Switch from Ant to Maven and Flexmojos -- Thoughts?

[Brian]

Morning guys,

Velo has offered to help the FlexUnit team migrate their build scripts
from Ant to Maven using FlexMojos. I'm fairly confident the
transition would work out and I'm always open to the help with the
build. The only thing I can think that may be a challenge in moving
to Maven is the delay in getting the latest Adobe SDK that works with
Maven correctly. Where the Ant build works out of the box with the
SDK distributions, with Maven we'd have to rely on Adobe's ability to
produce a solid SDK distribution that Velo can deploy. That being
said, thus far Velo has been able to remain on top of the issues and
typically get working SDKs out for the community.

Anyone object or have opinions about migrating from Ant to Maven?
I've sent the thread to Velo as well, so he may be able to help answer
any questions as well.

-Brian

[Michael Labriola]

The delay is a big deal and one of my primary objections We need to
test and verify with the next SDK months and months before Adobe will
do anything (even if there is a chance it is done right) with Maven.
Perhaps I am wrong, but I usually only see a maven option after an SDK
is released. That would effectively tank our ability to work with
Adobe.

Mike

[Brian]

@Mike - Velo can probably speak to the delay a bit more, but right now
4.5.0.17855 is available on the FlexMojos artifact repo. I think the
only that doesn't work with it is producing native AIR bundles using
ADT, which we don't do. I don't necessarily disagree, but what's the
definition of released (e.g. - released on opensource.adobe.com as a
release or a nightly)? We would have to rely on Velo to publish a
nightly to the artifact repo, if we needed it. Maybe we could see if
he'd push nightly's on demand for us, though he's running on the OSS
fuel just like us.

-Brian

[velo]

Hey,

@Mike
About flex SDK, well, adobe isn't really releasing night builds for
quite sometime, besides HERO, but still no real night builds, they
just publish a build or two and as soon I noticed it I published... I
think last flex SDK I had published even before the official
announcement.... unfortunately 4.5.0.17689 is buggy, not that I can
do much in situations like that. (In fact the blame goes for AIR 2.5
adt.jar that include tons of code that shouldn't be there). Anyway,
you still can use air 2.0 and air 2.5 is usable is you are willing to
edit adt.jar.

If you has access to real night builds and need to use that, I can
share with you the tool I use to publish flex SDK into flex
repository. You can have a new FDK into your flex repo in no time. I
have some concern about releasing this tool to general users, but we
can chat about it.

Also, flexmojos is deattached from flex SDK, you can use flex 2.0.1 to
4.5.0. I'm usually bumping the flex version used by flexmojos ASAP,
so I can support any new feature. You can even build pure as3
projects if you wanna.

Lemme know if you guys need any help with that.


VELO

[Michael A. Labriola]

Velo,

Thanks. I am aware of the gpl issues as well in the latest builds and have also escalated it to Adobe

Mike

velo <vel...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey,

VELO

Notice: This transmission is intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged or confidential. Any dissemination, distribution or copying of this transmission by anyone other than the intended recipient is strictly prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify the sender immediately by e-mail or telephone and delete the original transmission. Thank you.

[Marvin Froeder]

I think I did manage to make some noise about it :D

BTW, the motivation that lead Brian and I to start this conversation about changing flexunit build to maven is related to test running...
Both flexmojos and flexunit teams maintain a test runner structure.  I think we only have to gain if we could merge that into a single project/structure.  If we had that, flexmojos would gain amf socket message from flexunit and flexunit would get coverage support from flexmojos....

Besides, it is likely that we would even be able to share code with IDEA or FDT, making 4 teams life easier ;)

VELO

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 1:27 PM, Michael A. Labriola <mlab...@digitalprimates.net> wrote:

Velo,

Thanks. I am aware of the gpl issues as well in the latest builds and have also escalated it to Adobe

Mike

[Michael A. Labriola]

Yeh, I see the benefits for sure. My biggest concerns revolve around Adobe and their efforts to embrace Maven. Right now the SDK is still ant and that was always part of the reason I pushed Brian to stay with ant.

 

Brian, I am assuming this has the added benefit of solving our various dependency problems in our build process. What would it take effort wise to get things migrated?

[Marvin Froeder]

Well, thanks to their ant build they manage to publish a closed source project containing GPL code :D

I must be honest here, I don't see adobe migrating from ant....  from the little I know the Flex SDK codebase it has some many bad practices (on the maven point of view at least) that would be a too much exhaustive process.  On ant you just say do this, do that, do, do, do, almost a script languagem.... on maven you say, this is a jar project and it figures out what to do....  but maven won't figure out that a single jar project must produces 10 jars....  not saying it is not possible, just saying I don't have any hopes. =D

Brian, if you need any help just ping me.

VELO

[Michael A. Labriola]

Sorry, I didn't mean them migrating away from ant... I mean them not causing problems by not even acknowledging it.

[Marvin Froeder]

Ow, then it is likely that will happen more often then it should....  air 2.5 is here to prove that.

I'm curious on how much time will take to an ASAP fix
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-28348

VELO

[Michael A. Labriola]

I hope not too long. I have been watching the buzz on that one from a few sides.

 

In either case, once Brian has a chance to respond, I am guessing we will move toward maven so long as no one else here has a compelling argument against it.

 

Just need to schedule this with our other tasks for an upcoming release

Mike

[Brian]

I'm not sure of all the migration work needed to get to Maven since
we'll have to really tweak FM because of all the non-customary things
we do. That being said, I think it'd be easiest to look into doing
this for 4.2 and let 4.1 go out with our current Ant build. We have a
stop-gap solution in place to deploy artifacts to Sonatype manually so
we should be ok for Maven folks who just want to use the libraries.
Probably could do a side-by-side comparison in a branch to validate,
but I don't see a rush fwiw.

I'm interested to hear from other devs on the list as well, to see if
they have a preference. Even though the user base for Maven in the
Flex community is growing, there are a lot of folks that use Ant and
contribute back using Ant to build their sources. Anyone else want to
chime in?

-Brian

On Nov 1, 3:58 pm, "Michael A. Labriola"

<mlabri...@digitalprimates.net> wrote:
> I hope not too long. I have been watching the buzz on that one from a
> few sides.
>
> In either case, once Brian has a chance to respond, I am guessing we
> will move toward maven so long as no one else here has a compelling
> argument against it.
>
> Just need to schedule this with our other tasks for an upcoming release
>
> Mike
>
> From: flexunit-c...@googlegroups.com
> [mailto:flexunit-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Marvin
> Froeder
> Sent: Monday, November 01, 2010 2:55 PM
> To: flexunit-c...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: Switch from Ant to Maven and Flexmojos -- Thoughts?
>
> Ow, then it is likely that will happen more often then it should....
> air 2.5 is here to prove that.
>

> I'm curious on how much time will take to an ASAP fixhttp://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-28348

>
> VELO
>
> On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 5:47 PM, Michael A. Labriola
>

> <mlabri...@digitalprimates.net> wrote:
>
> Sorry, I didn't mean them migrating away from ant... I mean them not
> causing problems by not even acknowledging it.
>
> From: flexunit-c...@googlegroups.com
> [mailto:flexunit-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Marvin
> Froeder
> Sent: Monday, November 01, 2010 2:46 PM
>
> To: flexunit-c...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: Switch from Ant to Maven and Flexmojos -- Thoughts?
>
> Well, thanks to their ant build they manage to publish a closed source
> project containing GPL code :D
>
> I must be honest here, I don't see adobe migrating from ant....  from
> the little I know the Flex SDK codebase it has some many bad practices
> (on the maven point of view at least) that would be a too much
> exhaustive process.  On ant you just say do this, do that, do, do, do,
> almost a script languagem.... on maven you say, this is a jar project
> and it figures out what to do....  but maven won't figure out that a
> single jar project must produces 10 jars....  not saying it is not
> possible, just saying I don't have any hopes. =D
>
> Brian, if you need any help just ping me.
>
> VELO
>
> On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 5:33 PM, Michael A. Labriola
>

> <mlabri...@digitalprimates.net> wrote:
>
> Velo,
>
> Thanks. I am aware of the gpl issues as well in the latest builds and
> have also escalated it to Adobe
>
> Mike
>