Blog on Programming

Here is a quick sample on how to build a simple Flex "hello world" project with Ant. The "hello world" project contains a src folder with one Flex application file and an Ant build.xml file: ./project_home/ ./src/ app.mxml build.xml The app.mxml is the main module of the project. It simply has a label with a "Hello World!" text: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute"> <mx:Label text="Hello World!"/> </mx:Application> Here is the build.xml source: <?xml version="1.0"?> <project name="fx_practice7" default="all"> <!-- Init the build process --> <target name="init" unless="initialized"> <!-- Name of project and version --> <property name="FLEX_HOME" location="/Users/mykola/java/flex"/> ...

I found new macrodef feature in ant extremely useful in my code development. It allows me to reuse lots of code and save time. Here is a quick example on how to use macrodef and why it is cool Let’s say I have several web applications that I need to deploy on the same web server. If I use a regular Ant task, I would have to replicate these lines of code for every application: <wldeploy action="deploy" verbose="${verbose}" debug="${debug}" name="myApp" source="${output.dir}/myApp.war" user="${admin.username}" password="${admin.password}" adminurl="${adminurl}" targets="myWebSiteDomain" /> I know it does not look that bad, but this is just a short sample. In a real world case, I also need to compile the application, generate a WAR file, deploy it, generate a client stub, etc. So, the Ant build.xml tends to grow very fast. In one o...