"Make" system for Actionscript? - apache-flex

In working on larger Actionscript/Flash projects, I've started to really feel the need for some kind of "make" system, but I haven't found it yet. Does anyone know if it exists?
Required features:
Ability to associate SWCs with their source code and/or FLAs i.e. "this swc is compiled from this source"
Ability to mark my current project as depending on these SWCs (either as compile-time or runtime libraries)
A single, big shiny button, that when pressed does the following:
Checks to see if any of the source files have changed, and if so, recompiles their associated SWCs
Recompiles and relinks the main .swf, if necessary
Runs the main .swf
Have yet to find a way to get something like FlashDevelop to do this (but I don't know it well enough to be sure). Support for both code and FLA sources is preferred.

You are looking for http://projectsprouts.org/ which is based on Rake the Ruby version of Make. It can do all of that stuff and much more.
If you have Ruby and RubiGems installed which I think are installed by default on Macs you can install it by typing this into your command line.
sudo gem install Sprout
It will take a while because it installs many things. After this is all set you can create a project like this.
sprout -n as3 ProjectName
and then build it with this,
rake deploy
It manges things based on the runtime they are created for, this project was created for as3 but all of the other types of projects also. The build scripts are all writen in Ruby and can be modified to involve more complex multi-step compiles pretty simply. It also has a bunch of generators so that classes automaticly have unit test that are associated with them and many other features.

Might be a stupid suggestion, but if you want make, why not just use "make"? You can use it for any language by defining the right rules.
Apart from that, I've seen a lot of Flex/Actionscript projects use Apache ant, an XML based build system.

As said by wump; why not use Make?
There are some ANT scripts included in the Flex SDK, so you could explore and expand those. I've also spoken to people who use Maven and Cruise Control for automated build process.
Here is some info on Maven Flex: http://code.google.com/p/flex-mojos/
And some info on Cruise Control w/ Flex: http://www.eyefodder.com/blog/2006/05/continuous_integration_with_fl_5.shtml

Well, there are several options. One I would recommend is the Maven plugin for Flex flex-mojos, now maintained on the Sonotype site. If Maven isn't your cup of tea, they do have an Ant plugin, I don't know if NAnt can call Java Ant tasks directly or not. The third is the most complicated, but Adobe does include an OEM version of the compiler, I believe it comes by default with the SDK download. This is the one I used in the Maven plugin I developed for my company. The reason we didn't use the flex-mojos one basically boils down to a...disagreement about the "Maven way" of one project = one artifact. Their interpretation is that 1 SWF file is one artifact, so is one Maven project. My definition for my project is that all 80+ modules, each a SWF file, are no different than JSPs, all bundled in the same WAR file. So I've got one project with a LOT of modules and 1 maven pom.

You could check out Antpile which according to said link "is a collection of Ant Scripts which cover everything from building a SWF, SWC, AIR, Android and even Unit Testing."

Related

Creating ant build script to build only when a dependency was updated

I just started working with ant a few days ago. Right now I have a general buildall.xml which should call each project's build.xml. Because some projects depend on each other, I need to rebuild some other projects which depend on it. This isn't a problem--I'm just setting the depends property of the target. However, ant is always building the dependencies, even when the files haven't changed.
Let's say project1 has no dependencies; project2 depends on project1; project3 depends on project1, 2; project4 depends on project1, 2, and 3; and so on.
I could hack a solution which looks at project K, and checks if project 1 .. project K have updated files using uptodate. If so, then run the target. This is messy and appears unnecessary.
What is the cleanest way to implement this?
EDIT: So I decided to just hack in a bunch of targets, "check_projectK" where it does the uptodate checks on all of its source files, its build file, and the build files of the 1 .. K-1 projects. Due to dependencies, this is always handled correctly. However, this is still a large amount of copy and paste for a large workspace. I will leave this open.
Short answer, ANT can't do it, not unless you have some kind of way to connect to your version control system and check if anything has changed (you are using source control right?). Ant doesn't know about when what the last time a file changed and then see if it matches with what was built; it doesn't have the concept of a dependency repository. The whole purpose of Ant is that it just builds.
The solution to your problem isn't Ant, it's Maven. Maven HAS a dependency repository. There's also a very nifty plugin for Maven used specifically with Flex appropriately called FlexMojos. By using this, Maven can know when something was last built because it's uploaded to the repository. Then your other projects can add it's dependencies and download the SWC needed.
On top of that, it mixes great with a continuous integration engine like Hudson, Bamboo and Teamcity, which builds a project every time a file has been committed to your source control system, and then updates all dependent projects automatically!

macdeployqt on homebrew installed frameworks

I'm trying to deploy an application using macdeployqt. All Qt frameworks get copied correctly into the application bundle. The problem I encounter is that macdeployqt does not have write permissions on the copied frameworks which originally reside in /usr/local/lib. This is because I have installed qt using homebrew which seems to make install everything read only. My question is whether there is a better way to fix this issue then manually changing all permissions of the qt libraries inside /usr/local/lib so that I can use macdeployqt from within a qt .pro project. (I don't want to use macdeployqt manually with sudo or such)
The reason why I'm asking is because I am using many third party libraries in the project (they get copied ok etc.) which I need to update often through homebrew and thus have to redo the permission changing on them.
Thanks in advance!
Just in case someone finds this old post looking for info about macdeployqt:
Use a script to do macdeployqt in preference to scripting the macdeployqt commands in your .pro file. That will allow you to change the permissions on the files on the fly.
Here is [a snippet of] the script I use for one of my apps:
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-23268
If you're on Windows and don't have bash, you can use perl or python. The script referenced above modifies the files on the fly to work around a bug - you can put anything you want here, including changing the permissions on the files.
Using a script also means that you have the flexibility to add commands later to do code-signing, packaging or whatever else you need.
The Qt .pro "scripting language" actually generates Makefile commands under the hood and can be quite obscure if you want to accomplish deployment tasks that relate to paths and sets of files.
Also you'll need to create an extra target or include it into your build target - either way the build process becomes more complex and more error prone.
Disclaimer: I worked on Qt for 8 years as a Senior Engineer for Nokia/Trolltech, and also have published a commercial cross-platform app using Qt.

How do you enforce dependencies among java folders in Netbeans?

I am new to Netbeans. I am wondering if someone can help me with project setup in netbeans. I am moving half million lines of Java code from a different IDE to Netbeans. I was able to get the code build and run in Netbeans easily. I have a project with many folders with dependencies among those folders. They have to be built in specific order. This is to enforce layering so that a module in lower layer cannot call into higher layers. I couldn't get that configured in Netbeans. Below is how my project looks like
project/
libA/
libB/
libC/
libD/
libE/
appA/
...
I have one project that builds all the libs and appA. The project build xml is stored under project/ folder. But the libs have dependencies among them. libB should be built after libA. libC after libA. libE depends on libD and libB etc.
I tried to change the order of source folders for libs in project properties. That didn't seem to make any difference. Even if I move libA after libB, it was building everything fine. I expected it to fail because libA didn't build yet.
Iam lost. Just wondering what the trick is to enforce this kind of dependencies. I created my project using "Java project using existing sources" wizard.
I appreciate your help
Thanks
Video guy.
Even though it would be a pain, you could just write your own ant build script and then just have Netbeans use that.
Basically:
write the custom ant build file
install the Ant plugin
create an Ant build file
right click the build file
run the selected target.
This would enable you to enforce whatever you need to do, but, if Netbeans is figuring out the correct order then why not just use it.
Does something break when you just compile and run in Netbeans?
Well! Lets say a team member added piece of code in lower level package that calls into higher layer code. It should fail because it breaks the layering. Because Netbeans seem to compile all the files in one javac invocation, the build compiles just fine. I want Netbeans to break the build in this case.
Writing my own ant script is another way of enforcing it. The whole point in using an IDE is to save yourself from writing your own make files (or ant scripts). This is something any IDE was able to accomplish 10 years back out of the box. I am wondering if I am missing something here.
Thanks
Video Guy

Compile Flex Builder project from command line

Is there an easy way to build projects created in FlexBuilder via the command line?
I'm beginning to work on adding a couple Flex components to the project I have at work. Currently the rest of the project (some java, some C++) is built via an ant script. I'd really like to be able to integrate the builds for the Flex components I'm working on into that ant script, but I'm not sure how to build the Flex projects from the command line.
Is there a way to invoke the flex compiler from the command line such that it uses the flex builder's project as its configuration? Or is there a way to modify FlexBuilder's compilation so that I could write a build script for the project and then have it use that (so that I'd only have one way to build and have both ant and FB use that, instead of separate build processes)?
While a flex ant task would be preferable it's not really necessary, as I can create custom tasks from command line apps easily enough.
EDIT:
One additional thing that I should probably mention. While I have FlexBuilder installed some of the people who run that ant script do not. They would just have the normal Flex SDK.
You can use the -dump-config option in FB to dump the config.xml that FB is using to compile your project, and then use that (using the -load-config option) with your command-line build.
I know in regular Eclipse you can build from an ant file, and I'm pretty sure that you can do the same with FB.
Although the doc kind of stinks for the flex ant tasks, they work ok.
[EDIT]- I replied in the comments, but I wanted to flesh out my reply.
Herms is having a problem using -dump-config and -load-config and it kind of points out why the flex ant tasks are better. (I didn't want to be the guy who says "why do you want to do X?", so I just answered the asked question).
Even though their doc is subpar (imo), they're better suited for the task of building
your projects.
There are a couple of gotchas using the flex ant tasks, but for the most part, it's not brain surgery (and really the gotchas are more because the doc sucks).
When I started working on the automated build for our project, I found this site:
http://www.nabble.com/FlexCoders-f16212.html
to be invaluable.
Flex 3 comes with Ant tasks for building Flex applications from the command line. The documentation is available here. In addition, there is a great open source build framework called Antennae which can help a lot in organizing and building Flex applications from the command line (it is Ant-based).
I wrote a blog post on exactly how to do this (set Flex up with Ant) and have a sample build file. while I wrote this for Linux, the Ant part is platform agnostic. (see step 4):
http://blog.apterainc.com/software/setting-up-a-flex-development-enviroment-in-gnulinux/
If you need any help, leave comments and I can troubleshoot any problems you are having.
EDIT: Documentation for Flex's ant tasks are a bit sparse, but here are the official documentation from Adobe, is was enough to get me on my way: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=anttasks_1.html
I started out with Antennae and was pretty disappointed when I realized it does not use the Flex Ant Tasks. To get what I needed I would've needed to hack the command line parameters it passes to mxmlc... and antennae doesn't support modules among other things that are easier to accomplish with the Flex Ant Tasks. anyway, what I did come up with is a mash up of the good aspects I found in antennae and the good aspects of the build files from this blog post:
http://jvalentino.blogspot.com/2010/03/flex-ant-build-optimized-modules_24.html

Is there a way to get FlexBuilder 3 to treat a project as an Application and a LIbrary?

My team builds reusable libraries for other (internal) software development teams. We use FlexBuilder 3 as our development environment. Our SCM standards state that these projects must include test harnesses and a unit test runner, and (of course) we want to be able to use the debugger. For that reason, all the projects are Applications.
Our build scripts (used primarily by the CI system and for release deployment) build our actual libraries which works great. This approach is used so that FlexBuilder is not required to actually build our production artifacts (on the command line).
The problem is this - in order to have add a FlexBuilder Project to the Library Path for an Application it must be a Library Project. I have tried adding a nature to the project that we want included, but haven't gotten it to work yet. You would want to do that if you wanted to debug source files in another project.
A simple (yet annoying) work around is to include the source folder of the "library project" as a source folder in the "application project." It's annoying because it takes multiple steps to swap between a swc of the "library project" and the source folder of the project itself.
I would also suggest breaking this up into 2 projects. Have 1 library project and 1 application for the tests and the testrunner.
On a sidenote: FlexBuilder 4 will have support for running FlexUnit tests in the IDE, for both Flex applications and Flex library projects. So you won't have to maintain an application just for the sake of running the tests.
Assuming it is possible, I'd suggest adjusting your SCM standards to allow test harnesses and unit test runners to exist in other projects. Simply mandate that any library project must include a companion test project.
I don't know that this is going to make it any easier, but I would actually make the library and the testing harness seperate projects. This would allow you to source control each and would solve your problem with flexbuilder. Its not going to make it easier to work with, but it will be cleaner and the easiest to update.
I didn't totally understand the description of your situation, but if it's helpful, I'll describe how we have organized our Flex projects. The majority of our application code is contained within a SWC ("library") project. We then create two SWF ("application") projects - a "shell" application which represents the final output SWF, and a test harness FlexUnit 2 application. Both of these SWF projects reference the SWC project using a source path. Using this approach has made it trivial to enable unit testing for the application codebase in the SWC.

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