Comments on: Compiling ActionScript In The Enterprise

By: Francis

Francis — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 10:55:07 +0000

SVN? What century are you living in? Git it man….

Flash? I’d be careful now also… the world is changing…

By: joa

joa — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 13:49:33 +0000

No we never tried Ivy. Even “tsort” in a shell can sort your modules in correct order if you are looking for that. Or you can sort a Map[T, List[T]] with three lines of Scala.

Anyways. The “real” dependency hell starts at runtime, not at compiletime :)

By: manfred karrer

manfred karrer — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:14:14 +0000

have you also tried out apache ivy for dependency management? there is an ant task called buildlist which should outputs a list of modules sorted due the dependency graph. with subant the compilation of the modules could be triggered. unfortunately i coulnd´t get it running until now… has anyone experience with it?

By: joa

joa — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:39:21 +0000

Interesting post Ryan! I just rewrote some parts of our custom build to work better with TeamCity and to scale on a local grid. So we have now pre-tested commits and very fast response time which is really cool :)

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:53:17 +0000

As part of the Anvil Flex open source project we put together a fairly complex build process for a large enterprise application. I started to detail it in the comments, but it become so long I have posted in as a separate blog post at http://grandcloud.com/speeding-up-compilation-of-large-flex-3-appli

By: joa

joa — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:53:18 +0000

HFCD works very well with Flash Builder. However you can write your own HFCD very easy if you do not want to compile with an IDE.

By: Sven Busse

Sven Busse — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:22:51 +0000

Hi,

back to what vane already mentioned, has anyone tried HFCD yet? Would be curious to hear any experiences.

Cheers
Sven

By: Michael Plank

Michael Plank — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:53:44 +0000

True, in FDT 3 we don’t have a good solution yet for building/compiling projects that consist of multiple projects.
At Powerflasher we normaly use ANT for that, which is not the best solution as you mentioned in your post. But for projects with 5-10 modules it’s perfectly ok in my opinion.
In FDT 4 Milestone 4 we are completely rewriting our compile system, will support modules and so on. I’m sure we can leverage your great knowldege about building and compiling large scale projects when we reach that point.

Thx,
Michael
-FDT Team

By: joa

joa — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:42:18 +0000

Instead of Maven I would suggest checking out Buildr.

By: seb

seb — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:16:38 +0000

@Ole Christian Langfjaeran:
I didn’t know about Maven and Flexmojos, it seems very interesting. Is that possible to use those tools with an existing project ? I read in the “get started” that we have to create a Flex project structure with a shell command so I’m not sure I can use it in an already existing project.

By: Ole Christian Langfjæran

Ole Christian Langfjæran — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:24:32 +0000

I agree with Ralf! Maven + http://flexmojos.sonatype.org/ works like charm.
It leverages most of the dependency problems you describe using Ant.

By: jankees

jankees — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 06:50:45 +0000

Great post, thanks!

By: vane

vane — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:58:58 +0000

If you are not using it already, there is something called HellFire compiler for flex, maby that will help. Try to look at blog by the ex Adobe guy Edwin Wong stopcoding.wordpress.com

By: sascha/hdrs

sascha/hdrs — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:35:46 +0000

Sounds as if you should have went with haXe instead form the beginning. The Flex compiler is awfully slow! I’m wondering if you actually still get to write some AS code with all these auxiliary matters to care about.

By: joa

joa — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:51:49 +0000

TeamCity/Hudson/Buildbot/… are not the bottleneck. And most support a master/slave releationship. However I would like to specialize this a little bit further.

The ideal solution is IMHO to have multiple FCSH instances on multiple machines, each compiling always the same target. That way you have long-running processes which are great for HotSpot and you save JVM startup costs which grow with the number of modules. You will also not run out of heap space. If I think of 2sec startup time for mxmlc/compc then this sums up to ~3min wasted time in our case. I think that only a custom solution will give us an accceptable result. And that one could be plugged into any CI system of your choice.

By: Thijs

Thijs — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 11:39:19 +0000

FWIW, my favorite CI server is Buildbot. If Hudson or TeamCity are a bottleneck in your build process you might want to take a look at this lightweight master/slave(s) solution.