Before I Knew About Flex Libraries

I wanted to find a way to make my ActionScript library files into a SWC file for easy distribution. There are definitely ways to go about it, but I wanted to find a way that wouldn’t open a Pandora’s box of workarounds, learning curves, and bullshit. So, time for research.

First, I found the rather insane way of going about it by manually writing every single import statement into a document class. In this guy’s defense he is only doing one class and he is making a MXP out of it, so it’s different than what I was looking for.

I’ve heard about ANT tasks, now that I am a Eclipse and Flex user. So, I did some research on this and it seemed closer to what I was looking for. I found one or two places with some stuff to get me started. So I modified this one. After the learning curve blues, I got it to work, minus compiler warnings and a problem with the Vector class not in the Flex 3 SDK. It’s cool that ANT build files are XML so it feels familiar, but it’s a whole world to learn about.

Little did I know there was an answer closer to home. This is exactly what Flex Libraries are for. Built right into Flex. So simple, I should of looked into this first before going into new programming avenues. The one thing I don’t like about the Flex Library is that the SWC file takes the name of the project. There doesn’t seem to be any way to change it, I looked until late into the night for a renaming answer. So advantage ANT task on that. Also the Flex Library makes the SWC a derived file, and that doesn’t sync with my SVN repository. So, for now I am going with the Flex Library until I obtain the strength of an ANT. Here is the ANT task that I put together for what’s it worth.

<!--build.xml -->
<project name="AS3Library" basedir="." default="swc">
 
	<!-- load user configuration properties -->
	<property file="build.properties" />
	<taskdef resource="flexTasks.tasks" classpath="${FLEX_HOME}/ant/lib/flexTasks.jar" />
 
	<!-- create swc file base on config -->
	<target name="swc">
		<fileset id="sources" dir="${basedir}${input}">
			<include name="**/*.as"/>
		</fileset>
		<pathconvert property="classes" pathsep=" " refid="sources">
			<chainedmapper>
				<globmapper from="${basedir}${input}/*" to="*"/>
				<mapper type="package" from="*.as" to="*"/>
			</chainedmapper>
		</pathconvert>
		<echo message="compiling classes ${classes}"/>
		<compc output="${output}/${swc}.swc" include-classes="${classes}">
			<source-path path-element="${basedir}${input}"/>
		</compc>
	</target>
 
</project>

#build.properties
 
# location of flex sdk
FLEX_HOME = /Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3 Plug-in/sdks/3.2.0
 
# input location, can be blank of single dir with leading slash 
input =
 
# output folder, doesn't need slash
 
output = .
 
# name of the swc exported
swc = as3library