Christophe Herreman

Yesterday at the MMUG in Mechelen (Belgium), I asked Waldo Smeets if there was more information on Zorn available. The answer was that the only information was that on the Macromedia website. A lot of people at the meeting also didn’t really know what it was about. So I decided to look up the available info and collect it in this post.

What is Zorn?

Zorn is the code name for a next-generation rich Internet application development tool currently being built by Macromedia. Zorn will leverage the Macromedia Flex framework and build on the success of the Macromedia Flex Server. Macromedia plans to develop Zorn using the Eclipse tools platform. In association with this project, Macromedia recently announced that it has joined the Eclipse Foundation, which manages the Eclipse project.

Macromedia
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flex/productinfo/faq/
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/2005/eclipse_flashplatform.html
http://www.macromedia.com/platform/whitepapers/platform_overview.pdf
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/2005/announcing_flex2.html
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flex/flexbuilder/
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex2_intro.html

Mike Chambers
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/archives/2005/08/will_zorn_requi.cfm
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/archives/2005/08/what_features_w.cfm

MossyBlog
http://www.mossyblog.com/archives/536.cfm

CBR Online
http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=A8043F1C-CF76-411B-917C-35DD0E01B0B2

This post will guide you through the steps that are needed to setup your computer as a webserver in order to run PHP. After all, without running PHP, you won’t be able to use AMFPHP since it is the language it is written in.

The tools needed are:
- an operating system (Windows in my case)
- a webserver (IIS or Apache for instance)
- PHP (duh!)
- a database system (MySql, probably the most used with PHP)

The setup I use is also called a WAMP setup. WAMP stands for Windows, Apache, MySql and PHP. Note that a LAMP setup (Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP) is probably more used, but WAMP just better suits my needs.

You can start downloading all of the above mentioned tools and then spend a couple of hours (if this is your first time) installing and configuring them untill it drives you nuts and it still doesn’t work. Or, you can download WampServer and let the dirty work be done for you. Get WAMPServer here.

The installation

I tried to make as much screenshots as possible that show all the different steps, so this installation should be peanuts for you.

1. Wamp installation welcome screen (screenshot)
2. License agreement (screenshot)
3. Where should WAMP be installed? I left this at the default location. (screenshot)
4. Start menu folder. (screenshot)
5. Start WAMP on startup? Whatever you like best. I checked it because I needed to work with it for the coming 2 weeks and just to make sure everything was running. (screenshot)
6. Settings overview before installation. (screenshot)
7. Select your webroot folder (screenshot). This is the default but I prefer not to have any workfiles on the same drive as my Operating System in case I needed to format. Therefor I change the location to my D-drive. (screenshot)
8. Warning because I changed the webroot folder. You might not get this screen when you stick to the default location. (screenshot)
9. Select you default browser. Click OK to use Internet Explorer (screenshot), or browse to the FireFox executable. (screenshot)
10. Setup done. Let’s launch WAMPServer. (screenshot)

After the installation

11. If everything went alright, you should see a new icon in your systemtray. This indicates that WAMP is or is not running and provides some menu options. (screenshot)
12. Test it. Click the tray menu and choose the “localhost” option or open up your browser and point it to http://locahost. You should see a file overview of the files in your webroot. This folder may be blank if you chose another folder than the default webroot folder. (screenshot) If you did choose the default webroot folder you should see the WAMP startscreen. (screenshot)
13. In case you didn’t see the WAMP startscreen, copy the files in the default webroot location to the folder you chose as a webroot. (screenshot)
14. Click the PHPMyAdmin link under Tools on the WAMP startscreen to check if MySql is running. (screenshot) PHPMyAdmin is a webinterface to control your MySql databases.

Where’s my IIS startscreen on http://localhost?

IIS users (who run ASP for instance) probably noticed that http://localhost normally pointed to the startscreen of IIS. So how can I access my ASP and PHP webapplications on localhost? Simple, you can’t. At least not when you are running WAMP without having modified the configuration.

15. Shut down WAMPServer. (screenshot)
16. Point your browser to http://localhost. You should see the IIS startscreen, at least when you are running IIS on your computer. (screenshot)

OK, so do I have to shutdown WAMPServer if I want to work on an ASP application and start it again to work on a PHP application? The answer is no! Fortunately there is a way to run both webservers at the same time. All you need to do is change the port number the webserver is running on.

Port number?

When you type in http://localhost in your browser, it is interpreted as http://localhost:80 by the browser because port 80 is the default http port. A port is just an indication to the computer to start a specific process. By default, on my system, it runs IIS. We will leave port 80 as it is and change WAMP to run on port 81.

17. Click the WAMP systemtray icon and choose “httpd.conf” under “Config files”.
18. Do a search for “port 80″ in the config file. (screenshot)
19. Change it to “port 81″. (screenshot)
20. Restart WAMPServer. (screenshot)
21. Click the “Localhost” option in the WAMP systemtray menu.
22. FireFox opens but you get a security warning. It is trying to open the IIS startscreen. (screenshot) Internet Explorer will show the startscreen without the warning as shown before. The point of this step is to notice that the port 81 we specified in the config isn’t shown in the browser’s url bar. We need to change the links on the menu options in the WAMPServer systemtray menu.
23. Open the “wampserver.ini” file in the WAMP installation directory. (screenshot)
24. Scroll down to the “Menu.left” settings. (screenshot)
25. Notice that the parameters show http://localhost and not http://localhost:81.
26. Change the settings to point to port 81. (screenshot) You need to do this 3 times. Once for the “localhost” menuitem, once for the “phpMyAdmin” menuitem and once for the “SQLiteManager” menuitem.
27. Exit WAMPServer. (screenshot) Make sure you completely shut down the tool!
28. Start WAMPServer. (screenshot)
29. Click the “localhost” option in the WAMPServer systemtray menu. It should point to http://localhost:81. (screenshot)
30. Open another browser window (Internet Explorer) and point it to http://localhost or http://localhost:80. The IIS startscreen should open. (screenshot)

Now both the IIS and the Apache webserver are running simultaneously. Once this is done, you can start installing and configuring AMFPHP.

I’ve been scratching my head over the last couple of days about why my project compiled so damn slow with Mtasc. It used to compile in about 2 seconds, compared to 20 seconds in the Flash IDE. But now, since the beginning of this week it compiles in over 30 seconds! The weird thing was that I had the same problem before but it got solved without me knowing what caused the problem.

I first thought that it had something to do my Eclipse setup, more specific Flashout. So instead of compiling in Flashout, I tried with an ANT task that simply called the mtasc executable and passed in some parameters. It still compiled in about 30 seconds.

Next I opened a command line and compiled manually, which is pretty much the same as the ANT task, but nothing. It compiled in 30+ seconds.

Maybe it has something to do with some of the classes causing conflicts. So I compile with the -v flag to get more output, which resulted in a 40+ seconds compile time. I even tried adding the -v flag in the “additionals” field in Flashout, but that didn’t compile at all. The task manager told me that mtasc.exe was staying at 1080 kb memory and the only way to stop compiling was to kill the process.

Boss to the rescue

After trying all of this, one of my bosses (Peter Portnoy, yeah Dream Theater rocks!) comes sitting at my desk. I explain the problem and he asks me if I have an AntiVirus program running. “I do, Norton Antivirus!”. Let me disable the realtime protection and try compiling again…

Bingo & sweet potatoe pie!
The project compiles in 2 seconds.

Seems like bosses still do know things. Now if I only was my own boss

I just upgraded to Eclipse 3.1 (RC2) and installed Flashout 0.2.0.7 but was unable to set the preferences for Flashout. The following error occurred when I clicked the Flashout option in the Preferences window:

Unable to create the selected preference page.
Reason: Plugin com.potapenko.flashout was unable to load class com.potapenko.flashout.preferences.PreferencesRoot

After checking the log files from Eclipse (workspace->.metadata->.log) I found out that the following seemed to be the root error:

java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: com/potapenko/flashout/FlashoutPlugin (Unsupported major.minor version 49.0)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass0(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)

The result of a Google search pointed out that I might be using the wrong java version and indeed, that was it. Make sure you’re using Java 1.5.

To know what Java version you’re using, open a command prompt and type:

java -version

You can also try one of the other options listed on this page.
You can get the latest version here.

Have fun!

With the departure of one of our ASP.NET co-workers, I decided to start learning ASP.NET and the whole Visual Studio .NET story. So I installed VS.NET, SQL Server and all that was needed and was about to create my first C# ASP.NET application when…

Visual Studio .NET has detected that the specified Web server is not running ASP.NET version 1.1. You will be unable to run ASP.NET Web applications or services

… I just installed all the software, updated the .NET framework and then this? I was about to uninstall the whole thing and head over to Eclipse for some FAME pleasure ;-), but then decided to “google” for a solution and was more than happy to find one fast. So here it is.

- Open Visual Studio Command prompt., via Start-> Programs -> VS.NET 2003 -> Tools -> Command Prompt
- Type “aspnet_regiis -i“ and press enter.

The output should be:

c:\>aspnet_regiis -i
Start installing ASP.NET (1.1.4322.0).
Finished installing ASP.NET (1.1.4322.0).

And now back to Visual Studio for some C#’n.
Also, if anyone has some interesting links to ASP.NET resources, feel free to leave them in the comments.