FlexAbility

I’ve always wondered why it occasionally happens that a bunch of old blog posts from one blog come through Adobe’s blog aggregator (MXNA). Now I know.

This happens when you realized that your posts haven’t been appearing, and ping the aggregator (see http://feeds.adobe.com/PingProxy.cfm) to let it know that you’ve published something new.

There may be other scenarios as well – if you know what they are, please leave a comment.

Anyway, the Boston Flex User Group and Boston Flex Application Incubator Group meeting announcements that appeared on MXNA on Saturday are for meetings that have already happened. My apologies for any confusion. I’ll have a new BFAIG announcement out shortly, for tomorrow’s meeting.

I called Toshiba today to get a recovery DVD for my laptop. No, my laptop’s not dead but I’ve noticed that I’ve lost the DVD and I want to be prepared. Here’s how it went:

• They’re going to charge me $40 for the DVD. A classic case of gouging, and somewhat irritating.
• They explained that this was for “duplication and shipping”. Obviously, it’s going to cost them $1 to duplicate and $5 to ship, max. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather be told, “Look, we’ve got you over the barrel and can charge you anything we want!” than to be handed fiction, and expected to accept it as reality. I decided to complain, and asked to speak to a supervisor.
• The supervisor repeated the mantra and, when pressed, actually claimed at one point that UPS was going to charge $35 for shipping.
• After a while he tired of listening to my expressions of incredulity, etc, informed me that my only remaining option was to talk to customer relations, and gave me a number to call.
• When I called the number I found that the menu had no option for customer relations.
• I called customer support back and was told that, despite appearances, the number was correct, and option 3 would get me customer relations.
• I tried again. Option 3 did not get me customer relations.
• I called customer support back again and was, finally, “hot transferred” to customer relations.
• The customer relations person listened, but didn’t seem highly concerned. Must be a tough job. I informed her that I’d be posting this blog post, and she said that she’d note it in my account record.
• It’s worth noting that while I’m purchasing a recovery DVD before I need it, most people going through a similar experience will be in a crisis. Sweet.

Toshiba – Are you listening? Is it possible that this isn’t good customer relations?

I got the error above and couldn’t find it with Google, so here’s the solution I found.

First of all, the error was attached to a line in my Flex AIR app’s style sheet – the second line below:

@font-face {
src: url(“skinning/fonts/Tahoma.swf”);
font-family: “Tahoma”;
font-weight: normal;
}

What I discovered was that the referenced file was corrupted. In my case I’d munged it by using an Ant ‘filter’ to replace some tokens in an entire directory structure of files. It appears that the font file actually had the string @myToken@ in it, which got replaced. A bit surprising, but not very.

Ah, yes. The Ant docs have this to say: “When a filterset is used in an operation, the files are processed in text mode and the filters applied line by line. This means that the copy operations will typically corrupt binary files. When applying filters you should ensure that the set of files being filtered are all text files.”

Of course, your reason for having a corrupted file may be entirely different.

BTW, the Ant filter also munged some .png files, resulting in an ‘invalid bitmap’ error when I tried to load them.

Douglas

If your PNG files aren’t displaying with their transparent areas transparent, take a look at this post by Doug McCune. While it’s title is Problem with Transparent PNGs in Flex using @Embed, it also solved my problem which didn’t involve @Embed.

Simply stated, I couldn’t get transparency when trying to display a PNG in an Image component. Once I applied Doug’s solution, the problem disappeared.

It’s not clear why most PNGs work fine in Image but a few don’t. Doug seems to think that it may have something to do with how the PNG is encoded. In any case, Doug’s fix seems to remove the problem. Perhaps Adobe should incorporate his fix into the standard Image component.

If you get an error like this when trying to do Java debugging in Eclipse…

“Unable to install breakpoint in [your.fully.qualified.Class]$$FastClassByCGLIB$$7fb6fc92 due to missing line number attributes.”

… there may be a simple solution.

Just ignore it. It isn’t true. At least that’s what Google tells me, and it’s working for me.

Update:

Don’t use the solution in this post. I’m leaving it up on the web so that people Googling the error messages below will find it, but my newer Setting RTMP ports for your FDS Flex apps post has much better information.

Thanks to Dman for his comment pointing me in the right direction!

…

I’m mainly archiving this in case others run into the same problem…

The Problem:

I was trying to get Marcel Bouchard’s Flex/FDS/Hibernate/MySQL example to work on Tomcat.

Instead of displaying data the WebApp would give me an error containing this string: “No destination ‘employee.hibernate’ exists in service flex.data.DataService”

When I checked Tomcat’s StndOut log it contained this error:

[Flex] RTMP-Server failed to start up: java.net.BindException: Address already in use: bind
Exception in thread “RTMP-Server” flex.messaging.endpoints.rtmp.RTMPException: The RTMP server has encountered a fatal exception starting up: Address already in use: bind
at flex.messaging.endpoints.rtmp.BaseNIORTMPServer.run(BaseNIORTMPServer.java:310)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

The Solution:

I Googled “BindException: Address already in use”

The info I found suggested that the problem might be that more than one of my WebApps might be using the same RTMP address. I don’t know about RTMP addresses but I tried the following and it worked.

• Stop Tomcat
• Move all WebApps (folders with a WEB-INF subfolders) out of the Tomcat webapps folder
• Also move all .war files out of that folder, as Tomcat will re-expand them into WebApps if it finds them when it starts up
• Restart your computer and Tomcat
• Try your WebApp again – in my case it worked

Now here’s the part I don’t understand. I then stopped Tomcat, restored all the WebApps and .wars, and restarted Tomcat. My WebApp still works. (!) Two comments:

• I have no idea of what happened and why my WebApp now works. I’m just delighted that it does.
• If anyone can explain this, please add a comment!

Thanks!

I’m blogging about this error message because I just spent hours resolving it by a tedious process of elimination and I hope to save someone else the trouble.

Googling “Failed to create new project.” “Element not found:” didn’t get any meaningful results. Hopefully it will bring up this post in the future.

I got this error after I reorganized the folder structure within C:\fds2\jrun4\servers\default\

In specific, I did the following:

1. I created a new folder: C:\fds2\jrun4\servers\default\brightworks_examples\

2. I copied a folder: C:\fds2\jrun4\servers\default\samples\foo\ into the new folder

3. I now had this folder: C:\fds2\jrun4\servers\default\brightworks_examples\foo\

4. I attempted to create a new Flex project in FlexBuilder with “Flex Data Services” and “Compile application on the server when the page is viewed” selected, using \brightworks_examples\ as my root folder and the new \foo\ as the projects contents folder.

Then I got the above error message. I’m not going to specify the [path] the error message provided because it did more to confuse matters than to resolve them.

Here’s the simple answer: Search within your projects contents folder for all files names “.project”. Then rename them. I’d tell you to delete them, but best to be cautious. FlexBuilder will create a new .project file once you’ve created the project.

Here’s a somewhat more detailed explanation:

.project is an XML file with settings for (surprise!) your project. In my case the problem lay in the contents of two projectDescription.linkedResources.link.location nodes. Once I replaced “samples” with “brightworks_examples” the problem disappeared.

But I’d still recommend that you simply rename all .project files and let FlexBuilder build a new one for you. I ran into another problem once I tried to Run my project, which went away once I a) deleted the project from FlexBuilder, b) deleted the .project file, and c) recreated the project…