Never fear, you don’t have to restart your entire computer, open up Taskmanager and you’ll see an application called ‘Drag’. You can kill this application and the icon will disappear. If you don’t see this app, close Eclipse and find the process called ‘adl.exe’ and kill this process.

Restart averted, Yay!

It’s really a draft right now, you’ll see strikeouts and everything.  Most of the content is in there, but I need to add a page or two about debugging the project, as getting an Ant-built project to debug properly in Flex can be a pain.  I’ll also be adding some info about how to debug your java code at the same time you are debugging your flex code.

Take a look, and feel free to leave comments.

• Getting Started with Hibernate 3 (OReilly Shortcut)
• Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse
• Head First Java

**update** I’ve moved everything to a static page, view it here: BlazeDS + Flex
With the release of BlazeDS and WebORB Java going free, creating XML files from PHP doesn’t seem to be such a good idea anymore. After spending a year with Flex, switching back to PHP with it’s dynamic typing feels like I’ve switched to using crayons. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still use PHP for other purposes, but when I have all of the data strongly typed on the client and in the database, I don’t like the backend to not care.

A little bit of background, I haven’t compiled a Java program in 4 years, and that was for CompSci 312 when I was getting my undergrad. I’m coming to this brand new, and I may be making some mistakes… Hopefully I make them, someone corrects me, and I can pass this knowledge back to everyone else looking to take advantage of BlazeDS.

Also of some interest is that this is currently the third iteration of my little project. First I used WebORB PHP and was generally happy with the result. I wasn’t so happy with the whole PHP part, so I decided to see if I could learn Java. I ported my app over to Java with the help of the WebORB documentation, and I’d strongly recommend any java newbies to experiment with WebORB, as there is no newbie documentation for BlazeDS. After I got my application working in WebORB, I decided I wanted some of the Messaging/Polling features offered in BlazeDS, and after reading this post, I decided to try porting over to BlazeDS. WebORB does a lot of hand-holding, and BlazeDS requires more explicit configuration, but after working this out, I’ve got my application running on three backends!

I’ve been using Ant for a while, it’s great for packaging up my Flash/AS2 applications, without including the .as, .fla, swd, etc.. files. And since so many java devs use SVN, I knew there had to be some sort of integration between the two. I eventually stumbled upon SVNANT, but was unable to get the 1.0.0 working on my machine. I found many references to 1.1.0, however, so I downloaded the source and compiled it (Thanks to Jeff at Alagad). This worked right away for me, so with the help of this post from Howard Scholtz, I was able to add in revsion #/time directly into the app without using svn keywords!

Code included after the break.
This is the target I use in the build.xml file, it’s pretty generic, you should be able to drop it in and it will work, as long as you are using APP_ROOT.

	
		
			
		
		
		
		

		
		Build Number ${build.number} ${build.time}
		Revision Number: ${build.lastChangedRev}/${build.revision} committed on: ${build.lastChangedDate}
		
		
		
		
		
	

Here’s my Version.as file:

// Version Information
public var build_number:String="@buildnumber@";
public var build_time:String="@buildtime@";
public var revision_number:String="@revisionnumber@";
public var revision_time:String="@revisiontime@";

So, using Repeaters creates many issues you don’t usually come in contact with. Here are some of the things I’ve run into, and the workarounds.

• Repeater.currentItem not available in the click handler
  • Same as with a list and an ItemRenderer, but because I just need a button, and nothing fancy, this is annoying. I got around this by setting the “data” property (FB won’t suggest data as a property, but it’s there!) to Repeater.currentItem.
• Repeater isn’t on the display list, and doesn’t have an array of ‘children’, so it’s hard to get at the items that were created.
  • A mysterious feature of Repeaters is that if you set the id of the items created, AS3 will see an array based on that ID
    This means that if I use <Button id=”buttonArray” /> I will be able to do a “for each(b:Button in buttonArray)” loop to get access to those buttons. This works just like the groupName property of RadioButtons.
• Button property ’selectedField’ only gets the state, and does not set the data’s value when ’selected’ is changed.
  • I’m not sure how I feel about this. Part of me expects that when the button changes to ’selected’, the data’s field should be changed too. Then the pedantic, MVC Loving part of me kicks in and wants to strangle anyone who lets the interface directly change the model… so I end up half-strangled and completely exhausted.

For me, I had forgotten to set an initialize value, so I was attempting to reach object.value, but object was null. Normally this throws an error, a quick and easy fix, but when this happens during Data Binding, no error, so you’re left scratching your head wondering why the hell your function is finishing on the 2nd line of code.

4 hours later, you look up and see that you forgot to initialize the var.

someArray().filter(function(o:*, index:int, arr:Array):Boolean{return o.selected})

This makes looping through arrays and checking values quick and painless. You can also add in a .every() function on the end if you’re doing something simple, like tracing or logging (just remember to return false; in the every function).

From Sasha Magee @ Adobe on the ApolloCoders group:

The events that end in “ing” are the cancellable events that happen BEFORE the displayState change. We added these specifically so you could cancel the event.

I know, one of those things that seems obvious after you read it, but I hadn’t seen it said before. Something to keep in mind when your preventDefault() isn’t working.

Dusty entertains all offers, especially the wonderful “can’t refuse” type.  Big or small, just drop an email.