Installing LAMP, Eclipse Europa, Flexbuilder 3, Weborb

Flex is a relatively new quasi open-source technology based on Adobe flash. It allows the developer to create a "website" in flash, trusting that the end user is one of the 94% of all users that has Flash 9 installed and avoiding all of the common hassles of browser incompatibility.

Aside from a standard LAMP server (MAMP and WAMP will work just as well), we'll get a few developer tools that will make life easy:

Eclipse is found @: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/eclipse/downloads/
Students get FlexBuilder 3 for Free @: http://www.flexregistration.com/
Weborb is available @: http://www.themidnightcoders.net/downloadcenter/

Assuming that we have an Ubuntu box we can

sudo apt-get install gallery2

and although you may not want gallery2, it's an easy way to install a LAMP server with the common apache, php, and mysql packages that we'll need.

Ubuntu 8.04 doesn't come with Eclipse Europa in the repo, but that's okay, you can untar it into your home directory and it works just fine. But first you need to get java (I recommend sun's version)

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre
sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

If you untar eclipse in your home directory you can open it for the first time with

~/eclipse/eclipse

Assuming that it's working, close it out and procede with the flexbuilder installation with is pretty self explanitory. Open eclipse again and if flexbuilder installed correctly you should see:

Help > About Adobe Flex Builder Linux...

However, the Linux version of flexbuilder doesn't have design view so it's pretty much useless and you'll probably want to design your interfaces on OS X instead.

Next we need to install WebORB. Download it and then untar into

/var/www/

Double check to make sure that you follow this http://www.themidnightcoders.com/weborb/php/gettingStarted.shtm

If it worked you should find a pretty page at

http://localhost/weborb