Update: fixed point of this article. 😉
It is daunting task to build project in Flash Builder over and over again, fix bugs, create build and produce release build. You change libs in your system and it screws up whole project and you have to start from the scratch 🙁 . It takes at least whole day to reestablish proper build environment.
Nightmare for developers, lost budget and time for managers.
Adobe folks know this and they use Ant to build projects. Yea, it’s good, but little bit crude. It’s like moving from stone age to bronze age. It is BIG improvement once build.xml is in place and it saves a lot of time. But you have to find right Flex SDK, libraries, this swc, that swc, this certificate. Yay. Much better, just half a day is lost.
Java civilization already moved away from distant bronze-age and for several years they’ve been evolving Maven project. Ok, so how fast is Maven in establishing complete build environment? Very fast.
Download: Maven3, extract it, go to your project (with pom.xml), type e.g.: mvn install.
Bang! And you’ve got AIR package.
No manual downloads, no extraction of SDK, no manual copy of files back and forward.
Where is the hidden magic? It’s in Flexmojos project from Sonatype.
The only problem is to create good pom.xml. Stay tuned, there will be more articles about this topic. 🙂
