Flex Monkey Patches

A while back I posted this entry showing off my first Google Gadget that embedded a swf for Flash Player version detection.

http://blog.flexmonkeypatches.com/2008/01/25/google-gadget-flash-player-version-checker/

Recently someone posted a comment asking how I did that. I figured I might as well post the code. So here it is:

Here are the past week’s top 10 Flex/AIR/LCDS links:

I have answered questions for a few customers regarding the policy files changes in the recent releases of the Flash Player and have referenced the following documents:

This change in behavior is noted in the following kb article:
Sockets do not function in Flash Player versions later than 9.0.115.0

A good reference on the security changes in the new Flash Player is located here:
Policy file changes in Flash Player 9

The page that is probably of most interest to you is here:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer9_security_04.html

This is an article describing how to set up a socket policy file server and provides some samples:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/socket_policy_files.html

In addition to these articles, I have found 2 more that I personally found useful:

This one shows how to make and use a simple java socket server to act as a policy file server:
AS3 + Java: Socket connections to ports below 1024

This blog post shows how to create a simple java app that tests your socket server:
Flash Player 9 Update 3 and the Socket Policy File

Now if only I could figure out how to easily start the socket server when I start my TOMCAT server up?? Anyone?

Here are the past week’s top 10 Flex/AIR/LCDS links:

Here are the past week’s top 10 Flex/AIR/LCDS links:

A useful compiler switch to help with this is the -dump-config switch.

If you add -dump-config=c:\mycfg.xml to the compiler, it will generate a config file that represents all the compiler (either for mxmlc or compc) settings used for compilation in a Flex Builder compile and then you can use that config file in a commandline compile to do an equivalent compile.

A few notes on the generated configfile.

1. The file is not perfect. I found that the tag that was generated only had a relative path generated. It is much better if that were absolute, so before I used the config file, I changed the value for that tag to something like:

2. For some reason the generated file has a token ${flexlib} which didn’t get resolved and filled in. I found that I could just comment out the 2 properties in the config file as they aren’t relevant to most compilations.

3. I found the easiest way to use mxmlc/compc was to copy the generated config file to the bin dir of the SDK under Flex Builder install. Then I could invoke mxmlc against the app like so:

./mxmlc -load-config+=mycfg.xml C:/myapp/src/app.mxml -output myswf.swf

4. For compc, the classes to actually compile to include in the generated swc aren’t actually output to the generated config file, so you have to add them manually (or on the commandline). I found the easiest way to do this was to add tags like below in the generated configfile

The content for those tags comes from the project file - .flexLibProperties which looks something like this:

The classEntry paths translate into the class tag values.
After doing this you can run compc like this:

./compc -load-config+=mycfg.xml -output myswc.swc

HTH

-Kyle

Here are the past week’s top 10 Flex/AIR/LCDS links:

Here are the past week’s top 10 Flex/AIR/LCDS links:

Ya…you heard me. Flipping Flex Chart Axis! And I mean it too. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could easily swap x and y axis? And change the “corner” where the origin is. This functionality isn’t built in to the charts. You can change the side (left or right) where the y-axis is and the position of the x-axis (top or bottom), but that doesn’t change where the origin is. It merely changes where the axis labels appear. Well, this sample shows that through the combination of sorting, dataFunctions and labelFunctions, you can flip the chart axis and change where the origin appears in your chart.

Download a zipfile containing the source to this sample.

Browse the source of this example.

Or continue into the blog entry to see the source:
Read the rest of this post»

I thought I would take the time each week to post links that I have marked to share from Google Reader. As I mentioned in a previous post, I have gone a little RSS and Google Reader crazy. But I find it more and more necessary to peruse as many blog posts as I can to keep up to date with what is going on in the Flex/Flash Player/AIR/LCDS/BlazeDS world.

Here are the past week’s top 10: