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.

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Kind of related to an earlier post: Deploying Multiple LCDS wars to the same servlet container

I found out that you can specify config file tokens as JVM args. This makes deploying the same war file to various deployments that have slight variations for certain parameters easier, since you can deploy the same war, but “tokenize” (and/or use some of the default tokens).

http://livedocs.adobe.com/livecycle/8.2/programLC/programmer/lcds/help.html?content=lcarch_4.html

“You can also use custom run-time tokens in service configuration files; for example, {messaging-channel} and {my.token}. You specify values for these tokens in Java Virtual Machine (JVM) options. The server reads these JVM options to determine what values are defined for them, and replaces the tokens with the specified values. If you have a custom token for which a value cannot be found, an error is thrown. Because {server.name}, {server.port}, and {context.root} are special tokens, no errors occur when these tokens are not specified in JVM options.”

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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.

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This really isn’t that difficult to do, but the docs regarding it are a little hard to find. I thought I’d post the link and then some links to other useful blog entries that have info to add on this topic.

Doc link: http://livedocs.adobe.com/blazeds/1/blazeds_devguide/help.html?content=runtimeconfig_5.html#194376

One of Adobe’s platform evangelists has posted a blog entry that may be more clear:
http://raghuonflex.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/endpointatruntime/

There is also a “Flex cookbook” entry that may be of some use:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/communityengine/index.cfm?event=showdetails&productId=2&postId=9703

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