Aral Balkan

Up until recently, I had no trouble running Apache on my development machine. Then, one day, seemingly out-of-the-blue, Apache started complaining that it could not bind to port 80. This one almost drove me crazy until I found out Skype was grabbing the port and being very stingy with it. In case you have Skype running and Apache won't start, exit Skype, run Apache and then run Skype. (If Apache already has port 80, Skype doesn't complain.)

As part of reviving the What Is Flash Wiki, I restarted the scheduled automatic daily backups of the database from the web server to my local backup machine and thought it would be nice to share with you how I achieve this as it involves JScript for scripting Windows and JScript is a close cousin of ActionScript (they are both based on the latest ECMAScript specs.)

Update: If you're looking to do the same thing on OS X, Mike Chambers has a great post on Shell Scripting on OS X with ECMA / JavaScript

On a hugely dynamic site such as a Wiki or forum, it is very important to have constant backups of the database to protect against data loss. On a busy site with lots of updates, losing even a day of data is not good but it's worse if that becomes two or three days or a week! The way the What Is Flash server is set up, you can hit a certain URL (with proper authorization) to download backups of the site or of the various databases that it uses. What is needed is a script file that hits these URLs and does so on a daily basis, archiving the backups on the local machine. Enter the Scheduled Tasks scheduler and Windows Scripting.

If you're on Windows, there's very little you cannot automate using the Scheduled Tasks scheduler and Windows Scripting Host WSH).

Here are three of the best references I could find on them:

• WSH: MSDN Windows Script Host Reference
• JScript: JScript Language Reference
• More info on JScript objects (includes FileSystemObject, etc., which I couldn't find in MSDN's reference.)

To download the backups, I've written a script in JSCript that creates a directory with the current date as its name (in the form YYYY-MM-DD). It then goes and gets the latest backups for that day from the site and saves them locally in the newly-created directory. In order to access the site, I use Lynx, a powerful text-only browser famous in the Linux/Unix world. You cannot use IE for this since IE doesn't support the type of command line arguments that Lynx does. (You can also use CURL and a Cron job for this and it may more sense for you to do so if you're on a Unix-based system.)

The following script illustrates how it works (you need to have the Lynx.bat file -- see the Lynx installation instructions to know what I'm talking about -- in the current directory and substitute your own URL in the script here.

If you save the script as some_script.js, you can run it from the command line using wscript some_script.js. If you now add this to the Scheduled Tasks (Start->Programs->Accesories->System Tools->Scheduled Tasks and then double-click to launch the Add Scheduled Task Wizard) you can have it execute automatically at a specified time interval (eg. every day.)

Scripting Windows using JScript is a piece of cake if you know ActionScript and can give you complete control over your system. Coupled with the Windows Task Scheduler, you can automate things too.

There was a post on Flashcoders today by Craig Earls, wherein he states "I am having a very difficult time getting remoting to work in an AS 2.0 class."

Brian LeRoux responded that "it's because MM doesn't yet support ActionScript 2 for
Remoting. Only ActionScript 1 . . . You can download either Joey Lotts' [AS2] port of AS1 Remoting or Justin Watkins'. I've used both and both work just fine."

Additionally, there is a nice tutorial on flash-db on using Justin's Remoting Connector for Flash MX 2004 (the examples there use amfphp but are equally applicable to Flash Remoting and OpenAMF.)

Although, reportedly, the community AS2/connector solutions work well, we haven't had the time to test them out completely and are not currently using either of them at Bits And Pixels. Instead, we've devised a simple solution that allows us to use the "official" AS2-compatible Netservices classes from Macromedia as we await the official AS2 release. Our solution was to load the includes using a dynamic class, which, in its briefest form, looks like this:

dynamic class com.ariaware.arp.remoting.Includes
{
    public static function getInstance ()
    {
        #include "NetServices.as"
        #include "NetDebug.as"
    }
}

For the inquisitive of mind, Ariaware is the name of a service that we are going to be launching very soon and ARP stands for Ariaware RIA Platform, our internal RIA framework. Not shown here, the Includes class is actually implemented as a Singleton.

In order to use our includes, we simply call them from the onLoad method of our main Application form as thus:

class com.ariaware.sampleApp.view.Application extends mx.screens.Form
{
    function Application ()
    {
        // We don't do anything in the constructor that involves child
        // components or screens (forms) since none of these have initialized
        // yet. Instead we carry out all such actions in the onLoad() event
        // handler. 

        // Listen for the onLoad event
        addEventListener ("onLoad", this);

	// stop the timeline
	stop();
    }

    public function onLoad ()
    {
        // Do other stuff...

        // Load remoting
        com.ariaware.arp.remoting.Includes.getInstance();

        // More stuff...
    }
}

Ok, I lied, actually we load the AS1 Netservices classes by getting an instance of our GatewayConnection singleton, but I didn't want to complicate this example any further. This, in a nutshell, is a quick way to use the current official remoting classes with AS2 and forms.

It is puzzling why it is taking Macromedia so long to release the official AS2 version of Flash Remoting, given that the community has had enough time to release not one but two versions. Macromedia has announced the release, which leads me to believe that they will not be taking the alternative route, which would involve endorsing one of the current open solutions. I cannot help but think that not having an official and/or endorsed AS2/forms version of Flash Remoting is hurting the status of Flash Remoting as a supported Macromedia technology. That said, if the release is delayed further, we will probably end up going with Justin's solution in future projects and perhaps it will be up to the community itself to endorse and support this solution.