Waldo Smeets .com on Rich Internet Applications

So by now we all know that Flex is a java application that runs on a J2EE server (and yes, dotNet is being worked on indeed, see the Flex roadmap).

The configuration of a Flex application instance is defined in flex-config.xml and it allows you to turn on f.e. debugging features and to define security settings of your server (why is there no RIA to administrate Flex?). There’s one little ‘problem’; you have to redeploy Flex to make the flex-config.xml changes active.

Below is a trick that I learned from Lin Lin, a JRun engineer, that will save you some time; when running Flex on JRun you can tell JRun to automatically redeploy Flex when you change the configuration file.

Q: How can I automatically redeploy the Flex application when I change flex-config.xml?

A: If you are using Jrun as app server, then add the following into the jrun.xml under
<service class=”jrun.deployment.DeployerService” name=”DeployerService”>

<service name=”Flex Web Application Factory” class=”jrun.servlet.WebApplicationFactory” >
      <attribute name=”mandatoryFingerPrint”>WEB-INF/flex/flex-config.xml</attribute>
    </service>

Then restart jrun. Now the flex-config.xml is a watched file, when you modify flex-config.xml, Jrun will redeploy the app for you, so you don’t have to restart the server each time you modify the flex-config.xml file.