It should speed up the time it takes to fire up a flex project.

Still, it was fun building it from source and seeing that work! :) I’ll see if I still have the build log files so that I can post the files as you suggested.

It’s a shame the Flash player doesn’t offer a headless version, like Java does. I wonder if this is something the Flex/Flash team will add support for in later releases so that we can enjoy automated Flex builds/tests in *nix server environments (where they are most likely to live, IMO). I doubt they imagined that somebody would build a unit test environment for Flex, but since the Flash player is already cross-platform, one would imagine it would be possible to take the extra leap and make a headless version.

I may have a few questions for you on the plugin for my demo next Tuesday. If anything comes up, I’ll post them to the mailing list.

2nd point is about FlexUnit. I haven’t integrated support for flexunit, because in the environments that I have needed the plugin, builds were automated and headless (no gui, no user logged in). FlexUnit invokes the flash player, which requires a graphical context, and (on most O/S’) a logged-in user. You can fiddle with virtual framebuffer magic on linux, but I didn’t want to tie the plugin to something that requires that much system installation magic, and that was so platform specific.

I’m looking into creating a lightweight xUnit implementation based on the ECMAScript reference interpreter, so that you can at least unit test your actionscript code (the non-graphical stuff). There are lots of threads about unit vs. integration vs. system testing on the flexcoders list that I wont replicate here.

Glad you got some use out of the post.

I have been playing with the FlexUnit Ant tasks this evening, and I’d really like to see the code from this integrated in with the Maven 2 plugin. I’ll have to see if Peter Martin will let us use the code.

If so, perhaps Christian will let me contribute a little to the Flex plugin. I’d like to get my head around Maven’s plugin architecture, and this is as good an excuse as any.

Thanks for this article, it cleared up a few things for me. You should join Christians users group at http://groups.google.com/group/israfil-mojo-users
if you do decide that this is the better tool.

Christian has been very responsive and helpful, and I’m sure this tool can mature quite a bit if we help him out. It’s a much needed addition to any java project that has some flash sprinkled in. :)

I haven’t messed with that yet, but it is supposed to handle it, as well as swc-based dependencies.

A quick review of the usage notes indicates that you might need to specify a .flexLibProperties file for SWC projects, which I imagine holds the references to the included classes. If this is the case, it looks like a pain in the ass (but maybe o more so than the Ant equivalent).

I’ll have to play with it and let you know.

Do you know how well the plug in handles creating libraries (swc). I know the ant version is just an abstraction on the underlying compiler, which has a few pitfalls. For instance you have to explicitly tell it each class/file you want included into the library.