day off 9'th, BlazeDS, day off 11'th, networking 12'th

Day off 2009/12/09.

In the evening, ...

JSON decoding caught me out by turning a property "feeds.list" into a member "feeds.list" -- rather reasonable on the face of it.  Of course, this means one can only access via object["feeds.list"] (not object.feeds.list!)

LiveCycle/BlazeDS
Tutorial Invoking web services using custom components
N.b. Adding BlazeDS' Tomcat install to Eclipse doesn't start the Blaze samples -- guess something's not set.
Realization: useProxy on HTTPService (etc) can only ever go to the server that the app was served from.  (While it would make some sense to allow alternative routing, Adobe don't appear to allow this.)

Day off 2009/12/11.

FlexPMD Eclipse plugin YakAxe!
Cute port/reuse of [Java] PMD to Flex including an Eclipse (FlashBuilder) plugin.
Installation notes:

• Eclipse plugin uses a set of Jar files supplied from a zip that one downloads separately then points to from Preferences.
  
• Jars must be in a directory withoutspaces in the path.

First installation and it doesn't appear to work.  Watching videos for hints.  More in later post.

Saturday 2009/12/12
Flex network classes -- there appears to be something of a progression:

• URLLoader = mentioned since it's used by HTTPService (and possibly WebService)
  Loads a URL, allows HTTP header overriding: most control, least web-service like = lowest level
  
• HTTPService = REST
• WebService = SOAP
• RemoteObject = Call Java object methods in BlazeDS/LC*S via AMF
  
• DataService = Call... ? (includes offline capabilities)
  

Async FlexUnit 4 testing

So the JSONCallHelper() of the last post needs better testing.
I gave it the following signature...

public static function JSONCall(urlQuery:String, responder:IResponder):void

...but then went looking for how to test in FlexUnit 4.

Flex HTTP header customization problems again

So, again I hit Flex's HTTP networking constraint -- HTTPService rather than URLRequest this time.
HTTPService does not seem to allow modification of certain headers, amongst them the "Accept" header (it was "Cookie" last time for URLRequest).  Specific need: to call a RESTful webservice with "application/json" before "text/html" in the list (otherwise, I get back HTML!).

Eine kleine Yak musik

Another day, another blog.
In conversation with a friend, I realised I needed somewhere else to be silly, let off steam and comment upon inanities, yaks vs. axes and other ... well, stuff.
Let's see how we fare / fair :-)