code-complete - Flex

Flex 2 https socket requests to a server with a self-signed certificate

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:26:41 -0700

We are building a flex application that makes REST webservice requests to a Jetty webserver. The server requires basic authentication and we are able to pass the credentials through in the headers and can successfully access the webservices. The problem is that we will need to make these requests over SSL. When we change the protocol in the Flex application to use https, the suthentication and service requests fail.

I'm pretty convinced that this is due to the fact that the webserver is using a self-signed certificate, and the default https behavior is to deny the connection request over https unless the certificate has been issued from a trusted authority. I have looked at the raw packet traffic, and this seems to be what's happening.

When using a command line utility like curl to access https on a server with a self signed cert, it denies the connection, but provides this super helpful message:



curl: (60) SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details:

error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed

More details here: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/sslcerts.html



curl performs SSL certificate verification by default, using a "bundle"

 of Certificate Authority (CA) public keys (CA certs). The default

 bundle is named curl-ca-bundle.crt; you can specify an alternate file

 using the --cacert option.

If this HTTPS server uses a certificate signed by a CA represented in

 the bundle, the certificate verification probably failed due to a

 problem with the certificate (it might be expired, or the name might

 not match the domain name in the URL).

If you'd like to turn off curl's verification of the certificate, use

 the -k (or --insecure) option.

My question is does Flex provide the -k switch to just accept the damn certificate and move on?

I have a ticket opened with adobe on this and will post the info on the resolution to this issue.

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nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:50:11 -0600

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Must have demonstrated experience programming .NET Assemblies in C# or developing custom java classes, packaging and deploying WAR/EAR applications under tomcat. Database experience with SQL Server 200-2005 and/or Oracle/PostgreSQL is a requirement. Any RIA development including AJAX and/or Flex is highly desirable, but we can train the right candidate on using Flex Remoting/Actionscript 3 and AJAX to build RIAs. You will be leveraging WebORB and LiveCycle server components and code generators. The applications we build work on the Web and within the Enterprise, so your knowledge of scalability will help. You also need to be able to multi-task across multiple projects and manage your time well.

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Quality Assurance

Adobe Livecycle Dataservices Deployed under Tomcat with Sun 64-bit JVM on Fedora 7

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 13:33:51 -0600

As a follow up to my earlier post about getting Coldfusion 8 to run natively in a 64-bit enviro, this post will describe the steps to deploy Adobe Livecycle data services in a 64-bit environment natively.

First, the set up: 64-bit Fedora 7 + 64-bit Sun Java SE Runtime build 1.6.0_02-b05 + Tomcat 5.5.23 Release 9jpp.2.fc7

Initially, I just ran the installer for LiveCycle selecting to deploy as a war. It created the war files flex.war, flex-admin.war, and samples.war. I dropped those into the webapps directory and all the applications deployed automatically. I pointed my browser at http://server.com:8080/flex/samples, which popped right up. Then, when I clicked on the SQLAdmin sample app, kablooeee!

The error that gets thrown is:



09/06 14:17:03 ERROR java.lang.RuntimeException: XPathFactory#newInstance() failed to create an XPathFactory for the default object model: http://java.sun.com/jaxp/xpath/dom with the XPathFactoryConfigurationException: javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactoryConfiguration

Exception: No XPathFctory implementation found for the object model: http://java.sun.com/jaxp/xpath/dom

I realized that this had something to do w/ the Xalan/Xerces java component, but I had installed both components from RPMs. So I was conviced it was a classpath issue. I knew the stuff i needed was on my machine, but the application wasn't finding it. The following jars are what's needed for this to work:



xalan-j2-serializer.jar

xalan.jar

xercesImpl.jar

xml-apis.jar

xsltc.jar

So I ran the locate command for each of these jars and found many som in /usr/share/java/ and some under a xalan-j2-servlet/WEB-INF/lib directory.

I dropped copies of all the jars into my tomcat5/share/lib/ directory and restarted tomcat and viola!

Well, almost - now I was getting a different error:



09/07 11:48:53 ERROR java.lang.InternalError: An error occurred because there is no graphics environment available.  Please set the headless-server setting in the Flex configuration file to true.

But hey, that at least gave some direction on what needed to be changed, so I went ahead and changed the flex-config.xml files for all the applications to true and restarted tomcat. No love. Same error. Upon further log inspection, I found that there was another related error thrown just as the FlexAssembler service was spinning up:



09/07 11:45:54 Information [main] - Starting FlexAssembler...

Xlib: connection to ":1.0" refused by server

Xlib: No protocol specified



Exception in thread "Thread-23" java.lang.InternalError: Can't connect to X11 window server using ':1.0' as the value of the DISPLAY variable.

Okay, so because I was VNCed into the machine when starting up tomcat, the system appears to be disregarding the headless-server setting! So, I logged out of vnc, sshed into the machine stopped and started tomcat while tailing the catalina.out log file. Well, No errors on startup and when I went to the SQLAdmin sample app I saw this:

Adobe Livecycle successfully running.