The Space For App Developers

I’m proud to announce Flerry 1.2.0, which brings following new features and changes:

• Java discovery process has been completely rewritten. Now it looks into default location on given operating system:
  • Windows – c:\Windows\System32\javaw.exe (starting from version 6 this is the default Java location)
  • Mac – /usr/bin/java if that doesn’t exist it checks /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/Current/Commands/java
  • Linux – /usr/bin/java if that doesn’t exist it checks /etc/alternatives/java
  • In case any of these default locations fail it tries fallback mechanism, on Windows it is a native code compiled into FindJava.exe utility. This utility checks the registry on users machine and returns path to the location where java is installed. This was contributed by my colleague Serge Jespers; he used it for his Package Assistant Pro application. In case of Mac and Linux it uses native „/usr/bin/whereis java“ command to discover where Java is installed.
• The default location where to place jar files has been renamed to libs as it no longer contains only jar files. Now it also contains FindJava.exe utility. It can be customized by setting libsDirectory property on NativeObject class.
• Adding all jars under libsDirectory folder into the classpath automatically. Specifying it explicitly is no longer required.
• Compiled java code can be placed under classes folder. It is not required to package it into a jar anymore. This makes debugging and testing the application much easier.
• Out-of-the-box support for java code debugging. Flerry Getting Started (part 2) video tutorial covers how this can be used.
• Improved communication from AIR to Java, now it can support large objects transfer. This is due to object splitting into 256 bytes chunks.
• Added basic set of FlexUnit tests.
• Added Ant build script.
• Updated AMF serialization jars from BlazeDS 4.0.
• Removed reference between flerry and flerry-demo projects. Now flerry-demo is a standalone project referenced by flerry.swc.

This time kudos go to Jhonny Everson, Serge Jespers and Erko Bridee for their contributions and support.

Watch getting started video tutorials to get up to speed with Flerry.

Today I also started working on the 1.2 release, which will improve java path discovery on the Windows platform. I’m planning to reuse code written by my colleague Serge Jespers for Package Assistant Pro. It is simple native C code that checks the Windows registry to find where Java is installed.