The Danosphere.

Ran across an interesting problem last night that had me almost tearing my hair out, so I though I’d share to save others the pain. I have a fully licensed version of both Flex 3 Professional and Flash Builder 4 Professional on my machine. When compiling an old Flex 3 project which uses the “Data Visualization” components it suddenly had this ugly watermark on it!

For those of you who don’t know, this is the watermark shown when you are using beta or trial versions of the IDE with the DV components. Anyway, I had to get rid of this stupid watermark so I decided to do some googling. I applied the fixes outlined in this article to flex-config.xml and license.properties but the watermark was still showing! It was driving me crazy, literally. You know what the problem was? Flash Builder 4. Take a look at the license.properties file (located in C:\ProgramData\Adobe\Flex on Win7 machines) and you will see that it contains license information for both Flex Builder 3 and for Flash Builder 4. In order to remove the watermark when compiling the DV components through Flex 3 on a machine with Flash Builder 4 also installed, you must edit the license.properties file and remove all references to Flash Builder 4.

After you have corrected the file, compile the app that uses the DV components [in Flex3] and voila! No watermark. Keep in mind that every time you launch Flash Builder 4 it will re-insert its license information into the license.properties file, thereby restoring the watermark in your future Flex 3 compilations unless you edit the license.properties file again. Hope this helps some people!

I have been doing some pretty cool “node” based UI stuff at work using FLEX. I wanted to try and push the idea further, but the code I wrote at work is proprietary. Thus, I’ve decided to start from scratch! Since I’m starting from scratch I decided to do it up in Flash, here is the base for it, I’ll post updates as it advances.

Use: Click to create a node. Click and drag nodes to move them around.

A while ago I made a post about FileReference in AS2. For a recent project I needed to create a simple uploader class which uploads files to a given server from flash, so once again I was face to face with FileReference, but this time in AS3. The syntax is almost identical, with a few small nuances. Ill let you download the source** to get the full details.

This example has some a few small frills, my favorite of which is the constructor takes a directory name where you would like the file to be uploaded (relative to the upload script), this allows me to reuse this class for many different uploads, to different directories.

** Note: For this to work you need to put “upload.php” on your server and point the variable ‘phpUploadScript’ in FileUploader.as on line 20 to upload.php.

Life has been a little crazy balancing taking so many credit hours [20], wrapping up my final quarter at RIT, my day job, TCBN, and keeping my blog up to date but its almost 1am and I finally have time to post!

I found these pretty cool “load test” flash movies [a while ago] that serve as an awesome example of how much more efficient actionscript 3 is over actionscript 2. I am currently a huge AS2 junkie, but with my recent coursework in Flex and current project in AS3 based flash, I am getting more and more fond of it. There are some differences from AS2, don’t expect a point and click transition from one version of actionscript to the other. If you are familiar with object-oriented design in AS2 the move is nearly painless (off the top of my head: Document class, event handlers, and * var type [yes, *]).

Flash is here to stay, and it’s good to see that the language that powers it is maturing as well.

* Only run one load test at a time for accurate results

Embedding flash into a webpage is not always so straightforward. With activeX blocking now a standard feature in Microsoft Internet Explorer it is becoming trickier and trickier to properly embed flash content and have it display properly. Adobe released a technote addressing these new issues, and in this note they provided methods of getting around the new IE ActiveX blocking, but well… lets just say their solution was cumbersome to say the least.

Luckily, Bobby van der Sluis of Refunk has release “Unobtrusive Flash Objects” or UFO for short. What UFO does is it allows developers to easily embed IE-compliant activeX in their web pages. In addition to its easy to use nature it is also completely open-source js files, allowing the developer to easily customize it to suite their needs. As if that wasnt enough, the UFO can be configured to auto-magivally update the client flash player if it is out of date!

UFO is a great asset for any flash developer. For full details and download check out: Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO)

Things at work have been ramping up as we prepare for our enterprise-level release of software which utilizes many technologies…. FMS2, Jboss, Mysql, PHP, Flash, and Java. Everything has been going rather smoothly, until we began testing our security settings!

Data is secured using FMS2’s native SSL support. While this works great on the PC side of things, Macs are a different issue altogether. In testing we found that attempting to connect to a media server which uses SSL through the RTMPS protocol from a Mac computer results in a full scale server crash. The edge server loses connection to the core, tries to restart it, fails, and basically whats left is a dead media server… not good! Whats even stranger is that connecting to the same application via RTMP protocol connects with no issues!

Of course, I have made Adobe aware of this issue as well but they have yet to release a fix (no surprise there). Int he meantime there are a few solutions I have come up with:

Solutions to the MAC/FMS2 native SSL bug

• Tell all your users to go buy a PC
• Use JS detection to detect mac users and have them use RTMP to connect (unsecured, but at least they can connect and it doesn’t crash the server)
• Use a 3rd party SSL server such as STunnel to handle the SSL end of things (untested) this would theoretically avoid whatever is wrong the FMS/SSL+Mac and still enable mac users to utilize the secured connection

The important thing to remember here is that ANY connection attempt from a mac on RTMPS will bring down the server when using the native FMS SSL, and disconnect all clients! This means if some non user on a mac stumbled upon your login page and attempted a login the server would come crashing down and all your paying users would get disconnected!