Archive for March, 2009

Getting started writting Flex based AIR applications from the command line

Monday, March 9th, 2009

There are couple or gotchas installing the latest  Open Source Flex and AIR SDKs.  Here are instructions to get started

Download the AIR and Flex SDKS

Get Flex from : http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK

Get Air from http://www.adobe.com/products/air/tools/sdk/

I installed them into /usr/local/flex_sdk and /usr/local/air_sdk

Add their bin directories to your path, in .profile or .bash_profile e.g.

export PATH=/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH:~/bin:/usr/local/flex_sdk/bin:/usr/local/air_sdk/bin

Make the compliers executable

sudo chmod +x mxmlc

sudo chmod +x amxmlc

It turns out the lastest version of the compiles scripts are dos terminated lines so you need to do

dos2unix mxmlc

dos2unix amxmlc

You can get dos2unix from macports , sudo port install dos2unix

(bug here :http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-16699)

Next issue is the samples won’t compile, you will get an error “error while loading initial content”.

You need to update the namespace in your AIR project’s AppName-app.xml file to reflect the new AIR version 1.5:

<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.5">

(from http://blog.sunild.com/2008/12/error-while-loading-initial-content.html)