And more in-between posts...Blaze DS shows up, an open-source Flex Data Service!

As an instructor of Flex, I have often taught students who work at organizations who use Flex, but not Flex Data Services (recently rebranded as Flex Live Cycle Data Services -really, they should have a shorter name for it). The reason they do not use Flex Data Services is usually a) price and b) the proprietary nature of the server.

Well it seems both points have now been addressed.

Just over the weekend, Adobe released BlazeDS, and according to the website, the description reads as follows:

"BlazeDS is the server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Adobe® Flex™ and Adobe AIR™ applications for more responsive rich Internet application (RIA) experiences."

Furthermore, it appears to now have open source and licensing origins...

"Adobe is announcing its plans to contribute the proven BlazeDS technologies to the community under the LGPL v3. BlazeDS gives the rapidly growing Adobe developer community free access to the powerful remoting and messaging technologies developed by Adobe.

Concurrent with this prerelease of BlazeDS, Adobe is publishing the AMF binary data protocol specification, on which the BlazeDS remoting implementation is based, and is committed to partnering with the community to make this protocol available for every major server platform. The source code will be available for download early 2008. Please read the FAQ for further details on BlazeDS and Adobe’s open source plans."

Check it out at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/blazeds/ .

Installing and Configuring Flex Live Cycle Data Services, Tomcat 6.x, and ColdFusion 8 : Background

I have not written for over a month, as I had been busy travelling back and forth delivering Flex and Flash training between Boston and Toronto. During my "off-off-off" time (when a developer does not do work, research, or watch a couple of hours worth of Lost Season 2 lol), I took a moment to explore configuring Live Cycle Data Services (LCDS, formerly Flex Data Services 2.x or FDS2) with Apache's Tomcat Server.

There were a number of reasons I began to explore configuring LCDS/FDS2 with other J2EE servers.

One reason was that I could not get a stand-alone version of JRun with Updater 6 to run on Windows Vista. To note, I could install JRun 4.x with the SP1 update onto Vista, but I could not install the SP6 updater. The installation of Updater 6 would halt mid-way through, and updater 6 is required to run LCDS/FDS2.

I suppose I could have tried to install LCDS/FDS2 with the integrated JRun option on Windows Vista, but this leads me to my second reason to try and configure LCDS/FDS2; not all business clients run integrated JRun services. The clientele I work with (and the students I teach Flex to) may be using an in-house J2EE server such as Tomcat, JBoss, WebSphere, or Sun Microsystem's new GlassFish Server (In particular, I will be writing about GlassFish Server in a later blog entry). I am not knocking JRun, its a good J2EE Server, but you need to keep your clients happy!

A third reason is that clients, consultants, and developers using LCDS/FDS2 with their applications may need not only to know how to get LCDS/FDS2 configured with their J2EE servers, they may need to tweak settings appropriately. I know that on the Adobe Web site there is a "Flex Test-Drive Server" available, and it is a pre-configured Tomcat Server running FDS2, but the information provided focuses more on developing applications with Flex and Java then the actual configuration itself. I do recommend that you do explore the article itself anyway as it will give some details on the requirements to set up LCDS/FDS2 with Tomcat - see http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/java_testdrive.html, and credits should go to Christophe Coenraets, whose blog entries I also used as a point of reference (visit his site - http://coenraets.org/) .

Therefore in my upcoming blog entries I am going to attempt to do the following:

Install and configure Tomcat for LCDS/FDS2
Install LCDS (or FDS2, it will be the same process) on Tomcat.
Set up web services and messaging services on Tomcat (this was required for my courses , and good for local development for testing Flex code that access web services, uses messaging or data synchronization)
Set up ColdFusion 8 on Tomcat (also required for my courses that I teach as a potential back-end).

Alright, I am done for now. BRB with the next entry.

Installing Flex 3 Beta on Eclipse Europa J2EE Did not Install

After my previous investigation on installing Flex 2 on Eclipse Europa J2EE edition (which did not work), it prompted me to set up a Flex 3 beta environment with the same Eclipse Europa J2EE edition, which is still on my system (in a different directory then my Eclipse 3.1.x / Flex 2 installation).


Suffice it to say, it appears to installation proceeded further than when I attempted to install Flex 2.0.1 on Eclipse Europa. However, I got an installation error at the end of the process:



The installation dialog box stated that the installation process was complete, in spite of the error. So I opened up the log file to explore the error further. The log file had a cryptic filename (1187285806401.log) located in my D:\Program Files\eclipse\configuration folder.

Opening the file in Notepad revealed the following text (text cleaned up for clarity) -

!SESSION 2007-08-16 13:36:46.123 -----------------------------------------------eclipse.buildId=I20070625-1500
java.version=1.5.0_11
java.vendor=Sun Microsystems Inc.
BootLoader constants: OS=win32, ARCH=x86, WS=gtk, NL=en_CA

Framework arguments: -application org.eclipse.update.core.standaloneUpdate -command install -from file:\D:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3 Plug-in\com.adobe.flexbuilder.update.site/ -featureId com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core -version 3.0.172437

Command-line arguments: -application org.eclipse.update.core.standaloneUpdate -command install -from file:\D:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3 Plug-in\com.adobe.flexbuilder.update.site/ -featureId com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core -version 3.0.172437

!ENTRY org.eclipse.update.core 4 0 2007-08-16 13:36:55.655

!MESSAGE Feature
com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core 3.0.172437 cannot be found on file:/D:/Program Files/Adobe/Flex Builder 3 Plug-in/com.adobe.flexbuilder.update.site/

or a newer version is already installed.

------------------------------------------

So, it could not find Featurecom.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core 3.0.172437 ? Or a new version was installed? I will write up my investigation on this in a separate article.