Earlier, I pointed to this post about Glare (Flex backend for Smalltalk), and said I'd be taking a look at the little example. Thus began my fun little foray into tools of minimal help :)

First, I downloaded Eclipse. That installed ok, although I must say - the colorful introductory screen with a bunch of icons isn't all that helpful. I created a new project and it dove into project view, which, while not terribly like Smalltalk, was at least understandable. I quit Eclipse, and downloaded the eval of Adobe's Flex UI tools. THose installed easily enough, although - like most installers - it stayed on the "nearly done" part of the progress bar forever. With that out of the way, I started Eclipse back up.

First check - it wasn't that clear to me how to start the plugin, but it was just an option when I created a new project. Ok, easy enough. That's when the nightmare of trivial errors began :)

Flex development takes place using XML. I'm sure that some developer somewhere thought this was a good idea - but he needs to be taken out behind the woodshed, stat. leading whitespace in your source file from a copy/replace operation while looking at a tutorial? Enter inexplicable error #1:

Configuration error encountered on line 1, column 8: 
'The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed.'

Googling was the only way to figure out that I had a leading whitespace in one of my XML files; the error message certainly didn't inform me of that. There were a couple more issues I ran across, but those were related to the examples on the Glare page being partially incomplete - you really need to go to the source page (which is linked from the article) to get the full source for the Flex code (there were missing imports - something I'm sure an experienced Air developer would pick up).

Anyway - at that point, it started working: I had a back end Smalltalk service feeding a little Air app:

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