Bumpy Rollout and Flex Licensing Issues
Today was a rough day. Yesterday evening we rolled out new hardware for this application. Should have gone smoothly, but there were a few little glitches. Even so, it was all running and looking OK when I left last night and I had a good (but tired) feeling that things were going to be just fine.
Looking back, I have to giggle at my silliness.
Part of the rollout was a Flex component that I was given and needed to build. At the time, I was given the tools by the original author, and it all seemed to work. You can see it coming, can't you? Anyway, when I built things for this release, a few of the graphs had watermarks saying "Hey, this isn't licensed".
There was nearly a panic.
Did it work with the watermark? If not, then it's a rollback - but we've done hours worth of work, it'll take hours to get it all back. Nightmare! So I kept with my plan - push forward not slide back.
What I needed was to get the Flex license codes so I could build this app without the watermarks. Simple, right? Ha! Silly me. I had to chase things around to first find out if the watermarked graphs worked (they did), and that took the gun away from my head. It was ugly, but not inoperable.
Next, I got the install package, but the problem was that there was no directions for getting it installed on Linux. The public domain Flex compiler was on linux (my build/deployment platform) so I knew it had to work there, but how?
I ended up finding a place on the Adobe web site about the different locations for different OSs for this license.properties file. I put it in two of the locations on linux (just to be sure) and tried it again.
Sweet! It worked. I could just deploy the compiled SWF file to the web servers and be done. I showed the users and things were fine. Whew! That was nasty for a while.
[10/15] UPDATE: I just saw the PO for Flex Pro, which is what I need, and it's $699! Amazing. I can't believe it's that expensive. Maybe there's a ton of widgets that I don't see, but that seems like a lot for a few widgets as the rest is Open Source and works just fine. Well... it's what the customer will pay.