Deploying my flex application - java

I am doing some trial testing awith Amazon ec2 boxes, deploying flex apps running on top of restlet powered webservices. I have this problem - Everytime i deploy the app to the cloud, I'm having to hardcode the IP address of the server into the ActionScript/MXML files (http://72.93.48.39:8080/xxx/abc/) and for certain reasons, i am forced to choose a different IP everytime. and i think its really not the right way to deploy the application.
I would like to know what other people do in such scenarios?
On thinking about it, i thought i could make it pickup values from the HTMLVars of the HTML wrapper. but that again has to be edited everytime again and again.
will it be possible to be able to supply these values : server's ip address, server's port number(in case its not 8080 on some machine) at build time? if so can anyone give me a barbones sample build.xml just as an example?

After much research I (think) have finally found a way to do this. the solution is ant's build.xml file based
the solution is to use EnvGen ant Task to generate a "config.xml" file of sorts. The EnvGen task works on the FreeMarker model - so it takes data and a template to generate files. Data is to be supplied via a CSV file. Template is to be specified using the Freemarker Template .ftl file. Depending on the template EnvGen generates XML files too. the link to EnvGen Task is here - http://www.basilv.com/psd/software-files/EnvGen/index.html#InstallEnvGen
And finally, we program the Flex app to pick up the server end point values from the config.xml file.
Hope this helps someone who is looking for this answer

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I want to use flash file stored on another server or repository. I am using below code in xsl to add flash file.
https://www.***.com/docs/swf/Spreadsheet.swf
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Is it really required in above scenario? If yes then where to keep that cross domain.xml file? The flash file that I want to access is on another repository which is not on any web server. So can anyone provide me solutions on this?

How to set-up Persistent Storage for eclipse-tomcat for backup and streaming (not using database)?

I am working on a Java Web-Application project using servlets, eclipse, and tomcat.
I would like to be able to dynamically store/create persistent files from servlets and allow the user to access the files using a link, without storing the files in the database.
I have read that getServletContext().getRealPath("/") is volatile and gets reset every time the server is restarted.
I have also read that creating a directory like "$HOME/.ourapp" would solve this. Although, I cannot seem to find how to set-up tomcat to allow the user to access the files using a link, using the eclipse-tomcat.
Question : How to set-up eclipse-tomcat so that the link to the website "http://localhost/" and the file "http://localhost/temp-xx.txt" is the same, while also allowing to dynamically create persistent data "temp-xx.txt" is generated by a servlet and allow the user to access it and does not get deleted when the server is restarted.
This gets complicated, because Tomcat can server files using DefaultServlet (it just sends files back to the client, exactly as you'd expect from a web server), but it caches files internally, so modifying the file system underneath it can have some surprising behavior.
You can disable caching for the DefaultServlet but I've seen reports that it still behaves in surprising ways. The only fool-proof solution I've seen is to write your own servlet that streams the files from wherever they are stored.
But writing your own streaming servlet isn't as simple as you might think. If you want it to be high-performance, you'll want to enable all the nice HTTP features like range-requests, eTags, If-Modified-Since and all that stuff that the DefaultServlet already provides. Perhaps you should start with using the DefaultServlet and see how far it will get you.
The configuration is actually really easy: just add a <Resources> element to your META-INF/context.xml file and use a postResources attribute. You can find the documentation in the Tomcat users' guide for resources.

Java Application on Amazon Web Services with Mobile and Web Clients

Our new start-up company is trying to build a mobile app with an accompanied website. We are trying to setup our application on Amazon Web Services.
We have Java code running in an EC2 instance, which will store data in S3. We want clients (iOS and Web for now) to communicate with the Java Backend via a REST API. Ideally the website would be hosted under the same AWS account.
The Java Code and REST API are already set up in a very basic form, but the setup of the Website is unclear, since this is new to us all. We also would like to evaluate beforehand if such a setup is even feasible.
Since I am in charge of the Website i have already spend hours researching this specific setup, but i simply lack experience in cloud/backend development to come to a conclusion.
Here are some questions we would like to answer:
Where would the HTML files and accompanied JavaScript etc. files be stored?
How can data (images etc.) that is stored within S3 by the JAVA code be accessed from the Website directly?
How could something like bootstrapping of data within HTML files be achieved (in JSON format preferably)?
How could the server be set up to compress certain files like CSS or JavaScript?
Please point me into the right direction, any comment is appreciated.
Where would the HTML files and accompanied JavaScript etc. files be
stored?
Either on the same AWS EC2 box or a different one, just give it a static IP and link that IP to the domain you want, done. Just remember to have port 80 open as a firewall rule.
How can data (images etc.) that is stored within S3 by the JAVA code
be accessed from the Website directly?
The files will have some url that you can link to directly in your html so it's essentially just a url.
How could something like bootstrapping of data within HTML files be
achieved (in JSON format preferably)?
You have a number of choices here. You could potentially create some JSP files to generate the HTML and load the JSP files on access and cache them so they load up super fast. You could argue however, this is overkill and in some ways, the REST endpoint should be robust enough to handle the requests.
Part of me thinks you should endeavor to use the REST API for this information so you just have to manage one endpoint, why make an extra endpoint or over engineered solution for the HTML that you then have to maintain? Build once and reuse.
How could the server be set up to compress certain files like CSS or
JavaScript?
During the build process, run the files through a minify process. This is built into maven so you could do it automatically or by hand using something like jscompress. This Minify plugin shows how to automatically minify your resources. Consider you'll need to be using Maven though as your build tool.

creating web service client from eclipse

Hi I am new to SOAP web services and trying to create a client. I am following This tutorial but the problem which I am facing is Sometimes it generates the client stub in the form of .java files and sometimes it generates proper client with some .jsp pages like test.jsp, intput.jsp etc.
I have tried searching a lot on internet. Please let me know why it generates two different kind of clients though I am following the same process.
I have generated my client using wsimport but I just want to know, what is causing eclipse to generate two different clients at different times. may be some bug or some detail that I have missed.
The difference is most likely caused by selecting a different value in step 6 of the tutorial, when you select which kind of client should be generated: Move the Client slider to the Test Client position .
When you run the Eclipse WTP wizard, you get to choose which client you want to have. The JSPs that are generated are simply an input test form to test your web service.

How to provide access to an external resource (file) for a GlassFish web application?

I am a bit of a GlassFish beginner, so please forgive my ingnorance on the subject.
Basically we are serving a game website, and to make the client downloadable by our web app we copy it into a directory within domain1. The problem with this is that when redeploying the web app the client downloadable is lost and we have to copy it across again.
I'd like to be able to store the client downloadable in some external location and have GlassFish provide access to it.
I could just hardcode the link into the web app, but then we would lose portability so that's the reason for having GlassFish handle it.
I could also put the client downloadable into our database but that seems like poor use of a database and could also result in poor database performance.
The third option I have found is to add a custom resource mapping from some name to the file location, and then provide a method in one of my beans to retrieve the file location. This seems like a lot of work just to have an external resource, I feel like there must be an easier way.
So what should I do?
With GlassFish you can define an alternate document root to serve files from outside the war. From the documentation:
Alternate Document Roots
An alternate document root (docroot)
allows a web application to serve
requests for certain resources from
outside its own docroot, based on
whether those requests match one (or
more) of the URI patterns of the web
application's alternate docroots.
To specify an alternate docroot for a
web application or a virtual server,
use the alternatedocroot_n property,
where n is a positive integer that
allows specification of more than one.
This property can be a subelement of a
sun-web-app element in the
sun-web.xml file or a virtual server
property. For more information about
these elements, see sun-web-app in
Oracle GlassFish Server 3.0.1
Application Deployment Guide.
So you could configure something like this:
<property name="alternatedocroot_1" value="from=/ext/* dir=/path/to/ext"/>
Refer to the documentation for full details.
The link to your downloadables needn't be in the same application as the game servlets, right?
One solution would be to create a new "pseudo" application containing only a web.xml and your static file content. You would of course not deploy it in war form (well, only if you really want to) but just copy the files into the unpacked directory when you want to change content. I use a setup like this to serve a bunch of files from a Web app server I run.
At work, in an "enterprise" kind of environment, we do things differently. We have an Apache HTTPD server working as the front end. It forwards to the app server for stuff that needs to be done in Java, but any static content, as well as cookie management, SSL, load balancing and other "web server-y" stuff is done by HTTPD. This yields a bit of a performance advantage with heavily loaded sites and lots of big but static files. It also lets us split the work among different physical boxes, which again can help with performance.

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