Flex Monkey Patches

OK…so I guess I kind of passed over these yesterday in my announcements. To me, the fact that there would be new releases timed with MAX was known and to anyone in the community there was probably a strong suspicion that there would at least be a new point release at MAX 2008. But in an effort to correct my oversight, here are links to the announcements by the product managers:

Matt Chotin (PM for Flex SDK) announces Flex Builder 3.0.2 and Flex SDK 3.2 (with support for AIR 1.5 and Flash Player 10).

Anil Channappa (PM for LCDS and BlazeDS) announces LCDS 2.6.1 and BlazeDS 3.2.

I pointed one of my customers at this app last week. I had no idea it would be all the rage at MAX

http://flex.org/tour

“Tour de Flex is a desktop application for exploring Flex capabilities and resources, including the core Flex components, Adobe AIR and data integration, as well as a variety of third-party components, effects, skins, and more.”

I have posted an install badge in my sidebar (below my paypal badge)…check it out.

I am currently subscribed to 111 Flex/AIR/Flash Player/LCDS/BlazeDS related blogs. I frequently find myself sharing items in Google reader very from the same blogs over and over again or I keep going back to certain blogs over and over again because they have information or code that I use all the time. Occasionally I come across a blog I haven’t seen before and it is filled with useful Flex related information.

I have decided to embark on a new weekly blog series that highlights these blogs and bloggers. I think that everyone who reads my blog should certainly be reading these blogs that I mention in this series. Subscribe and reap the benefits of the vast amount of useful info out there in the Flex Blogosphere.

My first blog/blogger review is Mike Chambers:

http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/

Mike Chambers has spent the last eight years building applications that target the Flash runtime. During that time, he has worked with numerous technologies including Flash, Generator, .NET, Central, Flex, and Ajax. He is currently the Principal Product Manager for developer relations for Adobe AIR. He has written and spoken extensively on Flash and Rich Internet Application development and is coauthor of the Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide, Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide, Flash Enabled: Flash Design and Development for Devices as well as Generator and Flash Demystified. (http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/about/)

Aside from being a journeyman resource for Flex/AIR/AS3 info and code, Mike is often at the cutting and even bleeding edge of Flex related stuff. Recently, he has been exploring new features for Flex 4 and Flash Player 10 and posting great tutorials and tidbits on his blog exposing many cool new things in upcoming releases. Here are some his recent blog posts that I have recently marked to share in Google Reader:

I beleive in the “80-20 rule”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
http://management.about.com/cs/generalmanagement/a/Pareto081202.htm

I think it certainly applies to solving the types of problems I face day in and day out as a part of my job.
Within this realm, I see its application as thus:

For a known set of questions (related to a given topic), 80% of the solutions have already been found (or closely related solutions have been found), leaving 20% of the solutions yet to be discovered.

If there are others in the community who are publishing questions and solutions, then I should be able to find the solution(s) (or other solution(s) that are close enough to make the jump to the one I am looking for relatively trivial) to 80% of the problems I encounter.

Anecdotally, I find this assumption to be not too far off.

So, over the course of assisting customers with Flex/AIR/Flash/BlazeDS/LCDS related problems, I often perform quite exhaustive Google searches on particular topics to see if I can find information to solve or help solve a problem. I come across all sorts of info during these searches. Some of it useful, some of it not.

On one recent occasion, I found I was coming across a lot of good info on the broader topic I was searching on, but it took me a while to find out what I was specifically looking for. I did eventually find something that solved or helped solve the problem, but rather than discarding all the other info that I had gathered, I thought it would be better to collect it together and post it somewhere that would make searches that fall under that broader topic more efficient.

This idea essentially resulted in me devising a new set of pages for my blog. Each page will essentially be a collection of human-indexed topics related to Flex/AIR/Flash/BlazeDS/LCDS. During my searches for specific solutions, I will try to remember to keep the other related results (although they may not solve the specific problem I am tackling) and post them into a more general “topic related” page.

The “jumping off point” for these pages will be an index located here:

The Monkey Index

I already have a few pages to add and will do so later this week and (hopefully) continue to do so as I, one monkey, attempt to index Google for Flex/AIR/Flash/BlazeDS/LCDS related solutions.

Launching external applications from AIR is not supported.
Here are a few non-Adobe resources that are looking into bridging that gap:

http://www.merapiproject.net/
http://aperture.fluorinefx.com/
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2008/01/22/commandproxy-its-cool-but-is-it-a-good-idea/
http://www.jeffryhouser.com/index.cfm/2008/4/22/Using-AIR-to-launch-other-applications

I have been working on a few Adobe AIR projects and along the way as I run into what I feel will be common pieces of functionality to many of the AIR applications I may write, I have been abstracting that functionality and breaking it out into various Flex library projects. After reading the the Developer Center article on Managing Adobe AIR updates with ColdFusion 8, which helped me understand the general process, I decided to tailor the code that I was using in my current AIR application.

What I came up with was a pretty simple approach. I decided to use information that was available in the application descriptor ([appname]-app.xml) for update purposes. In setting values for 3 of the keys in the application descriptor with deliberate usage in mind, the information necessary to deal with determining version dominance, location of the latest version info and installers would be readily accessible.

I figured that if the current, running application was going to get it’s version and update information from the application descriptor, then just having that information available in the same format somewhere on the web to download would make for a simple architecture. By using the “applicationID” and “appFileName” to construct a url to this “latest version” application descriptor, I could easily grab this XML and read from it the “appVersion” to compare against the current appVersion. If the latest appVersion is greater than the current appVersion, then the new application installer could be located at a url I contruct from the applicationID, appFileName and appVersion. Here is how I contruct these two URLs from keys within the application descriptor:

From this, you can see how I use appFileName and appVersion. That is pretty straight forward. Each new AIR installer that I distribute will just follow this naming convention. The applicationID usage is a little less clear, but here is how I use it. For each application that I build, I create a subdomain off of my main domain. Then, I map that subdomain to a folder. When I create a new build for release, I increment the appVersion key in the application descriptor and in that folder, I place the latest application installer and the corresponding application descriptor.

More details on this library can be found at its Google Code project home: http://code.google.com/p/flex-monkey-patches-upda-man/.
Later this week, I will also be posting a useful little AIR application with source code that makes use of this library and should serve as a good sample for this functionality.

So it is almost February already! Where did January go? I’ve been a bit slow out of the gate this year as far as keeping up a decent pace in posting helpful samples to my blog. Actually, I have been working on things behind the scenes, a few details of which I will reveal now. I have launched a new blog on a new domain. The content is to be all “work” related, so it will be about Flex/Flash Player/Adobe AIR, LiveCycle Data Services/Blaze DS/ColdFusion and other fun technologies. I’ve also been working on an AIR app which I hope to get out at least in a fairly stable beta form around the same time that Flex3/AIR releases. It will most likely be open source and hosted on Google Code. I will also be compiling a library of useful components, extensions to components and monkey patches to the Flex framework. This new blog and content will all be available on:

http://flexmonkeypatches.com

All old posts on http:blog.739SaintLouis.com should link to or redirect to the same content on my new site. I will leave my old site up for an undetermined length of time with the intent of transforming it content-wise into a more personal blog (time permitting.)

Regards,

-Kyle

Adobe Flex sdk beta 3 and Adobe AIR beta 3 just release to Adobe Labs yesterday, so I have updated my version checker AIR application to detect the new SDK and also compiled the app against the new AIR classes targeting the new AIR runtime.

All other blog references will be pointing to this new version

>>>> here <<<<<.

I just recently was made aware that there are actually 3 different “builds” of Flex SDK “hotfix 3″ out there.
1. Originally hotfix 3 was applied to hotfix 2 (updating a few swcs) – version 1
2. Late summer 2007 it was realized this confused some folks so the hotfix kb article was replaced with a full version of the SDK with the fixes applied – version 2
3. Flex Builder 3 beta 2 shipped with the latest/greatest SDK from the 2.0.1 branch which is an equivalent to hotfix 3 SDK – version 3.

These versions should be functionally identical afaik.

I updated my version checker to detect and differentiate these versions. I have updated the original blog entry here and also have links to the update AIR app here.

Finding out what version of the SDK you are using for Flex Builder, command line compilation, Ant compilation or in your Flex war file for FDS or LCDS can be comfusing. Especially if you have added one of the SDK hotfixes for 2.0.1. When faced with issues from customers, I often ask them what version of the Flex SDK or FDS/LCDS they are using. Sometimes they don’t know or don’t remember if they have installed a hot fix or if they are running FDS or LCDS. To be fair though, finding out what version of the SDK is not clear nor is finding out the version of a FDS/LCDS war. Cracking open some swc files or jar files to find a build number or starting your server to look for a build number in the output or logs and translating the build number to an actual version equivalent really could be made easier. I thought this would make a good AIR application, so I started coding and here is what I came up with. Mind you, it is not feature complete, pretty looking or by any means architecturally elegant. It does the job though…those other things can come later. This is build with Adobe Air Beta2, which can be downloaded here.

Here is a link to the installer.