Datasheet
Luchner c01.tex V3 - 03/20/2008 2:29pm Page 3
Chapter 1: The Development Environment
On Windows:
1. Open System from the Control Panel.
2. Click the Advanced tab from the menu.
3. Click on Environment Variables.
4. Within the System variables grid, navigate to and double-click on Path.
5. In the Variable Value field, if the last character is not a semicolon (;), enter a semicolon and
then the path to the
/bin
folder within your Flex SDK installation directory. For the pur-
poses of this example, that would be
;C:
\
flex_sdk_3
\
bin
.
On Mac OS X:
1. Open the Terminal and type > open -e .profile.
2. If you do not have a
PATH
variable set, add the following line:
export PATH:$PATH://Application/flex_sdk_2/bin/
If you do have a PATH variable set, add the path to the bin folder after first entering a
colon (:) to delimit the paths.
Now you are ready to access the command-line tools directly. These tools require Java to be installed
on your machine as well. You probably already have Java installed; if not, download the JRE from
http://java.sun.com
and install it in a directory of your choice. Try to obtain the latest stable release,
but note that all the code within this book — including the Apache Ant build scheme — has been tested
with Java 1.5 + . Remember where you install the JRE, or remind yourself where it is already installed,
as you may need that directory path when you are ready to debug your Hello World application.
Command-Line Tools Overview
Within the
/bin
folder of the Flex SDK installation directory are the command-line tools that you will
use for debugging, deploying, and packaging AIR applications. The .
exe
files with the Flex logo icon (a
black circle with the text
fx
) are the executable files included with the Flex SDK package. The .
bat
files
and
adl.exe
(with the AIR logo icon) are the executable files that come with the AIR SDK.
The
mxmlc
executable is the compiler responsible for generating Shockwave Flash (SWF) files out of
MXML and ActionScript code. Its AIR ‘‘sister’’ — the
amxmlc.bat
file — uses the
air-config.xml
file found in the
/frameworks
folder to configure the compiler for AIR. Running
mxmlc
itself uses the
flex-config.xml
file, also in the
/frameworks
folder. The
amxmlc
compiler is invoked for both deploy-
ing and debugging the SWF file to be packaged in your AIR application installer. AIR application installer
files are created by invoking the ADT batch file (
adt.bat
)foundinthe
/bin
folder of your installation
directory.
In this context, the term deploy refers to the creation of the SWF file that will be packaged with your AIR
application. By invoking the
amxmlc
compiler with your main .
mxmlc
file as an argument, a SWF file is
generated. The SWF file, however, is not launched during this operation, and using the
amxmlc
compiler
alone will not enable you to preview the Flash movie running within the AIR runtime environment.
Running the AIR Debug Launcher (ADL) will launch the SWF file generated by the
amxmlc
compiler.
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