New tutorial created around building Flex application in Visual Studio utilziing Ensemble Tofino

Matt Wicks has created a tutorial content around building a flex application using Ensemble Tofino posted at DeveloperFusion. Take a look here and help get started on Flex in Visual Studio. Anyone running into issues around Ensemble Tofino, questions around consulting, feel free to contact tofinosupport@ensemble.com

David in rainy Vancouver.

Ensemble Tofino for Visual Studio - Enabling Flex for .NET

New release of Ensemble Tofino is now available at our company's website here. The latest release includes features such as:
- intellisense code completion for Action Script and MXML sources
- debugging flex applications
- object browser now has type references as active hyperlinks
- "show all files" for flex projects in the solution explorer
- comes in 2 variants, one with rebundled Flex SDK, and one without
- Options page added. Access the options page via Tools > Options > Projects > Flex Projects
- "Go to definition" in Flex sources and object browser
- and many more

For complete change log, please go here.

For support questions, please send them to tofinosupport@ensemble.com.

Tofino is available for free.

Happy coding and merry Christmas/Happy holidays!

Dave in snowy vancouver.

Just posted a session for MAX2008

Being the procrastinator that I am, I finally got around to posting a session for MAX 2008. The sesion will be about how to built a collaborative review solution using Adobe AIR and LiveCycle. The solution has 3 components: AIR client, LiveCycle backend services, and a repository for storing content and comments. During the session, I will talk about high level architecture, implementation details, and showcase bunch of demos. (starting from a multitude of assets, leveraging Adobe's shared review capabilities, and use LiveCycle as the orchestration engine.)

For others who wants to present, go to https://adobemax.dabbledb.com/page/callforsessions/NLXYueHm and suggest a session before the deadline tonight.

See you all in San Fran.

David

Enable SSL for LiveCycle Rights Management for cheap

LiveCycle Rights Management ES which protects PDF documents with revokable policies, requires an SSL certificate to ensure communication between PDF and the server is secured. In the past, we typically use a self signed certificates for development purposes, until the project is ready for production. Unfortunately, most trusted CA signed SSL certificates tends to be quite expensive.

I didn't know about this until recently, but inexpensive SSL certificates ($30 USD / year) can be used. P.s. I am not affiliated with GoDaddy. If you find other cheap and trusted CA, feel free to post in the comments.

I was a bit skeptical about whether the root certificate is trusted in the browser and in various OS's. Of the machines i tried, it seems to work fine. So below is a brief end to end instructions on how to enable your Rights Management ES instance (jboss) using a trusted CA signed certificate.

Step 1: Generate java keystore


Step 2: Generate certificate request


Step 3: purchase a Standard SSL certificate
Follow instructions provided by the CA, and paste certificate signing request when requested.

Step 4: importing the various certificates into your java keystore
After successfully purchasing a certificate, you will be sent a set of certificates. A root, a chain, an intermediate, and your site certificate. Follow the instructions below to import the certificates into your keystore.


Step 5: update server.xml

First copy the .keystore into a known location. I used JBOSS_HOME\server\all\conf. Then update the server.xml located at JBOSS_HOME\server\all\deploy\jbossweb-tomcat55.sar as below.

New COLLADA flex sample based on Away3D

Finally got around to posting a COLLADA viewer that we built based on modified version of Away 3D. The component was put together to support viewing 3D models based on the COLLADA standard within a Flex application.

Changes include:

• - Implement a flex component for the AWAY3d rendering engine.
• - Hover/Zoom navigation support using custom targeted hover camera (hold down shift OR ctrl on top of the model viewer).
• - Added simple material and lighting support to the COLLADA parser.
  
• - Added materials preloading support.

The reason behind building this component is that we wanted to support viewing and interacting with a 3D model for a flex application. We also wanted to ensure that existing 3d models can be reused. Some of our envisioned usage scenarios below:

• - interacting with a Air Plane or Car Model for a technician to document repairs and issues done (visual maintenance record).
  
• - review architecture and design decisions for a building amongst architects, and developers.
• - etc...
  

The viewing part was handled, but interacting will require a bit more work. The source code and samples have been posted. Feel free to upgrade / migrate to the latest AWAY 3D and/or merge the changes into Papervision 3d (PV3D).

To view a demo of the viewer in action here. The samples page on our website here, including a download for project source.

Cheers,

David

Be a rebel...

I needed to validate LiveCycle ES 8.0.1 against Windows 2003 R2 - 64 bit and SQL 2000 Server. According to the install documentation (pg13) , this is a big no no.:

Intel x86 compatibilityOn supported Windows and Linux environments, LiveCycle ES supports Intel EDT64 and AMD64 compatible chipsets, but the operating system must be 32 bit.

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition or Standard Edition SP1 and R2 (32-bit edition only)

Good news!

The installation and configuration went basically flawlessly. The only thing I ran into problem with was the JDBC Driver.

I started the installation process using: SQL Server 2000 Driver for JDBC Service Pack 3 . Unfortunately I ran into some SQL issues during start up of my jboss app server. Specifically I got the "Can't start manual transaction mode because there are cloned connections". After a bit of googling, this turns out to be a problem with Microsoft Type 4 JDBC Driver and concurrent statements, transactions, or result sets on the same database connection. The resolution was to pass in "SelectMethod=cursor" in my connection string. I didn't like this very much, since SelectMethod=cursor potentially has performance impact.

After further researching, it turns out that the SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver 1.2 supports SQL Server 2000 as well as 2005. Using this driver my connection issue went away, and I was unable to successfully complete the rest of my configuration steps for LCES.

The specifics of my environment below. Hopefully this may potentially help some of you.

Hardware: AMD X2 5600+ , 8GB of RAM
OS: Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition R2, 64 Bit
Java: JDK 1.5.0_13-windows-amd64
Database (on a remote machine): SQL 2000 Server SP4 on a Windows 2003 Enterprise (32bit)

Notes:
- Use the latest JDBC Drivers from Microsoft. Version 1.2 of the JDBC Driver was released recently, and my preliminary tests (Reader Extensions, create sample policies) worked without any issues.
- Set database to authenticate against mix mode (SQL Server and Windows authentication)
- Watch out for driver-class in adobe-ds.xml and mssql-ds.xml. I double checked by extracting the jar file to see what the path is.

Happy installation :-)

rise from the ashes ;)

Been a while since I've posted... some updates over the course of next few days:

1. Currently experimenting with installing LiveCycle ES 8.0.1 on an 64 bit OS. Officially it's unsupported. I am keeping my fingers crossed that A) Java's abstracted well enough from the OS layer that this is a non-issue. B) LiveCycle 8 is purely Java, failing that C) Windows 2003's 32 bit emulation mechanism is good enough.

I should have an answer tomorrow.. Keep reading :)

2. Some folks in our office spent quite a few weeks trying out install and configuration documentation for Clustering on LiveCycle ES. Version 8 is so much easier to install and configure in a cluster than previous releases. There are a few caveats to watch out for in *unix based environments. Specifically this has to do with the GlobalStorageDirectory properties during the installation step. I will share some of the problems we ran into, and our workarounds in a follow up post. For those who needs specific help, send me an email at davidl AT ensemble dot com.