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Lauren Park - [10/31/07 04:07 PM ]
Deferred for Moxie.
Are you certain that you're not underestimating the value that such a plugin can have for the penetration of Flex in the enterprise application development world?
I mean, Flex is not meant to be used all alone, it has to integrate with backend modules at some point and the best technology I know for such an integration is Maven 2. Moreover, as Flex 3 gets Open Sourced, more and more third-party modules will appear like themes, component libraries, generic modules and so on. And that would be great if Adobe offered an official an standardized way not only to integrate but also to distribute all those dependencies, through a Maven repository for example. Anyway, I guess you're on a tight schedule for Flex 3 release and that you have plenty of other priorities. I just think that such a plugin, combined with FlexUnit and a central repository would be THE killer feature, at least for me. I couldn't agree more with you, Sebastien ! Maven integration is a must have for any enterprise java enabled technology.
I too would like to see Maven integration.
Reopening these bugs that were deferred Minor Enhancements
Agreed, a Maven plugin would be very nice and help to penetrate in to the enterprise world.
There are currently two open source Flex plugins for Maven in the works
http://www.israfil.net/projects/mojo/maven-flex2-plugin/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/mvnflex2plugin/ +1 for Adobe supported Maven repo It is true that there are two open source Maven plugins for Flex. The second one listed is actually the ServeBox plugin. http://www.servebox.com/foundry/doku.php?id=m2f2plugin. I have tried to get the ServeBox plugin to work on two separate occasions, failing both times. The plugin has serious problems and the documentation is abysmal. I've only tried the Israfil plugin once, but also found that it was intractable, also possibly because of the poor documentation.
All this to say that the two current offerings leave a lot to be desired in feature set, in quality and in documentation. Adobe could leverage either one of them and get them working properly. That would be fine with me. But in their current state they are hardly a substitute for a functioning Flex plugin. :-/ "Adobe could leverage either one of them and get them working properly."
100% agreed. I should have explained that I was posting the links to point out that there are a couple of projects that Adobe could potentially build on to get this done a bit faster :-) Peter,
The ServeBox plugin would not meet my needs either so I added a patch: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1861397&group_id=192807&atid=942884 1. Unit Tests will now run on Linux 2. -compiler.strict= is now configurable 3. Fix for library-path If you give this plugin another try, I might be able to help you get started. Thanks! Next time I have time to look sideways for 2 seconds I will give your patch a try...
The big problem I had with the ServeBox plugin was having to install all of the Flex dependencies in my artifact-repository and use their naming convention for the dependencies. The israfil plugin at least didn't require this extra step.
Unfortunately neither of these plugins work quite like I would like them to, so it would be really nice to see Adobe step up and address this issue. I do not understand why Adobe should support a maven2 plugin. I am using the Israfil plugin without any real trouble. I have not missed documentation on it, yet. If you think it needs features or better documentation, couldn't you try and submit a couple of patches, to support the good (and existing) work on Israfil? I would much rather have Adobe concentrate their effort on making the flex libraries more bug free, as in, focus on the *bugs* :-)
Maybe we need to support up and down votes so that Per can give this one a thumbs down vote. Anyone care to file a Jira feature request? :)
We also have the israfil plugin working to some extent, and are trying to submit patches to improve it. However, Flex Builder integration is really poor compared to the Java world. Unless there are ways for us to write Flex Builder plugins, only Adobe can provide the necessary hooks to integrate the two.
While it would be nice if Adobe could adopt one or both of the maven plugins and make them "official" or supported, that is not my personal requirement. I think letting the plugins grow on their own is sufficient for now if Adobe's resources are scarce, but I would like to see Adobe reach out and make the maven experience more integrated into Flex Builder, either by providing hooks and documentation, or additional functionality to make Flex Builder maven-aware. My vote on this issue to have Adobe support better integration between maven builds and Flex Builder. Right now we have to maintain by hand both sets of project files (maven pom.xml and .actionScriptProperties). I suppose someone could write a maven plugin to generate the required Flex Builder project files, and I hope Adobe would give them whatever configuration needed to do it properly. It would also be nice if libraries under Adobe's control were put in a proper maven repository so every maven project didn't have to create their own repositories. Even better if they could be looked up inside Flex Builder and automatically added to the library paths. Plus maven projects often use multiple source/resource directories, and Flex Builder currently handles that poorly. Unit-testing integration would be wonderful. Plus the ability to have a maven build trigger a recompile of dependent projects. Or have a maven build kicked off when a file is saved in Flex Builder. The m2eclipse and Q4E projects both have Eclipse plugins that work for Java, and should be able to be modified to work with Flex Builder. Even if Adobe doesn't take direct ownership of these things, providing interest, encouragement, support, documentation, etc. would be a welcome first step. @Logan:
Hmmm, this is a tough one, but I can see what you mean. But I am not sure which path will be the better. For once, doing IDE integration with maven is a bitch. There isn't a single IDE, which does this well enough. IDEA comes close with its 7 release, but not close enough. I should also note, that I am not a flex builder user myself. I try to keep out of a dependency on the (closed) builder, in effect making maven my build tool, not the IDE. On the projects I work on, it is simply not a choice, to force the developers into using a certain IDE. Anyways, I do see your needs. One solution would be for adobe to open up the builder plugins and features. But somehow I do not see that coming around the corner :-( We at eBay wrote our own Maven 2.0 integration plugin with Flex in Java
We found the current open source versions competently inadequate and unusable in real Enterprise Development We wrote our own and found that writing your own Maven plugin for Flex in Java is THE way to go, but it was development we wish Adobe had invested in. Our build is very complicated with the build system generating code that needs to be complied on the fly, as well as building our codebase against mutiple Flex SDKs. Our plugin allows us to pass parameters to the multiple Flex compilers by specifying XML tags. Our Plugin also can compile our code against multiple Flex SDKs in the same build cycle, just by setting the tags in the POM file for our app. Please, do not ship Flex 3.0 unless it comes with a comprehensive Maven plugin for Flex, or developers who have limited resources are stuck with the buggy open source versions from very small companies with limited support options Thank you Tony, your requirements for building seem quite complex, at least more complex than the average flex project, I think. Maybe that is why writing your own build plugin was right for you. My guess would be, that Adobe wouldn't have produced a plugin, that had met your requirements out of the box.
Isn't it better as Adobe is doing it now, by release a compiler api, which should make it easier, to produce a plugin? BTW: You mention you found the existing open plugins "buggy" and "inadequate". Have you thought about contributing your plugin code, to make them better? Please, Adobe, do *not* hold back flex3 because of a missing official maven plugin from Adobe. Our enterprise applications and the resulting build environments are also extremely complex and the lack of a "working" Flex plugin is one of our real frustrations. Even with my team of 50, I have a very hard time justifying taking someone off to build my own plugin - I have a backlog of hundreds of customer facing stories that drive our revenue that I have to put a significantly higher priority on. Adobe needs to find a way to support this if they are to continue to cement their lead in the development community over one of the other technology choices, who while significantly behind now, tends to win in the end. And I loudly second the motion to put Adobe's own libraries in Maven and make Flex builder support this much better.
Per,
Yes , I think I will write my own Maven plugin (seperate from my client) and contribute it. Adobe BTW is not releasing an compiler API as you state but is open sourcing the Flex compilers in the 3.0 release, theis has no impact on writing a Maven 2.0 plugin. Maven has its own Java API. It is fairly easy to learn and very powerfull Although having the source code fro the compilers will be educational, it probably will not have an impact on Flex tool writers The way to integrate with Fex builder at the moment is to write an Eclipse plugin. Flex builder inself comes as 33 Eclipse plugins We build from Java using java.exe and pass it the compilers (mxmc or compc) as jar files to do the actual build This alows us to control the build extremely well and is mre effective than writing very complex build scripts as most of the heavy lifting is done in java code wrapped up as a Maven plugin. Let me know if you have any questions? There is a new option...
http://code.google.com/p/flex-mojos/ Still under development, but is possible to compile, with RSL and some other stuff. Working on get support to incremental builds. VELO I really would appreciate if someone like Adobe could provide the plugin as I feel it would be more reliable. Currently we are looking at all the options available and each one of them require some kind of tweaks to make it run and we wouldnot prefer to have the uncertainity of the build system failing in the near future when some new dependencies come in.
We would really appreciate if someone in Adobe could throw some light on the current status of the issue. Thanks and Regards, Hafiz Too many options it seems, and neither one is considered stable based on all the feedbacks listed here. I for one truly agree that Adobe should come out with a plugin for it.
I have just started learning Flex, got my Flex Builder Alpha 3 installed and the first thing went into my mind before I ever started a tiny project was "CREATE A POM". Now, whether it sounds scary or not, Maven has subconsciously become an acceptable/standard practice. For organized projects, for CI, etc. Maven plugin FTW. - yc We are migrating our enterprise application's UI from JSP to Flex. Since our build process is Maven based we are facing real trouble in building our application. At present we are using ServeBox, Adobe's Ant task as well as some custom batches to build our application. None of the available Maven plugins or Ant tasks fully support all the available build options.
We would really love see Adobe come up with a Maven plugin which makes Flex integration into enterprise application's really smooth. We also support the idea of putting all of Adobe's swcs into a central Maven repository. Thanks and regards, Kalyan Sarkar i'd like to officially add in my request to have this feature. we could argue for days if maven is any good, but for large organizations with many projects/subproject, binaries source repositories are really not an option, they are fact of life and maven is one of the best tools out there to incorporate that into the build process.
I am working I am working on Maven integration for Eclipse (m2eclipse) [1], which is also proposed as an Eclipse project [2] and will eventually became part of the Eclipse release train. More over, several commercial tools based on Eclipse already using m2eclipse (e.g. JBuilder).
We just added extensible project configuration framework [3] to m2eclipse that can be used for integrating various tools. Basically, it allows to register custom project configurators that would read Maven plugin configuration which can then use the Flex Builder API for configuring project in Eclipse to match Maven configuration. So, after project import, Flex project is ready to work in the IDE. We are also planning to add support for going other way around, i.e. creating Maven's pom.xml using settings from Eclipse project (e.g. Flex Builder settings) in order to simplify Maven project configuration that would work for the command line Maven build and make it really easy to build and test Flex apps on continuous integration servers. We started prototyping Flex configurator using Flex Builder 3 API for configuring projects (com.adobe.flexbuilder.project.*), but could really use help to map Flex Builder configuration API to Maven plugin configuration [4]. Also, anyone interested in Maven integration for Flex Builder (or Eclipse IDE), please comment and add your use cases to the wiki [3]. [1] http://m2eclipse.codehaus.org/ [2] http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/m2e/ [3] http://docs.codehaus.org/display/M2ECLIPSE/Other+Ideas+and+Use+Cases#OtherIdeasandUseCases-FlexBuilderbridge [4] http://docs.codehaus.org/display/M2ECLIPSE/Flex+Builder+Configuration+API I think this is a must for Flex as more enterprises are moving to maven. I want to be able to define my flex project as a module inside the whole enterprise app and then use FlexBuilder for daily work and use Maven install command to generate a war file from the project. It should not be a big task to create an official maven plugin for the flex. The only thing is chanding the FlexBuilder to support the Maven project layout. At the moment I am evaluating the FlexBuilder and I think I will not buy it . Because I am using maven, I should still maintain my own project layout outside of the FlexBuilder. So I would not be able to use the FlexBuilder as a proper RAD environment.
Cheers Behrang http://www.beyondng.com Hi Behrang,
M2eclipse guys are working on get maven support to flexbuilder. M2eclipse will read flex-mojos configuration at pom.xml and use this configurations on flexbuilder projects. You can follow progress on this issue: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNGECLIPSE-598 Any news I will post http://blog.flex-mojos.info/2008/05/15/flex-mojos-on-m2eclipse/ VELO This is essential for Flex at this point. Where's the Maven support? Put the artifacts into the public repository
Another vote for Blaze DS jars in a public repository.
FYI, there is another issue in BlazeDS JIRA for that: https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/BLZ-71
Maven support is really a big plus for continuous integration
Deferred for Gumbo as the Flex-Mojos project should be taking things along. Please consider submitting patches for some of the bugs that the project needs to continue.
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Feature Request
Deferred
C
A Maven2 plugin to integrate Flex into enterprise projects and continuous integration