I have a simple GWT app.
Whenever I run gwt compilation for production, I also see a file with the extension .devmode.js being generated.
Questions:
This looks like a devmode-related file; do I actually need it while running in production? Do I need to delete it?
What does it do?
If useless, is there any way to stop it from being generated while in production?
I'm using GWT 2.8.
Kind regards,
Andrei
It is specific to legacy Dev Mode, and not used in Super Dev Mode. If you don't ever use legacy Dev Mode, you don't need it.
You don't need it in production... unless you ever need to debug your app in production. If you ever want to debug your app in production (with legacy dev mode), you should leave it.
You do not need to delete it - it will not be used unless you attempt to enter dev mode, and it is a static file, and cannot be used to maliciously debug your app, unless the attacker also has all of your original Java source code already.
The Linker system does not currently have a way to prevent it from being emitted. The "generation" of it is very simple, only the __MODULE_NAME__ tokens are replaced with the name of your app, so there is essentially no penalty paid in creating it.
Unless you need the extra 1k of disk space in your generated app, I wouldn't worry about it at all as there is no risk in having it. If you do need that extra 1k, either modify your current linker to avoid emitting it, or add a later build step to delete it.
Related
When running my code in debug mode, I keep getting 2 error messages:
Could not delete [path_to]\productiondb.log. May be locked by another process
I don't know what process might be locking it. It comes when I make changes to the code while my Pivotal tc Server is running in debug mode, but it dosent seem to create a lot's of trouble. Sometimes however, I get this warning:
Also due to some changes. I usally just restart the server and move on. This isen't the real problem, the real problem is that I get these messages when I havent doen any changes. Somethimes it accures when I run a certen part of the code, other times i occurs when I open certen codes in sts, however, it doen't seem to stop at the same place twice.
I am suspecting that this has something to do with git. I am using git to change between versions and doing tests. So I am thinking that STS has some of the code in memory from before I changed branche with git, and isen't updating it before I run or open the file with that code. But I am rather new to both sts and git, and can't be certan that it would work that way. If it is, does anyone know how to update sts after I have changed branch? If it is not, does anyone know what might causing it?
If you run an app in debug mode, the Eclipse Debugger tells the application when code gets changed and tries to use the debug API to swap in the new code into the running application. This is especially useful if you debug your code, hit a breakpoint, step through the code, fit the issue, change the code, and press save. At that moment, the Eclipse compiler updates the class file and tells the running JVM to swap in the new code. If that succeeds, the debugger will jump back to the last stack frame and the execution of your app will continue with the beginning of the method that you entered. This allows you to directly continue to debug and step through the updated code without restarting the app.
While this is a great feature of the JVM, it is very limited in terms of what scope of changes to the classes the JVM can deal with while doing this hot-swap. It is usually limited to method implementations. So adding new methods, adding or deleting members of the class, etc, are not supported. As a result, the above screenshot will appear. It means that the JVM wasn't able to hot-swap the changed code and will continue to run with the previously loaded code instead of the changed one.
Theres a few questions similar to this, so I'll try to be clear as possible.
We have an existing, fairly large and complex, GWT webgame I have been asked to make work offline. It has to be offline in pretty much the strictest sense.
Imagine we have been told to make it work off a CD Rom.
So installation is allowed, but we cant expect the users to go to a Chrome/Firefox store and install it from there. It would need to be off the disc.
Likewise, altering of the browsers start-up flags would be unreasonable to expect of users.
Ideally, it would be nice if they just clicked a HTML file for the start page and it opened in their browsers of choice.
We successfully got it working this way in Firefox by adding;
"<add-linker name='xsiframe' />"
To our gwt.xml settings. This seems to solve any security issues FF has with local file access.
However, this does not solve the problem for Chrome.
The main game starts up, but various file requests are blocked due to security issues like these;
XMLHttpRequest cannot load file:///E:/Game%20projects/[Thorn]%20Game/ThornGame/text/messages_en.properties. Cross origin requests are only supported for protocol schemes: http, data, chrome, chrome-extension, https, chrome-extension-resource.MyApplication-0.js:34053 com_google_gwt_http_client_RequestBuilder_$doSend__Lcom_google_gwt_http_client_RequestBuilder_2Ljava_lang_String_2Lcom_google_gwt_http_client_RequestCallback_2Lcom_google_gwt_http_client_Request_2 MyApplication-0.js:34053
Now I was aware same origin policy issues might popup as during development we often tested locally using flags in chrome to bi-pass them.
Thing is...now I dont know how to get around them when we cant use startup flags.
Obviously in the example given its just the .properties file GWT uses to get some language related text. I could dump that inline in one way or another.
However, its only one of many,many,many files being blocked.
The whole game was made to run off *.txt game scripts on the sever - to allow easy updating by non-coders. Really the actual GWT code is just an "engine" and all the XMLHttpRequested files supply the actual "game".
These files are of various types; csv, txt, ntlist, jam.
The last two being custom extensions for what are really just txt files.
All these files are blocked by chromes security. It seems from what I can make out only images are allowed to be accessed locally.
Having all these files compiled in would just be impossible, as they are not fixed in number (ie, one central .txt file determains various scene .txt files which in turn determain various object files and directory's...).
Putting all this into a bundle would be nightmare to create and maintain.
So in essence I need some way to supply a offline version of a GWT project that can access a large number of various files in its subdirectories without security issues.
So far all I can think of is;
A) Theres something I can tell chrome via html or gwt that allows these files to be read in Chrome like FF can. (I suspect this isn't possible).
An alternative to XMLHttpRequest maybe?
B) I need to somehow package a game+a webbrowser in a executable package that has permission to access files in its directory's. (http://www.appcelerator.com/titanium ? ?? ).
C) I need to package and have the user run a full webserver that can then deliver all these files in a XMLHttp accessible way.
D) Bit of a funny one...we cant tell the user to add flags to browser start up...but Maybe I could write a game installer which just detects if they have Chrome or Firefox. It then opens up the games html in their browser with the correct flags for them? This would open up security issues if they browse elsewhere with that instance though, so Id presumably need other flags to disable the url bar if that's possible.
I am happy to make various changes to our code to achieve any of this - but as mentioned above theres no way to determain all the files needing to be accessed at compile time.
And finally, of course, it all has to be as easy as possible for the end user.
Ideally just clicking a html file, or installing something no more complex then a standard windows program.
Thanks for reading this rather long explanation, any pointers and ideas would be very welcome. I especially will appreciate multiple different options or feedback from anyone that's done this.
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I accepted the suggestion to use Chromiumembedded below.
This works and does what I need (and much much more)
To help others that might want to use it, I specifically made two critical changes to the example project;
Because CEF needs a absolute path to the web apps local html, I wrote a c++ function to get the directory the .exe was launched from. This was a platform specific implementation, so if supporting a few OS's (which CEF does) be sure to write dedicated code for each.
Because my webapp will make use of local files, I enabled the Chrome flag for this by changing the browser settings;
browser_settings.file_access_from_file_urls = STATE_ENABLED;
These two changes were enough to get my app working, but it is obviously the bare minimum to make a application. Hopefully my finding will help others.
I'd suggest going the wrapper route. That is, provide a minimal browser implementation that opens your files directly. Options are Chromium Embedded[1]. If the nature of the application absolutely requires the files to be served as non-file urls then bundle a minimal webserver, have the on-disk executable start the server and open the bundled browser with whatever startup arguments you want.
[1] https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef
We are in the process of switching our game from our own canvas page, to using the Unity integration on Facebook. However, during our development tests we have occasionally run into a problem where the webplayer binary gets loaded from the browser cache, even though a newer version was uploaded to the server.
Manually clearing the browser cache solves the problem, but that's not exactly a solution we want to present to our users all the time. Previously, when we embedded the unity object ourselves, we also passed in a ?version flag with the url, which would keep it up to date, but we can't exactly do that anymore with integration turned on, unless we manually update the binary location link in our app settings every time we do a build (Kind of a pain in the butt, since the rest of our build process is automated)
Is there any way around this?
Thanks.
We have exactly same problem and I can say only solution is to change the binary file name everytime you made a build but only for your production environment. Here is our solution:
We have development (sandbox mode)and production environment and one app for each one.
For development, we ran everything locally, we have buildpipeline that builds and copies the binary file to appropriate place with the same name always like MyGame.unity3d, and we have set our browsers not to cache anything, that solves the problem for testing.
For production, our buildpipeline constructs the binary name with:
YourGameNameMainVersion.SubVersion.TimeStamp like: MyGame0.3.1006-1004.unity3d and this one is manually set from facebook's app settings page in every build. But this is not a big problem as you won't want to make a new build more than once/twice a day for production.
We've found that all that needs to be done is to add "?version=xxxx"
This works, and perfectly fine. I do now, is only change version (?version=1.52) in main link:
<a href="http://cometoplaynow.com/Labyrinth3D/Labyrinth3D.html?version=1.52">
Have advantages using it:
Changing only 1 number - link is still the same (if people open game from your site)
Savings will stay as it was (if you change .unity3d you will lost PlayerPrefs).
Ok
SO recently I've being having a lot of trouble with an application working in debug mode but not working in distribution mode.
Is it possible to use xcode debugging tools such as break points and variable tracing with an adhoc distribution build of an app?
If it's not how would one usually go about debugging such a thing?
Assuming that your crash logs aren't giving you any clues (you'll need to hook up to the device to get them) there are lots of things you can do.
But I'd start by looking at the crash logs ... the clues will be there and don't forget Apple make distribution crash logs available to you through iTunesConnect.
1) Copious logging is one thing. Lots of developers use a switch so that in debug, logs go to the console but for other builds they are dropped. Consider a different option where you log to a file instead. You could then push the log files to a remote server for debugging. It's a bit of a slog to set this all up, but once you've done it, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.
2) Another option is to use Flurry and log events when you detect that things have gone wrong. This can cover more controlled problems when things aren't as expected rather than random crashes. This can be a useful feature for released apps provided your terms and conditions are clear about what data you are logging and why.
3) Make sure you do a clean build, I'm sure you've already done this, but sometimes it clears these issues.
4) Are you using external libraries / modules? I've come across issues with older versions of TT where the arm6/7 build settings were wrong and this was causing issues for distribution builds. Basically check through the build settings for each profile and make sure it is what you expect.
5) Suspect a race condition. In distribution mode (often because the logging is turned off) you will find that your application runs a little bit faster. That can reveal timing issue bugs in badly written code.
So yes ... there is a lot you can do ... you just can't attach the debugger ;-)
Not possible to debug an application in distribution mode.
The build configuration difference between Distribution, Debug, and Release is really whatever parameters you have set for that in XCode. If your Distribution config is giving you problems and the release isn't, the easiest way to fix it is to go back through Apple's steps on copying the Release config and making the changes to make it a Distribution config, like you did originally.
The alternative is to go through every line of the configurations for Release and Distribution and find what's different. The other way is a LOT faster. :)
Motivation — I had a new version of my Cocoa application ready that worked fine on all beta testers' machines. So I released it. Turns out that a crucial feature simply doesn't work on anybody else's computer. Yikes! Yes, read that again: I released software that didn't work.
Cause — Users who had used previous versions my app (read: all my loyal beta testers) already had a folder ~/Application Support/MyApp/ from an older version. Due to the critical bug in the new release, this folder was necessary for the software to work. And for everybody else, because the folder did not exist, it didn't work.
As you can imagine, this is extremely embarrassing, and I want this to never, ever, happen again.
Remedies? — The straight-forward way to ensure this, of course, is to actually download and install it on a "clean" machine just before you publish a new release. But this seems impractical, because in time I will run out of friends with a Mac who have never tried my app yet (eventually all will have ;-)), and because I'm not eager to "format c:" my Mac before every single release…
This is where I need your help:
How can I ensure that a user who has never used my software before will get the same results as someone who has?
Virtual machines (VMWare Workstation, etc.) can be useful for testing clean installs of applications. You can start up a new virtual OS, install your stuff, test it, then delete the VM when you're done. There are ways to automate the spinning-up of a VM as well, which can make your life even easier.
Another thing to do is to determine all the prerequisites your app requires, and add checks for these things at startup. If something is not setup right, you can either attempt to set it up within your code, or inform the user to do it.
A more lightweight approach might be using tools like AppZapper to get rid of everything — temporary files, preferences, cache, history, etc – related to the app to test.