Latest Tweets:
This is a rant so be forewarned.
Flex is great. Adobe is cool. I’ll preface this with that.
The project that I’m working on uses a few 3rd party Flex libraries. as3corelib, (for JSON en/de-coding), as3flexunit, and the almighty Cairngorm.
These libs, all from Adobe, are inconsistent in their distribution and viable use within FlexBuilder, (the IDE for Flex based on Eclipse). We have wrestled for days on end on how to include these libs in our own project source.
Cairngorm is clearly organized by experts. Download the source and import the project into your workspace and you’re good to go. Fire off the ANT script and with one command you’ve packaged the source, docs and binary into zip files for distribution. The Cairngorm source has versioned the Eclipse project files that the others have not. Is this good? I say yes because I did not have to go through multiple steps to create a new project and build it in Flex Builder.
Could I have built using just the ANT script? Yes. But ANT binaries are not part of the source. Now I need to get ANT to build. Am I asking to much for one download, issue a command and build? No. Cairngorm gave me options. Build with ANT or FlexBuilder. But it did not include ANT, and it did not have a publicly accessible SVN repository from which to pull the source with Cairngorm, (the others did).
Adobe — please find a consistent way to distribute your open source libs. If you want to attract new developers and promote the use of your IDE, (and tout cross-platform dev), then include ANT scripts, FlexBuilder project files and public SVN access so we can link them as externals to our own.
Thanks
