Are there opensource tools to build flash apps.  For example, if I print Hello World using flash.  What would it take to do that.

read the ToC of this book

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlgp/


or get the examples.

they use some library.

Interesting. Their approach uses the perl bindings for ming:

http://www.libming.net/

Well, I just tried Flex and they have an open SDK.  Worked fine so far.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flex

OK, I'll look at that. Just for fun. I don't think I need flash for anything, but why not?

Report on ming: it has a blurb that it is so fantastically self contained, it won't even accept fonts and you have to convert fonts to its internal vector format. Sounds good, so download, unpack, ./configure, make ... ERROR: dependent files not found. So their self contained thing is bullshit, and getting it to work is obviously going to be another one of these bullshit open source nightmares that takes weeks of tweaks and posting in boards for help, getting insulted by open source geeks, and so forth, and in the end have a crippled product. Really for all that trouble better to just go with abobe.

I thought about Flex a while back but was so confused on what it was.  An sdk, an IDE for creating flash apps, new revision of flash for developers.

I could not figure that much out from their site, so I am confused too.

More screwing with ming. It requires png.h, which is not a normal system header. So you have to guess that you need to locate, compile, configure and install lib-png. That worked ok, and now ming complies but does not link, apparently because ming relies on some earlier version of lib-png than the latest, which had different functions:

/usr/bin/ld: Undefined symbols:
_png_create_info_struct
_png_create_write_struct
_png_destroy_write_struct
_png_get_channels
_png_init_io
_png_set_IHDR
_png_set_PLTE
_png_set_filler
_png_set_write_user_transform_fn
_png_write_end
_png_write_info
_png_write_row
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[2]: *** [dbl2png] Error 1

Or maybe something else.

If I ever find a open source project whose makefile actually works, I will probably have a heart attack.

ubuntu/debian/apt

enough said.

do you actually know about apt, PE?

because if you don't, it's a bit like working on windows without knowing where the control panel is.

Try: http://www.openlaszlo.org/