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So after seeing just how darn good an HTML based Apollo application could be done, I wanted to see how I could build one as well.

Now I may be dumb - but I was surprised to find I couldn't use Flex Builder (by itself) to build an HTML based Apollo application. Flex Builder will only let you work with a Flex based Apollo application. You can't point the project to an HTML file.

On reflection I figure that is pretty obvious. I mean, it is Flex Builder, not HTML Builder, but I was still a bit surprised.

Luckily it isn't too hard. I had help from the Apollo Coders list. I don't know the guys name, but brodnack was his ID and I thank him for the help.

Let me be clear - I could be doing this completely wrong. But it worked for me.

So first off I created a super simple HTML file:

Hi, this is Raymond's first HTML apollo app.

And saved this to index.html in a new folder. Next I needed the XML file that Apollo uses to help define the application. I followed the format FlexBuilder used and named my index-app.xml. I got the XML from another FlexBuilder project. (I will probably make a simple snippet out of this for CFEclipse.) I edited a few of the entries in the XML:

appID - I set this to ApolloHTML
name - Ditto
description and publisher - I just typed something relevant for both

Lastly, I changed

<rootContent systemChrome="standard" transparent="false" visible="true">[SWF reference is generated]</rootContent>

to

<rootContent systemChrome="standard" transparent="false" visible="true">index.html</rootContent>

As you can see, I changed the value to point to my main application file.

So far so good. Now it's time for the command line tools. The first one I used was adl. This function lets you run your code as an Apollo app. All you have to do is point it at your XML file:

adl index-app.xml

So that was easy enough. I can now develop and just quickly run this command then to view the results. (And if I remember right, I can do this directly in Eclipse.)

Next - how do you build the AIR file so you can package your application up? One more command like - adt:

adt -package index.air index-app.xml index.html

The last argument can be a directory instead, which would have made sense if I had more files. This generated an AIR file I was then able to test with. I included the AIR on this post, but it's incredibly boring so don't bother downloading.

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