I’ve been in Newton, MA (just outside Boston) all this week taking a couple of Flex 2 classes at the Adobe offices here. Starting tomorrow (Thursday) we’re beginning the 2-day class called Flex 2: Data and Communications. One of the prerequisites for the class is to have Flex Data Services (now called LiveCycle Data Services ES) installed and running. I am definitely not very knowledgable on J2EE things in general and JRun configs specifically, but a couple of blog posts helped get on the right track.
Andy Powell has a blog entry titled “Installing Flex Data Services on OS X” that accomplishes this by putting two WAR files into the /JRun4/servers/cfusion directory so they are auto-deployed when you start your ColdFusion server.
This approach was working except I was having some pathing issues to the images that are referenced in the student files provided by the instructor. After doing some reading, I decided to attempt to deploy LCDS into a separate server in JRun. I stumbled upon a blog post by Joe Rinehart detailing the steps he took to get FDS installed on his Macbook Pro. I followed the steps in his post (with the exception of step 10 as I didn’t have the samples WAR file he mentioned) and things worked like a champ.
At this point, I had a working Flex application at an address like http://localhost:8301/flex/someFolder/someApp.mxml — but something about having that extra /flex/ part of the path didn’t sit right with me. In order to change the context root that LCDS was running under, I had to delete the default-war folder in /JRun4/servers/flex/. That allowed me to change the context root for LCDS from “/flex” to “/”.
I revised my URL to be http://localhost:8301/someFolder/someApp.mxml and was rewarded with the same app as before (but with less typing). Now I just have to figure out how to configure Apache to talk to the JRun proxy port so I can drop the 8301 port alltogether. Something to look foward to tomorrow I guess…