ArcGIS Flex API in use in China

Check out this entry - pretty cool implementation of the AGS Flex API - our prayers and thoughts go out to the folks that perished in this terrible incident - Peace.

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Adobe releases Flash Player 10

Check it out at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

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SpringSource Application Platform

The SpringSource folks announced the beta release of an Application Platform. This is very cool, where in the past you had to have a web server to start up Spring. And if you are a big fan of OSGi and Spring-DM (like I am) you know what a pain it was to wedge all that together. And if you think about it, it was a chicken and egg problem. Well no more, this platform does it "right", where it starts the JVM, the OSGi platform (Equinox), the new Dynamic Module Kernel™ (dm-Kernel) and then the bundles. Remember back when SpringSource bought or aligned (do not remember which) with the Tomcat folks, well Tomcat is now a web bundle. This is very cool - next is to move it onto EC2.

FlexUnit + ANT + AIR

I'm a big fan of Unit Testing and Continuous Integration. Peter Martin blogged about how to achieve this for Flex. Basically, he created an Ant task that starts a server socket connection and forks a browser that launches a flexunit based application. The application opens a client socket connection back to the server and streams the flexunit results in JUnit XML format. The server reads the xml stream and writes it on the local disk.
Notice that all of this is done so that a flex application in a browser can write to the local disk. Pretty clever, but this is where AIR makes life a bit easier. A Flex application using AIR can write to a local disk drive. Since the source code of JUnitTestRunner was available (thanks Peter), I was able to 1) learn something and 2) adjust the sendResults function to write the result to disk.

private function sendResults() : void
{
   for each (var report : Object in reports)
   {
     var xml : XML = createXMLReport(report);
       var utf : String = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n" + xml.toString();

       var file : File = new File();
       if( m_basedir )
       {
           file = file.resolvePath( m_basedir + "/target/TEST-" + xml.@name + ".xml");
       }
       else
       {
           file = File.userDirectory.resolvePath("TEST-" + xml.@name + ".xml");
       }
       var fs : FileStream = new FileStream();
       fs.open(file, FileMode.WRITE);
       fs.writeUTFBytes(utf);
       fs.close();
   }
}

Next, was to compile the application in Ant as part of the CI process. Here is the target that calls mxmlc:

<target name="compile">
   <java jar="${flex.home}/lib/mxmlc.jar" fork="true" failonerror="true" maxmemory="256m">
       <jvmarg value="-Dapplication.home=${flex.home}"/>
       <jvmarg value="-Dsun.io.useCanonCaches=false"/>
       <arg line="-compiler.headless-server"/>
       <arg line="-library-path+='libs/flexunit.swc'"/>
       <arg line="-output='target/junitair.swf'"/>
       <arg line="+configname=air"/>
       <arg line="src/junitair.mxml"/>
   </java>
   <copy file="src/junitair-app.xml" todir="target"/>
</target>

The last task in the target copies the application configuration to the build directory. I have modified the configuration file with the following entry:

<content>junitair.swf</content>

Now to run the application - I admit that I cheated here a bit :-( where, rather than creating a "real" AIR application with it full signature and having to "allow" it to run everytime as it has been changed during the compilation, I use the adl executable as follows:

<target name="run">
   <exec executable="adl" failonerror="true">
       <arg value="target/junitair-app.xml"/>
       <arg value="--"/>
       <arg value="${basedir}"/>
   </exec>
</target>

I've created a project that contains a build.xml and the junitair.mxml application. Make sure to download the flex sdk. Create an environment variable FLEX_HOME that points to where you installed the sdk, and make sure that $FLEX_HOME/bin is in your path so that adl can be execute.

Glassfish on OSGi

Not to say that I predicted this at the last JavaONE - but JBoss is going to be based on OSGi and now so is Glassfish. Too cool - you will see more and more web servers will be based on OSGi and with Spring-DM to wire your POJOs - That is how you write enterprise software.

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M$ Joke

A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic navigation and communications equipment.

Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter's position. The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, and held up a handwritten sign that said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign said "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER."

The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the copilot asked the pilot how he had done it.

"I knew it had to be the Microsoft Building, because they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer."

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Code Coverage For Flex

Joe Berkovitz just release a flex code coverage tool - this is very cool - have to use it in my ant build before calling flexunit.

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