Now that you’ve been through 3 exhaustive tutorials on ant for flex, it’s time to use your knowledge you’ve gained to turn your back on the built-in Flex compiler and switch to ant for your builds. This part applies to FlexBuilder (and FlashBuilder) users only although it may apply if you’re using some other eclipse-based plugin. If you’re using another program like TextMate or Flash CSx, you can skip this article.
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Collective thoughts on the Flash Platform, iOS, Unity, and any other technology we use.
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Using ant for Flex – a no B.S. guide – Part 3 of 4
by Mims H Wright
This third installment talks about tips and tricks for using ant with version control systems.
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Using ant for Flex – a no B.S. guide – Part 2 of 4
by Mims H Wright
In this part, I get more nitty-gritty about working with flex’s ant tasks.
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Using ant for Flex – a no B.S. guide – Part 1 of 4
by Mims H Wright
After spending hours wrangling with my ant build script and finally making everything work correctly, I am convinced of two things:
- ant is a very powerful tool for compiling code but it can also do so much more.
- The support for ant for flex online is abysmally frustrating.
So, I’d love to share with you some of the tips I’ve picked up after tweaking my script to the point where it finally worked!
Introducing ant
First of all, let me introduce the basics of what ant is. I couldn’t really say it better than the thousands of nameless editors of WikiPedia.
Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. It is similar to Make but is implemented using the Java language, requires the Java platform, and is best suited to building Java projects.
The most immediately noticeable difference between Ant and Make is that Ant uses XML to describe the build process and its dependencies, whereas Make has its Makefile format. By default the XML file is named
build.xml.Ant is an Apache project. It is open source software, and is released under the Apache Software License.
So in short, ant lets you use an XML based script to run a series of commands typically used to build software projects. It was originally designed to be “for Java, in Java” but it’s popularity and ease of use has created interest beyond the Java community. For flex, ant can be used for compiling ActionScript and Flex projects into SWFs, creating SWC files, generating documentation with ASDocs, and other actions associated with compiling.
There are a lot of great tutorials online that can cover the basics of how ant works so I’m not going to go into a general overview in this article. Instead, I’m going to try to focus on some of the practical aspects of getting a build set up when working with Flex. However, here are some links to the official ant documentation some helpful tutorials for the basics:
Another basics tutorial (this time for Flex)
After the jump, I’ll get into some of the ways that ant can be useful for Flash and Flex projects.
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Using XML Schemas in Eclipse / FlexBuilder
by Mims H Wright
UPDATE: After reading the entry by Misprintt on the SchemaManager and XMLDecoder more thoroughly, I felt the need to tell you all to go check it out! This is a very powerful undocumented feature of Flex (why undocumented?) that could potentially save loads of time on a larger project. Along with the rest of this article, you could automate the parsing of your XML files into bindable model classes with ease.
XML-Schema (.XSD extension) are documents used to describe the format of XML files. They are similar to DTD (Document type declaration) files but much more powerful.
While working on some XML documents for a Flash site, I stumbled across the XML-Schema editor for Eclipse. The editor shows the XSD as a graphical representation of the model that you’re editing that looks similar to a UML class diagram.
Here’s a great article on how it works.