Flex Compiler Modules

21 Nov 2008

In one of my projects, I was trying to use Flex Compiler Module for Apache. I was doing development on my Mac OSX and everything worked fine. As soon as, I uploaded application on server (CentOS 4.5, x86_64), it didn't work.

After some debugging, I figured out Flex Compiler Module binaries are compiled as 32bit would not work on 64bit version of Apache. I could have used some third-party wrappers or rebuild it again for 64bit, unfortunately Adobe has not provided source-code for these modules.

There was another problem, it seems this apache-module has dependency on glibc, the required version of glibc is not available for RedHat/CentOS 4.5. Now that's weird, even if I had source code, not sure I could build against 64bit of CentOS? Not even sure about CentOS 4.5 x86?

BTW! glibc seems to be an important library and one can not just go ahead and update for one requirement, it might actually break many other applications. Hence, I didn't upgrade glibc on CentOS 4.5 to the required version.

So as an alternative, I used Flex Compiler API by writing some wrappers in Java and then invoke API using PHP. But it seems there is weird licensing i.e. I need to have license of Adobe LCDs in order to use Flex Compiler API?

I have fallen back on pure PHP implementation, I need to figure out about custom logging.