Doing Flex

FlexMojos

After 127 votes on jira requesting maven support cf. SDK-12730,
the flex team finally announced their pick is flexmojos (*)

At the Flex Community Feedback Forum we once again heard a strong demand for Flex integration with Maven.
We, unfortunately, do not have the resources to work on this feature, but given the high demand, we have changed this feature request's milestone to "SDK Community Fix Candidates"

• we believe this is a good project for the community to work on.

If you're interested in this feature we hope you'll contribute to the Flex-Mojos project (http://code.google.com/p/flex-mojos/) that has been working on a Maven plugin for Flex. In particular, they are looking for help to provide better AIR support. For further discussion, please post to the forums (http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b7e646).

Good for me/us, our pick(*) (for fna) is flexmojos as well, the other good news are

• version 3 of this maven plugin is now being sponsored by sonatype (VELO the author of flexmojos has been hired by sonatype a few months ago)
• on top of that, m2eclipse support for FB is coming . cf. http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNGECLIPSE-598

Other challenges:

• provide a maven archetype for quickstarting BlazeDS projects cf. BLZ-44
  • fna provides it now , but the lcds archetype is yet to come
• Put BlazeDS WAR and libraries in a public Maven repository cf. BLZ-71
  • same for lcds, but now at least internally the nexus tsi server is providing that
• Apps in non-main source folders are not yet supported, that sucks for maven projects cf. FB-8757
• this other compilers bug can be annoying as well SDK-15406,
  • the compilers tells you have Error: Invalid Embed directive in stylesheet when you are just missing a dependency or a class.

Maven, Eclipse and FlexBuilder

Maven has now failry good maven support thanks to M2Eclipse (**)

• its Remote update site is : http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update/

One of them is to add a M2_REPO linked resource that will be use in the FB build classpath.

Flex and Maven, further reading

I gathered quite a few links and tutorials at

• on my blog and on fna
• on my delicious

Finding your artefacts, building your repositories

The next challenge when you are building project on top of Adobe products is that, none of them are released on maven central repositories.
You have to find (and often create) your archetypes elsewhere.

Non official Maven Adobe repositories

Here is the list I came up with, so far:

• FlexMojos (the flex plugin for maven) hosts some open source Adobe artefacts as well
  
  
  • http://svn.sonatype.org/flexmojos/repository/

• Fna : I've been also creating an open source repository on our fna project
  • http://fna.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/fna/fna_m2_repository

What I do is that I proxy and aggregate those repositories with other Adobe proprietary LiveCycle ES and lcds artefacts through a Nexus Maven Repository Manager for my entreprise projects.

What about you ?

Next Challenges : groupIds, artifactIds and dependencies standardisation

What groupId for livecyle ? lcds ? blazeds ? flexunit ? cairngorm ?
What are their dependencies ?
I should not be the one to say, though I did (within the fna repositories at least for flexunit, cairngorm, blazeds and a few other open source flex libraries)

But that should be done by the product team.
Today it's not. It's a shame and it's error prone.

So go and vote for those bugs :

• http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FXU-27


• http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-14725


• http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-12730


• http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-15406


• http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-8757
• http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/BLZ-9


• http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/BLZ-44


• http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/BLZ-71

(*) : Though, alternatives exist :like http://www.servebox.org/maven-flex-plugin/ looks also good to me, have you tried it ?
(**) : Though, alternatives like q4e looks also good to me, have you tried it ?

I had an an hour and half to cover :

• a basic presentation of the flash and AIR platforms,

• cool UX flash/flex/AIR demos

• the latest great features of flash 10

• and flex, and its ecosystem from a Java developer perspective (mvn framework, testing libraries, building and quality tools, blazeds, lcds)

I ended up the session presenting fna maven archetypes. I prepared some new fna features for this talk. Those features are still under development but are already available in SNAPSHOT releases :

• I added flexbuilder support to some of my archetypes. (Taking as a start the simpler of all the fna archetypes, the flex-library-archetype)

• I also upgraded the archetypes with flexmojos 2.0 support and up to the latest Flex SDK

Have a look atmy other blog to look up for details and for the presentation I uploaded on slideshare

• http://code.google.com/p/fna/wiki/blazedsXdocletSpringHibernateMvnArchetype

• Add my maven repository to your repositories list in your maven configuration file,
• Run 3 maven command lines :
  • mvn archetype:create .... (to create your new flex blazeds spring hibernate multi-modules project)
  • mvn install (at the root of your newly created project : to compile and package it)
  • mvn jetty:run-exploded (at the root of java_webapp module : to run and test your web app at http://localhost:8080 )