Learning Flex 4

Chapter 17. Deploying Flex Applications

IN THIS CHAPTER

Deploying to the Web

Deploying to the Desktop

Summary

In this next-to-last chapter, we cover the processes for deploying Flex applications to either the Web or the desktop.

Deploying to the Web

First we discuss the process of deploying to the Web, and demonstrate the steps relative to the PhotoGallery application. A typical web deployment involves the following steps and considerations:

• Check the Flash Builder Compiler options

• Modify the index.html.template file

• Merge or separate the Flex Framework Library

• Export a release build

• Upload files to the web host

As you know, we’ve been compiling our applications to the bin-debug directories of their respective projects. The compiled SWF in the bin-debug folder contains extra debugging methods used by the debug version of Flash Player. When you casually run a project in order to test it, Flash Builder launches the debug version of your application. Of course, the debug version is necessary for debugging and profiling (we briefly discuss profiling in the sidebar “Tweaking Performance” on page 375), but it’s not yet optimized for frequent downloading. Therefore, when you’re ready to deploy, you’ll want to create a release build that doesn’t include the debugging extras. The specific advantage of a release build is its smaller compiled size.

Now we’ll walk through the steps identified in the previous list and create a release build for the PhotoGallery application, so open that project now.

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