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DaisyWorks Desktop App

##License This software is made available under the GNU LGPL (v3.0). A copy of this license is provided in the root directory of this project as LICENSE.txt or you may view an online version at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

##Introduction

The DaisyWorks Desktop App is a GUI desktop application for managing / interacting with the Daisy Bluetooth 1T. The application is built using Adobe Air and Java. Air represents the bulk of the application and the user interface. Java is used because there is no way to talk to Bluetooth through the Air SDK.

Air communicates via Java through Object Remoting / AMF which is a binary over-the-wire protocol for remote services.

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/blazeds/BlazeDS

On the Java side, we instantiate our own embedded Jetty server and programatically configure the WAR.

http://jetty.codehaus.org/jetty/

We use Spring-Flex (with its BlazeDS support) to expose services from the War.

http://www.springsource.org/spring-flex

This architecture allows cross-platform support for Windows, Mac, and Linux, since both Air and Java can all run fine on these three platforms (today...)

To make the installation and user experience easier, we embed the JRE inside the installer for Windows and Linux. This avoids having the user download and install Java themselves, and avoids most runtime errors caused by not finding the Java executable, or having a corrupt Java installation. It also ensures we have fully tested with the JRE we ship.

For Mac OS, there is no re-distributable JRE. The OS (through 10.6.x) ships with Java. This may change in the future, and we'll have to re-evaluate but for now, we expect it to be there, and the application will find it and use it at runtime.

##Build Pre-requisites

Adobe Build tools allow you to create a native application installer for each platform, which is nice. What is not so nice is that you must actually build on that platform to get each respective installer file. Thus, to build a Windows setup.exe, you have to build on Windows, etc.

  • Sun/Oracle JDK - install and use the Sun/Oracle JDK; The Ant build scripts use the <os> tag and this supposedly requires tools.jar which is not present in OpenJDK.

  • Ant (using 1.7 or later) - I would just use all Maven, but the flex-mojos/maven support for the Air stuff (e.g. native installers) is poorly supported, as well as FlashBuilder project support. So, the top-level stuff is all Ant, and the Air application is Ant, while the Java server side is maven (just cuz' it is easier).

  • Maven (using 2.2.x or later)

  • Flex SDK - You have to download and install the latest Flex SDK, unzip it somewhere:

You can download the Flex SDK here:

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4.5

$ mkdir -p /home/me/flex-sdks/flex_sdk_4.5.0.20967/
$ unzip flex_sdk_4.5.0.20967.zip -d /home/me/flex-sdks/flex_sdk_4.5.0.20967

As of this writing, we are using 4.5.0.20967 Adobe Flex SDK -- not the Open Source Flex SDK.

  • Air 2.6 SDK - You must have 2.6 or later to be able to build.

You can download the Air 2.6 SDK here:

http://www.adobe.com/products/air/sdk/

For Linux, you can't go above 2.6 since Adobe stopped supporting it...bastards.

http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/2.6/AdobeAIRSDK.tbz2

Now, unzip it into the same directory as the Flex SDK

$ unzip AdobeAirSDK.zip -d /home/me/flex-sdks/flex_sdk_4.5.0.20967

!!! IMPORTANT !!! It must unzip / overlay directly on top of it -- it has a similar directory structure. If you get the path wrong, it won't work.

##How To Build

$ cp build.properties.sample build.properties
$ vi build.properties
$ ant

##TODO

The JRE that we include for Windows / Linux is the full enchilada. We should trim it back to the absolute bare binary essentials for runtime. It blows up the size of the installer mega-fold.

Also need to fix the Linux JRE bundle because the uid/gid get blown away and the main executable can no longer be launched. Also, if you try to run the .deb installer it has a whole bunch of warnings and says the package is of poor quality (mainly b/c of these uid/gid issues).

###BLUETOOTH

Bluetooth is a fickle animal with lots of different hardware and software stack implementations on different operating systems and architectures. This section provides some brief documentation on what we've tested the application on and what steps were necessary to make it work (if any)

The implementation relies on the open source Java Bluecove libraries. Here are some relative links.

####Windows 7 on AMD64 Should work out of the box

Tested with SMC BT10 USB/Bluetooth Adapter: http://www.smc.com/index.cfm?event=viewProduct&cid=5&scid=103&localeCode=EN_USA&pid=1370

####Ubuntu 11.04 on i5 x86_64 and AMD64 On 64-bit Ubuntu you will need to install the native libs for Bluetooth dev. I'm not sure if we could really bundle these. They should be installed by the user as an extra step, unfortunately to better ensure it will work. This command should do it:

sudo apt-get install libbluetooth-dev

Tested with Targus ACB10US1 USB/Bluetooth Adapter: http://www.targus.com/us/productdetail.aspx?sku=ACB10US1

####Mac OS X 10.6 i7 x86_64 Should work out of the box; tested with built-in bluetooth for Mac Book Pro

#####DEPRECATED

This was old advice related to Linux builds. If you download the Flex SDK and the latest Air SDK and unzip them as per the instructions below, this shouldn't be necessary..so ignore it. It is here for historical purposes.

!!! IMPORTANT !!! If you are going to build on Linux, it can be a little trickier. I went through a lot of headache to get this to work properly. I posted to the Adobe Forums here:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3354091#3354091

Just downloading the Flex 4 SDK and running ant doesn't work. I would get an error. So, do this stuff instead:

Download this Flex 4 SDK =>

http://fpdownload.adobe.com/pub/flex/sdk/builds/flex4/flex_sdk_4.1.0.16076.zip

Unzip it somewhere, e.g. /home//flex-sdk/flex_sdk_4.1.0.16076

Download this Air 2 SDK =>

http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/latest/AdobeAIRSDK.tbz2

Unzip it on top of the same directory, e.g. /home//flex-sdk/flex_sdk_4.1.0.16076

Now, when you build in Linux, the Ant build script should work. It does for me on Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop AMD64, with 64-bit Sun JDK.