Updating your HFCD Installation

September 30, 2009 at 11:56 am

UPDATE: The instructions here also applies to hfcd_4.zip.

If you already have HFCD installed and now you have an updated hfcd_3.zip and you would like to update your existing installation, please continue reading.

If you've never installed HFCD before, please click here to read the full installation instructions.

Updating your HFCD installation is easy.

  1. Unzip your new hfcd_3.zip to a new directory.
  2. Copy all the files in the new directory to your existing HFCD installation.
  3. Run 'ant patch'.

HFCD Installation and Configuration

September 29, 2009 at 8:19 am

UPDATE (Nov 25th, 2009): The instructions here also applies to hfcd_4.zip. You can skip the instructions here if you simply use the installer (currently available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux).

As promised, I’m going to talk about how to install and configure the HellFire Compiler Daemon, a.k.a. HFCD. Again, if you’ve never heard of HFCD before, please check out the following posts:

  1. The Flex Compiler API… RPC Style
  2. A New Version of HFCD
  3. HFCD Beta Is Now Available

Before you download HFCD, make sure you meet the following system requirements:

  • Java 5 installed (Java 6 highly recommended). BTW, Flex Builder ships with JRE 5. It’s okay to use that, but the point of using HFCD is build Flex apps faster… and Java 6 is *faster* than Java 5…
  • Apache Ant installed. Mac OS X ships with Ant. If you use Windows, go download it at http://ant.apache.org.

Now, go to http://stopcoding.org/. Register and download hfcd_3.zip. The installation consists of 2 parts:

  1. Install the HFCD server and client SDK. In this step, you need hfcd_3.zip.
  2. Install the HFCD for Flex Builder plugin. In this step, you install the plugin via the Eclipse/Flex Builder Update Manager.

It’s highly recommended that you install the HFCD server and client SDK first. Once you’ve downloaded hfcd_3.zip. Unzip it in a directory called hfcd_3. Run ant.

> mkdir hfcd_3
> cp hfcd_3.zip hfcd_3
> cd hfcd_3
> unzip hfcd_3.zip

> ant server client

The ant tasks ’server’ and ‘client’ install the HFCD server and client SDK in the hfcd_3 directory. The tasks download the Flex 3.3.0 SDK automatically from Adobe (For hfcd_4, the tasks copy the Flex 4.0.0 SDK from the Flash Builder home directory). Because of that, the tasks may take a while to finish.

If you intend to run the HFCD server on a second machine, you only need to run ‘ant client’ on your Flex Builder machine. Then, download hfcd_3.zip to your second machine and run ‘ant server’ there. Alternatively, you run ‘ant client server’ on your Flex Builder machine and then simply copy the server directory over to your second machine.

After the ant tasks, please check out the JVM settings for HFCD: Open the ‘hfcd’ script (Mac OS X/Linux) or ‘jvm.config’ (Windows). The ant tasks modify the settings to something like this:

-XX:+UseParNewGC -Xms512m -Xmx1024m

You may change the -Xms and -Xmx settings. You may also change the parallel Young Generation GC to the parallel GC (-XX:+UseParallelGC). I would not add more VM settings until I see it in action. More on tuning later. If you’re happy with the default setting, go ahead and start hfcd. The HFCD server, by default, listen on port 50207 and 50208. Please make sure your firewall setting is properly configured for this.

> cd hfcd_3/server/bin
> hfcd
HellFire Compiler Daemon (hfcd) version 3

Now, you’re ready to install the HFCD for Flex Builder plugin. Note that you do NOT need to install the plugin twice for both HFCD 3 and HFCD 4.

  • Launch Flex Builder.
  • If you have a previous version of HFCD installed, click ‘Help’ –> ‘Software Updates’ –> ‘Manage Configuration’ to uninstall.
  • If you’ve never used HFCD before, click ‘Help’ –> ‘Software Updates’ –> ‘Find and Install…’.
  • Click ‘Search for new features to install’.
  • Click ‘New Remote Site…’.
  • Enter http://stopcoding.org/hfcd/3/download (or http://stopcoding.org/hfcd/4/download for HFCD 4) as the update site. You may use the URL as the name.
  • Click ‘Next’.
  • Choose the ‘HellFire Compiler 3.4.1′ feature.
  • Accept the license agreement.
  • Click ‘Next’, ‘Finish’ or whatever comes out. Click ‘Install All’.
  • Restart Flex Builder.

Now, it’s time to configure Flex Builder to use HFCD. There are three pieces in the configuration:

  1. Configure Flex Builder to use the HFCD client SDK.
  2. Change the HFCD hostname.
  3. Sync up source files with HFCD.

To configure Flex Builder to use the HFCD client SDK:

  • Click ‘Preferences…’ –> ‘Flex’ –> ‘Installed Flex SDKs’.
  • Add and choose the hfcd_3/client directory and set this SDK as the default SDK for Flex Builder.

To change the HFCD hostname that Flex Builder connects to:

  • Click ‘Preferences…’ –> ‘HellFire Compiler’.
  • If you intend to run HFCD locally, do nothing. Otherwise, change the hostname setting. You can use either hostname or IP address.
  • Restart Flex Builder.

To sync up your source files with HFCD:

  • Close your Flex projects in your Flex Builder workspace.
  • Reopen them.
  • Clean and Build All.

If everything is fine, you should see output from HFCD.

In the next few posts, I’m going to talk more about HFCD… about what you should expect from using HFCD.