Flex and AIR Development Archive

Aug 25, 2008 0

Processing Hearts AIR While Merapi Lends a Hand

As promised at my brief demo at 360|Flex San Jose last week, I’m now releasing the Merapi library for Processing.

Processing is a Java-variant built mostly for artists or for anyone who wants to create quick prototypes.

Merapi is an opensource Java library that gives access to Java from AIR – Adobe’s own OS-agnostic runtime (for the desktop, not a browser plugin) built around the Flash Player.

But most of you already knew that.

It’s really nothing too complicated (just wrapping the JAR file correctly), but it will make it a bit easier for you to get started with Merapi in Processing.

What to do:
1) ~~Download Merapi Processing Lib Beta~~ – Merapi is not being publicly released yet.
2) Wherever your actual Processing binary resides, you will find a folder called “libraries”. Unzip merapi.zip into this directory. (Your directory structure should be {ProcessingDir}/libraries/merapi/library/… which will contain all the necessary JAR files for Merapi.)
3) Open your Processing IDE (restart if it’s already open), go to the Menu->Sketch->Import Library->merapi. This will import the necessary packages, but there’s one last step before you’re in the clear. The way that Processing imports all of the packages becomes a bit troublesome. If you simply try to create an instance of the Merapi “Bridge” class, you will get a compile error. To resolve this… (See Step 4)
4) Change the import line import merapi.*” to “import merapi.Bridge;”

Also, Adam Flater whipped up this quick video demonstrating the Lego Mindstorm robot cruising around thanks to Bluetooth<->Java/Merapi<->AIR.

Aug 1, 2007 0

This Ain’t Your Mom’s Middle Tier….or, Apache Tomcat/Adobe LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) on OSX

So, I’ve been getting into Adobe’s LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) for a project I’m working on. This is really my first foray into Java application servers in the first place (except for some minimal JRun installations for testing out ColdFusion), and definitely my first meeting with the middle tier offerings from Adobe.

The first step was to download Apache Tomcat and get it running. Tomcat is a Java application server that allows you to serve up servlets and JSPs (if you want to get into J2EE development, you’ll need something more robust like WebLogic, JBoss, or WebSphere). I’m developing on a MacBook Pro with OSX 10.4.10, and I could not run Tomcat 6 without some serious freeze-ups. I’m on the JRE 1.5, and things should have been clean, but they weren’t. So, I just backed up to Tomcat 5.5 and everything has been smooth since.
The installation/setup should be really simple, but you may need to edit the startup.sh or catalina.sh files to set the Java heap size when Tomcat starts up (I was running into java.lang.OutOfMemoryException errors when trying to compile some sample apps provided by Adobe). To do this, open up the $TOMCAT_DIR/bin/catalina.sh file in a text editor, and look for a line that starts with JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS "...
Go to the next line and type:
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS "-ms64M" "-mx512M""
This will make your minimum heap size 64MB, and the maximum 512MB. This should fix your troubles…but adjust as necessary.

The next step is to download LCDS. Adobe is offering a free ES version that allows you to use it in production environments with unlimited users, but it is limited to one CPU. Pretty good deal if you ask me…and it should work perfectly for your learnin’.

This is where things get a bit less obvious. If you’re on OSX, you’ll notice that Adobe has no love for you when it comes to LCDS. You can still use it, you’ll just have to download the Linux version. After downloading, you’ll see that it’s a .bin.sh file, but you can actually use the unzip command in your terminal to extract the files. After extracting, you’ll notice a R_ directory wherever you executed the unzip command. Go into this directory and look around…you’ll find a dist/flex.war file and a dist/samples.war file. You will put these files into the $TOMCAT_DIR/webapps directory, and when you start Tomcat next, it should autodeploy the WAR file (it will extract it, read its configuration files, and let you access the Flex services) as long as you have the autodeploy option set to true in Tomcat (it is true by default).

That’s about it for the initial setup. I would recommend pointing your browser to the samples/testdrive directory (if you’ve left everything default for the Tomcat installation, this would be http://localhost:8080/samples/testdrive).

That’s it! Now get busy learning about LCDS!

Astral Physics

Processing Hearts AIR While Merapi Lends a Hand

This Ain’t Your Mom’s Middle Tier….or, Apache Tomcat/Adobe LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) on OSX

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Astral Physics

Processing Hearts AIR While Merapi Lends a Hand

This Ain’t Your Mom’s Middle Tier….or, Apache Tomcat/Adobe LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) on OSX

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