Reuse your Flex SDK with Sprouts 3

Posted June 5, 2009

Well, I just started taking a look at Sprouts to manage my Flex builds by I didn’t want to download the Flex SDK again!
As soon as I saw that Sprouts was trying to download the flex_sdk_3.zip file I just Ctrl-C and did the following:

  1. touch ~/.sprouts/cache/sprout-flex3sdk-tool-3.3.0/flex_sdk_3.zip
  2. ln -s /opt/Adobe Flex/flex_sdk_3 ~/.sprouts/cache/sprout-flex3sdk-tool-3.3.0/archive

This just fools Sprouts which is advised against in the google groups discussions but saves my some time :P

I did a similar process for the Flash Player 10 which I had downloaded but you could also use the one that came with the Flex SDK. Basically you need to :

  1. touch  ~/.sprouts/cache/0.7/sprout-flashplayer-tool-10.22.1/flash_player_10_linux_dev.tar.gz
  2. mkdir ~/.sprouts/cache/0.7/sprout-flashplayer-tool-10.22.1/archive
  3. ln -s <wherever>/flash_player_10_linux_dev ~/.sprouts/cache/0.7/sprout-flashplayer-tool-10.22.1/archive/flash_player_10_linux_dev

This is a simple hack but might be useful to some of you.

Apache proxy for crossdomain problems 25

Posted February 27, 2008

Well, the Flash player requires a crossdomain.xml file to reside on every server you call for remote services.

We needed to display RSS feeds for user’s blogs and we couldn’t enforce every single blog provider to have a crossdomain file. The solution was to use a local proxy to perform requests on our behalf.

Common solutions use a server side script to fetch the contents but I didn’t want to have yet another PHP, JAVA, Ruby, etc script laying around so I used Apache’s mod_rewrite with a very simple rule:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/my_rss_proxy/(.*) $1 [P]

Since we were already using Apache’s proxies to forward request to my HAProxy I just added this simple rule and now we can use:

http://my_server_url/my_rss_proxy/http://rss_url

Mobile Platforms thoughts for 2008 6

Posted January 4, 2008

Nowadays tech junkies have a real problem.. there are just too many cool gadgets to carry around.

The convergence has started and I personally believe that the cell phone will become the “do it all” device of the future. We already have cell phones with decent cameras, PIM software and GPS. Add to this a good storage solution and  you got everything you’ll need on a daily basis.

The problem so far has been the platform. You’ve got Windows Mobile which has been around for a while, still it seems sluggish and is missing the “cool” factor many of us geeks miss… Nokia has the Maemo platform for the N800 which is pretty cool but there is no GSM support. Nokia also has the Symbian OS which allows us to develop in C and Python but it is not compatible with most other manufacturers.  Java has been around for most mobile platforms and there are some pretty decent apps and games but you get the feeling that JAVA is not build right into the platform.. some phones even have a separate JAVA area for you to start your JAVA applications.

Apple has released the sexy iPhone and it is really appealling. Still, the SDK took long to come out and the platform remains too closed for any serious investment in it. Besides that, here in Europe we need 3,5G to have decent Internet access and the iPhone does not provide that.

Then, Google came up with Android. It’s impressive… Google can generate quite a hype around a mobile platform for which there is no hardware yet! This seems to be the way to go.. this way when it arrives at the market there should be lots of cool free software around the web for it, especially with money being offered to the best apps!

Nonetheless Apple’s iPhone still has the sex appeal that most phones only dream of having….

Adobe has been focusing on AIR, Thermo, etc.. they have come up with great technologies for Web and Desktop but delayed the Adobe Flash Lite. Personally I’m not very interested in a stripped down AS2 only Flash version… this could be because they’re hopping the hardware will evolve to support the whole Flash runtime… The actionscript engine uses the TamarinVM so it should be ported to most of mainstreammobile platforms soon.

Well, this post is becoming too long, I just though i’d write here my 2 cents. I’ll be keeping and eye on Google’s Android and the iPhone.. wouldn’t it be a beautiful mariage?