Alternative to FlexBuilder

Trying to build flex applications? But can not pay for FlexBuilder. No worries. Open Source Community has already a solution for it but available in two pieces i.e MXML editor and AS3 plugin. We need to put them together to build a Flex application. Darran Schall has an old post that explains how to set up eclipse for working with MXML files. Though it is meant for flex's older version, the procedure remains same for newer versions too. I would just like to extend his post to make it work for Flex3 with MyEclipse.

Step 1. Get new xmls xsd file for Flex 3 version from xsd4mxml project.

Step 2. Start MyEclipse, from the menu, select Window -> Preferences. Select General -> Content Types. On the right, expand Text and highlight XML. Click the "Add" button and enter "*.mxml" as the file type. Click OK.

Step 3. Again from the menu, select Window -> Preferences. Expand "MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench" -> "Files and Editors" ->"XML". Click "User Specified Entries" and click "Add" and use the following values.

URI: browse for the path to the mxml.xsd file downloaded at Step 1.
Key: http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml

Step 4. Click "OK" to save the changes and close the window.

That is it. Set to create/modify mxml file with code assisting.

Now the second part. Download an eclipse plug-in from www.axdt.org that helps you to work with ActionScript 3.0. Though this plug-in does not have code assistance feature for AS3 but definitely good start to developing and compiling AS3 classes.

Happy building FLEX applications!!!

Cloud Computing

Check out this link for an excellent guide on what is Cloud Computing and where are the top cloud computing providers such as Google, SalesForce and Microsoft currently are and what they gonna offer in near future.

Introduction to RESTful Webservices

I have found an excellent presentation on REST webservices here that serves as beginning point to start learning REpresentational State Transfer(REST) WebServices.

Free PDF Creator software

Looking for PDF creator software? I have found the following free PDF creators very easy, useful and feature-rich. Why to buy expensive Adobe PDF creator when I have these software on hand for free :)

1. Primo PDF

Creates PDF files from 300+ file types. You can secure with passwords and add document information (title, author, etc.) during creation.

2. PDF Creator


PDF Creator allows you to easily create professional looking PDF files in seconds. It is very simple to use. Open any file or document you want to turn into a PDF file. Click File -> Print and select "PDFCreator" as your print and click Print. PDF Creator will take over and in seconds your new PDF file will be ready to save.

3. PDF reDirect

JBoss ESB 4.2 presentation

Cool presentation on JBoss ESB 4.2 product.

Managable SOA

Today I have stumbled on an article that describes why Service Oriented Architecture is still slow to be adopted in large organizations.

Problem connecting to Websphere MQ in binding mode

Today, I have run into a problem in sending a message to Websphere MQ. I just want to send a message from a stateless session bean running in JBoss 4.0.5 on Solaris box. Both my application server and Websphere MQ are running on the machine. So, I decided to connect to MQ in a binding mode. Simple task isn’t it?
I quickly wrote a simple MQ java client, modified the session bean to call the mq client , deployed the application, run a sample test and expected the message to show up in the MQ queue. But, instead I got an exception reported in the application server log. Below is the stack trace of the exception.

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no mqjbnd05 in java.library.path
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1517)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:788)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:834)
at com.ibm.mq.MQSESSION.loadLib(MQSESSION.java:872)
at com.ibm.mq.server.MQSESSION$1.run(MQSESSION.java:228)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at com.ibm.mq.server.MQSESSION.(MQSESSION.java:222)
at com.ibm.mq.MQSESSIONServer.getMQSESSION(MQSESSIONServer.java:70)
at com.ibm.mq.MQSESSION.getSession(MQSESSION.java:492)
at com.ibm.mq.MQManagedConnectionJ11.(MQManagedConnectionJ11.java:168)
at com.ibm.mq.MQBindingsManagedConnectionFactoryJ11._createManagedConnection(MQBindingsManagedConnectionFactoryJ11.java:179)
at com.ibm.mq.MQBindingsManagedConnectionFactoryJ11.createManagedConnection(MQBindingsManagedConnectionFactoryJ11.java:215)
at com.ibm.mq.StoredManagedConnection.(StoredManagedConnection.java:84)
at com.ibm.mq.MQSimpleConnectionManager.allocateConnection(MQSimpleConnectionManager.java:168)
at com.ibm.mq.MQQueueManagerFactory.obtainBaseMQQueueManager(MQQueueManagerFactory.java:772)
at com.ibm.mq.MQQueueManagerFactory.procure(MQQueueManagerFactory.java:697)
at com.ibm.mq.MQQueueManagerFactory.constructQueueManager(MQQueueManagerFactory.java:657)
at com.ibm.mq.MQQueueManagerFactory.createQueueManager(MQQueueManagerFactory.java:153)
at com.ibm.mq.MQQueueManager.(MQQueueManager.java:451)


Just by looking at error message, it is clear that the system can not find library file for mqjbind05 in java’s library path. A quick grep on the system showed that required mq java library file(libmqjbind05.so) is available at /opt/mqm/java/lib.
I thought adding the above directory path to my environment variable $PATH would solve the problem but it did not. Apparently, Solaris does not seem to pick this entry from $PATH variable add to java’s library path. That left me no option but to add the path as VM argument. I did it so by adding
‘-Djava.library.path=/opt/mqm/java/lib’ to my server’s VM arguments. And guess what? It worked!!