9, while Aptana needs version 1.8. To fix this issue you need to download xulrunner 1.8 and unzip it to /usr/lib, so its path would be something like /usr/lib/xulrunner/. Then you create a script which looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.8.1.3
if [ $LD_LIBRARY_PATH ]; then
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
else
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME
fi
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME LD_LIBRARY_PATH
~/aptana/AptanaStudio -vm /usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-6-sun/jre/bin/java

Make the script executable and then on your panel add an application shortcut to point to this script file, mine is called “aptanastart”. Oh, and you need to have Java installed, since Aptana requires it.

2133 · 9.04 · Aptana · computing · hp · html · ide · jackalope · jaunty · java · Linux · ubuntu

In my experimentation to build a question and answer system using adobe spry, I tried to create a view of the data set in which only one question is visible at at time. The code seems pretty straightforward, as the Adobe Spry 1.6.1 documentation outlines under the section dealing with Pagedview. However, when I tested it I get either “no data in the data set error (or something like that)” or a blank page. Try as I might, looking at all the different possibilities, looking at any possible oversight in my code, I could not figure out what was wrong.

The solution, however simple, took me about a day to find out. It seems that the SpryData.js that Dreamweaver CS3 shipped with is an older version, so while I was actually doing things correctly using the documentation of Spry 1.6.1 and the SpryPagedView.js from the 1.6.1 package, it was the SpryData.js that somehow broke it all. So if you are trying to create a paged view of a data set using Adobe Spry, make sure you update the SpryData.js to the one that comes with the 1.6.1 package from Adobe Labs. This way at least you will end up with more hair on your head.

No tags