Flex 3 with WebORB - The first steps

Posted: May 2008, Matt | In: Development | Leave a comment

I've recently taken up the Flex 3 challenge, but I've encountered a few problems whilst setting up WebORB.NET in my development environment.

Distributed development environment

The support documentation assumes that Flex Builder and .NET are on the same machine and platform. My setup is different, I have .NET on a development server, and Flex builder on a Mac workstation.

I prefer my development environments to be scaled down replicas of the eventual live environment, this helps to avoid nasty surprises towards the end of a project. I want my Flex applications to be developed on a host that is remote from the WebORB gateway.

Rather than getting stuck, I decided to email Mark Piller of the Midnight Coders who promptly provided me with following advice.

Developing with WebORB.NET hosted remotely

To install WebORB on a development server, but develop your Flex application on a different computer, without resorting to directory sharing, try this:

1. Install WebORB on to the Windows host
2. Create a standard Flex 3 project on the mac
3. Copy the configuration files [WEB-INF/flex] from [/Inetpub/wwwroot/weborb30] into the [src] folder of the new Flex 3 project on the Mac.
4. You should now have [/src/WEB-INF/flex] inside your Flex 3 project.
5. Open /src/WEB-INF/flex/services-config.xml (now on the Mac) and modify the "my-amf" channel definition. You will see the "endpoint" element, you need to set the URI attribute to an absolute path pointing to your Windows box. By default it will have just "weborb.aspx", so you should change it to http://windows-box-name:80/weborb30/weborb.aspx
6. In your Flex Builder project, you need to add a compiler argument -services with a full path for your modified services-config.xml file

Hope this works out for you.