Support for Linked Resources?

[Luke Bayes]

Hey Jon,

Thanks for the interest, I'm glad it's working for you!

I'm trying to keep questions on the discussion group so that other folks can find the answers as they come up, so please join the list (even though there are only a handful of us on there right now!).

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "linked resources"... We have exposed all of the features of MTASC via the mtasc rake task. We also provided a simple starting .project file that should allow you to simply import it to FDT, but we don't have round-trip support going.

Meaning, if you edit your project configuration in FDT, you'll need to make comparable edits in the rakefile.

I've been struggling with this issue (keeping DRY) for months now and actually started out generating the rakefile from .project files. I've since moved away from this because many people don't use Eclipse, and rake is much, much more expressive, not to mention, pleasant to edit. For another approach, I was considering going the other way and generating .project files from rake files, but this actually turns out to be pretty difficult and starts up a battle with running instances of Eclipse.

At this point, I've settled on stashing hand-created .project files in the templates that get copied, but not really relying on them after that. There is probably some code in asclass that still loads and reads the .project file in order to get a project name or something, but that will likely be moved. I think we also look for the existence of .project file (as one way) to determine where your project is.

I hope that helps, please let me know if you have more questions!


Thanks,

Luke Bayes
AsProject

Hey, I'm very interested in your project, I love fdt and your project will certainly speed up my workflow. I'm wondering does asproject support linkedResources. I did see the place for them in the ".project" file but it doesn't appear to compile in. I get this error:

C:\SVN\TLBflash\as2\projects\FooBar\project>rake

(in C:/SVN/TLBflash/as2/projects/FooBar/project)

mtasc.exe -cp src -frame 2 -main -version 8 -swf bin/FooBarSkin.swf -out bin/FooBar.swf FooBar

src/FooBar.as:9: characters 15-24 : type error class not found : tlb.geom.Polar

SAFlashPlayer.exe ./bin/FooBar.swf

[trace] Warning: Reference to undeclared variable, 'FooBar'

[trace] FooBar Instantiated

[jon....@gmail.com]

Yes, that answered my question exactly, and I've edited the
rakefile.rb to use my lib, it works great. What do you think about a
method similar to "asclass" that would update the rake file
and .project to add a class path, like "asclasslinked".

[Luke Bayes]

I'm glad that worked out!

There are some issues with automating those compiler edits...

1) If Eclipse is open, it doesn't seem to know when it's project file has been edited, and when it is subsequently closed, it clobbers the file on disk with what it last had in memory. (At least that's what my installation has done - 3.2 on Win XP)

2) It's difficult to know which rake task you would like to add paths to. Ali and I have been working on Modular swfs for most of this year and our rake files have gotten sort of big. In these cases, it seems a lot easier to just go into the rake file and add the path to the appropriate task, especially since you'd need to know a little bit about rake in order to configure the automatic action. Even for simple projects, we have two build tasks (main and test).

3) Not everyone uses Eclipse, so we're trying to build tools that stand along-side whatever development environment you choose. Some Eclipse-specific features would definitely be nice, but for now, we're trying to get the environment-agnostic foundation in place. I tossed those .project files in there mostly as an experiment in the hope that we'd be able to share .project files in SVN (This turned out to not be the case). But the seemed helpful for quickly getting a project started.



Thanks,


Luke Bayes
AsProject

[Jon Adams]

That makes a lot of sense, thanks for all your work if i can help with
anything let me know, though I don't know ruby. Good luck, and thanks
for the help.