Practicing Continuous Integration on Flash Projects : Automation
In the previous part one of my series of "Practicing Continuous Integration on Flash Projects" I explained how to set up a Flash project for CI. In this part of the series I'm going to explain how automation is achieved using Apache Ant and the Flex SDK.
Introduction
One of the most import parts of CI is the need to automate the build process. Building a Flash project means, at the very least, compiling your code into a SWF file. There are various ways to compile a SWF, but in order to be able to automate the process its best to use the mxmlc compiler thats part of the Flex SDK. If you are using the Flash IDE to compile your projects I would say that CI is not for you and/or your organization. However, thats not to say you should stop reading or stop using the IDE. I still use the IDE on nearly all my projects, just differently than I used to. Anything that requires timeline animation or is just easier to draw using the IDE I publish into a SWF. I then import the symbols from that SWF into my project when I compile with mxmlc. Explaining how to do this and just exactly how to use the mxmlc compiler is outside the scope of this blog series but you can learn more about using it on the Flex 4 product support page.
Practicing Continuous Integration on Flash Projects : Project Structure
In the previous part of my series "Practicing Continuous Integration on Flash Projects" I described what CI is and its best practices. In this next part I will explain how to set up a project to make the CI process run smoothly.
Introduction
Practicing CI relies heavily on a consistent process. Having a well defined project structure will definitely be an important piece to the puzzle as well. Flash projects are unique in how they are structured and any seasoned developer has their preferred way of doing things. Regardless of if you are a seasoned developer or new to all of this, this part of my series is meant to serve as a simple guideline to developers who are new to the practice of CI. I truly believe that having a simple and consistent project structure is extremely important to being able to make a project portable and easily built on various platforms. That being said, I've created a very simple project called CIExample. Its under version control at google code. This is the project that I will be referencing throughout the rest of this series.
Practicing Continuous Integration on Flash Projects : What Is CI?
Welcome to my blog series, "Continuous Integration and Flash". This series is a case study of all the things I learned about practicing Continuous Integration. As a reader of this series, you are most likely interested in Continuous Integration in some way or another. After reading at least this first entry I hope to give you a better understanding of what Continuous Integration is and how its practiced. In this series I will also explain how to set up a project, automate the build process, and set up a CI server using Amazon EC2. For the remainder of this series I will mostly use the acronym CI when referring to the term Continuous Integration.
Proof-Of-Concept: A Simple UI for Running Ant Targets Built with Adobe AIR 2.0
I've really been getting into Apache Ant lately. I really enjoy using it to manage various build processes when working on Flash projects. So when I found out that AIR 2.0 can invoke a native process I immediately thought that it'd be cool to learn how to use that capability to make an app that presents a UI for a given Ant build file and then be able to run its various targets from that UI. Thus I created a simple application that I'm calling, for the time being, rANT.
It took me a while to figure things out entirely but in the end I'm happy to have learned how to use flash.desktop.NativeProcess. Unfortunately, in order to realize my idea faster, I ignored the fact that the application would really depend on a user's system. For instance, I have Ant installed in such a way that its available as a system command so I can run it from the command line like any old DOS command. I know not everyone is setup like this andwould require knowing where Ant is installed on a user's system. Additionally, Ant doesn't come with a good old fashioned .exe file for Windows so I invoked Ant via C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe. Here's some pseudo code that comes straight from my application...
Another (little) thing was that Adobe isn't very clear about the fact that you need to package your application in a native installer in order to use the 'extendedDesktop' profile. Took me a while to figure it out, but the good news its pretty darn easy to package a native installer from a .air file.
At any rate, its by no means ready for the public, but I wanted to share my work thus far to see if anyone else would be interested in an application such as this. So here's how it looks and works so far:
When you start the application you're presented with a screen that allows you to load a build file...
Once the file is loaded it displays information about the build file and a list of its available targets...
You can then select a task and run it. Here you can see the output in the TextArea component from when I ran the compile-docs target...
Some of my targets require arguments to be passed in for them to work. For instance, my compile-and-debug target requires a debugLevels parameter that specifies the various debug levels (info, status, etc.) to output to the debugging console (which happens to be de MonsterDebugger). So I created a little panel that lets me specify parameters for the target...
Lastly, here you can see the output from the compile-and-debug target after running it with the passed in parameters...
So thats it! And if anyone thinks this would be useful to them leave some comments and/or ideas.
P.S. I built it with robotlegs 
On Learning
I'm at the point with Flash/ActionScript where I feel like I can no longer move forward in learning, at least not while gaining that awesome feeling of "No shit?! That's how it's done?!"
The Adobe v. Apple stand off isn't helping this. But over all, I don't think the public opinion of Flash really matters. If Flash sticks it out, I can still build banner ads, video players and microsites until I'm blue in the face. It's just nice to expand my options.
So what to learn and how to learn it?
I've picked up books on the iPhone SDK/Cocoa, Android, PHP and C++. Yes, it's quite an ambitious step to branch off and become a "general developer" vs. a Flash Developer. But I think over all, it should help.
Problems, and where you come in..
The biggest issue I'm having with learning new languages and frameworks is that every book, online doc, etc... has these drawn-out examples that start off with "How Conditionals Work" and end with advanced topics like "Dealing with Web Services." I know how programming languages work, so I end up getting bored and skipping over pages, often overlooking some crucial information about the product. By the end, I'm finishing their example just to finish it and often forgetting what I had learned.
So how you finding ways to learn and ways to get around this general "I already know this..." mentality?
What resources are you using to learn new languages?
How did you get to the point where everything clicks?
I realize these are pretty general, but I'm curious, so I must ask.