Question

I haven’t written anything in Flex in a couple years and much has changed since. I used Flash Builder 4.6 to build my app now I want to deploy it to a ASP.NET application. What files other than the swf do I need to deploy to ensure everything works for my users? I see in the bin-debug folder of the project it spits out a bunch of swfs (framework, rpx, playerProductInstall, spark, etc) and the swfobject.js. Do I need all these files deployed to the same location as my swf?

Answer 1

These extra files are what’s known as a run-time shared library (RSL for short). In your project properties in eclipse/Flashbuilder/Flexbuilder (right click go to properties) you can set in the flex build path to either merge the framework library into the code or to use RSLs. The advantage with RSL is that the framework code is stored in there and is cached, so if the user has already gone to a site that has the same versioned RSLs or if they’ve gone to your page before and your application code changes but the framework doesn’t then they just have to download your updated swf without the framework embedded. If you change the option the project properties to SDK merged into code then it’ll just compile the classes needed from the framework into your swf. In the latter case it’s just like how you’re used to probably where you end up with single swf. There’s a couple of extra js files it’ll create too, history.js helps it out with the BrowserManager for dealing with deep linking and using the browser back button ACOETags.js embeds the swf into the DOM with some browser specific settings, if javascript is disabled it’ll fall back on the HTML embed method. Basically in either case you are going to want to deploy everything in the bin/bin-debug (whatever your output is) to your web-server, but you have options to tweak what that output will be through the IDE.