Tag Archive for 'ant'

AS3V For Ant Released

Published on Jun 26, 2009 in Flash, as3, personal, projects and tools. 31 Comments Tags: , , , .

Since I started the development of some other library I completly put AS3V aside because the Eclipse integration with FDT is currently not possible. But since AS3V is working already I decided to release a version really quick that allows you to use AS3V as an Ant Task or simply from command line.

I know it would be better to have it as an Eclipse Plug-in with nice little markers etc. but for that I need some more extension points in FDT. I do not know about FlexBuilder but it would be probably the same.

The file includes an example build and some test cases that show you how AS3V can detect common errors and mistakes. There is currently not that much documentation available for the rules and parameters you can specify. Putting a list online with all rules and nice descriptions is of course something I would like to do but currently the time for that is missing. I hope everything is self-explaining if you have a look at the readme and example files.

Update: The AS3V package has been updated with one bug fix and some modifications so that AS3V will produce a more interesting log output if it fails for some reason. Using AS3V with Eclipse works only if you specify fork="true" like in the Flex SDK example from the build file that comes with the zip.

Compiling dependent SWF files

Published on Sep 5, 2008 in Flash, as3 and projects. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

AudioTool Ant buildLast night I spent about 9 hours writing a build script for the AudioTool allowing us to compile each plugin into its own SWF container. I think it is the first time a Flash project is taking more than 5 minutes for me to compile completly.

I figured out that it is definitly not easy to handle the mxmlc or compc in a way we needed it to be. The point is that we have for each plugin three modules A, B, C and a library D. A depends on D. B depends on A and D. C depends on A, B and D. Now to make it even more complex we have A, B, C and D in one project so that developing in this environment stays still simple. The solution to compile all modules in a way we need them to be was first generating unique entry points for the SWF files because we do not want to work with SWC libraries (or the SWF inside the SWC package). After having the unique entry points we compile D (and its dependencies as well) without including the source of A, B or C. Afterwards we can compile A. But B is dependent on A so we have to compile a SWF for A and then a SWC for A so B can link to A as an external library. C is also analog to this but needs B as a library as well. In the end it was 5am and I was happy to have the complete build working which generates a lot of SWF files and SWC libraries.

Since it is very hard to configure Ant for this (I was using XSL in the beginning for automated code generation) I started developing my own Ant tasks. I have to say that it is really simple and saved us hours of work. We have now one single XML file containing the dependencies and the Ant task will do the rest (code generation, compile tasks, etc.).