timwalling.com

Well it’s actually more like AMES depending on what you decide to take from this. Ant, MTASC, Eclipse, and Swfmill.

I’ve been using eclipse as my actionscript authoring tool for a little while now, not compiling any work projects in mtasc, just using it since a lot of my development is made easier with the cvs and ant integration.

I decided to take a stab at using Ant to help compile a library in swfmill instead of relying on a batch file or typing it on the command line. I know that may not be a common task since you only need your library compiled once but it became more of a challenge just to see how close to a typical java project I could take actionscript.

Here’s a screenshot of the folder setup I quickly put together for this:

I wrote a build.xml file which you can right click on in Eclipse and have the integrated Ant execute the file. The library.xml file is the swfmill file you can setup for your library. There are a few params I setup in the build file, basically pointing to the folder structure I have, classpath, path to swfmill and mtasc, and one or two other things. I think it should be self-explanatory.

I’m including two build files. I don’t want to get in the way of what Flashout and ASDT is already providing compiling wise so I know some people may just want to use the swfmill only portion of the build file. The build.xml file I’ve included by default does a full build by first compiling the library with swfmill, then compiling your project with mtasc. The build-swfmill-only.xml file just does a library build in swfmill for you. You’ll need to rename it to build.xml if you decide to use it.

I’m outputting the swf to a build directory but you can easily customize all of this. I just wanted to get the ball rolling as far as playing with Ant and some of these open source flash tools and also just wanted to try it out as a proof of concept.

Download example with build files here

Suggestions and changes are welcome. I put this together after looking up a few things regarding Ant so it may not be the best implementation. I’m sure plenty of tech departments would love to finally get flash compiling integrated into their workflow and build process.