Worked with Phil to resolve getStrackTrace() calls in our code which were apparently breaking the non-debug version of flash player.

• Commenting out the violating lines fixed the issue
• So I then put in put in some conditional compilation flags as defined here
• And magically even with the debug flags on, the code ran in the non-debug flash player, so by adding lines of code that in theory do nothing, we fixed the problem
• Reworked the about page to add information about the debug flags and the user’s version of flash player

While playing with database accessing code, I found out how to build a Flex + Java Dynamic Web Project in Eclipse which builds and deploys both the java and flex code all in one swoop.  It also allows debugging of both sides in the same instance of eclipse.  Here are the VERY specific requirements:

• Install Galileo Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers (Newer versions of eclipse will produce an error later on)
• Install the Flash Builder 4 Eclipse plug-in, make sure to pick the Eclipse plug-in from the drop-down list
• The plug-in is installed with Eclipse Ganymede (too old for what we want to do, and who ships a plug-in with the whole framework anyway?), so we have to tell out Galileo install where the plug-in is:
  • Navigate to your plug-in install directory (‘C:Program FilesAdobeAdobe Flash Builder 4 Plug-in’ which I’ll call PLUG-IN)
  • Copy the file ‘PLUG-IN/eclipse-host-distro/dropins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.nl1.link’
  • Paste a copy in to GALILEO-INSTALL/dropins
  • All this file contains is one line pointing to the plug-in install directory
• Now if you run your Galileo Eclipse, you should be able to open the ‘Flash’ perspective from Window > Open Perspective > Other…
• Now that the installs are done we can make a project… go to the ‘Flash’ perspective and create a new Flex project, fill in the fields something like this:
• If you do not see the bottom lines “Create combined Java/Flex Project..” something was not installed or configured correctly in the beginning steps.
• Click next, here you will configure your server, if you do not have a J2EE server configured, click new and make one, it is fairly straight forward, you simply choose your tomcat version and point to the main tomcat directory
• You will also need a blazeds.war file which can be downloaded from Adobe here, the binary distro is all you need but there are very nice examples in the full distro
• After you’re done with this page, click next to configure your flex project, the only line you need fill in is on the bottom ‘Output folder URL’.  If your project is called ‘TestWebProject’ this would look something like ‘http://localhost:8080/TestWebProject’
• Click finish, if you get an error here which won’t let you finish the project, it may be because your eclipse version is too new… yea, this won’t work any eclipse version other than Galileo as mentioned earlier
• Next we need to change one thing in the .flexproperties file.    Initially the server’s context root is not set properly after the project has been created. To change this either open the properties of the Flex project ADCDemo, select Flex Server and change the context root to /ADCDemo or change the serverContextRoot property in the file .flexProperties. To do this open the file .flexProperties in Flex Builder (you can find it in the Flex Navigator view in the root folder of the ADCDemo project) and change the property serverContextRoot to the context root of the Web application (“/ADCDemo”). Replace
  serverContextRoot="/WebContent"

  with

  serverContextRoot="/TestWebProject"
• Now open the ‘Servers’ view from Windows > Open View… (Server > Servers), and add your project to your server by right-clicking on the server and choosing ‘Add and Remove’:
• Start the server, then run your flex app and you should get a very blank flex app running in your browser
• From here you can edit Flex code in the Flex perspective and your java code in the Java perspective (I highly recommended switching perspectives as the directory structure appears to change between perspectives)
• The usual flex remoting files are contained in ‘WebContent/WEB-INF/flex’ and anything in your java src folder will be placed in to ‘WebContent/WEB-INF/classes’ folder during the build so things like log4j.properties go there

Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers

Working on the back-end database and java interface.  After going through a lot of documentation and partial examples, I figured out a way to dynamically map java HashMaps of key value pairs to a hibernate managed database.  I did it by using the dynamic mapping capability of Hibernate.  Hibernate simply requires an xml document to map keys to database columns.  I plan on creating a meta class structure that will either store object meta information or read it straight from the database tables and create the required xml documents as required.  If a new property is added to a dynamic object, the meta class will generate a new xml document for Hibernate and hibernate takes care of the SQL ALTER calls.

Reasons why this is good:

• We can make use of dynamic Flex objects
• Our object types can evolve and grow with time and be transferred between instances
• We can connect to almost any database type (all types supported by hibernate) without rewriting anything
• We can make use of libraries made to work with hibernate for things like lazy loading and data pagination
• We don’t have to write sql queries for most things (if a Car has an Owner and we have a reference to the Car object, calling car.getOwner() will cause hibernate to do the database call for us)