FlexOOP

My company pushes code out to our dev, QA, and production servers via ANT scripts. They’re an excellent way to deliver your code in a reproducible fashion that takes away (most) of the human interaction necessary, and hopefully most of the spots where errors could be introduced. This method has been working great for our ColdFusion builds (as there’s nothing that gets compiled each time), but pushing out our Flex code has been more of a challenge.

We use subversion to version control all of our mxml and actionscript files, and also our swf files. Currently we build our swf files locally, deliver them to our ColdFusion stream, and check them into our SVN repository. This works great until you forget to update your Flex files before building your SWF (as I have done), removing functionality that another developer added. Not a huge issue, but by using some kind of automated build process, you can circumvent this issue very easily. This is where Antennae comes into play.

By adding a few xml files to your directory structure, you can use Antennae to handle the initial directory structure creation, html-wrapper, compiling, unit testing, and several other things that slip my mind right now

Hopefully soon I’ll be able to make some posts about how I managed to set this up that will assist others in automating their Flex builds.