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asbeans: A Sample Hamachi Module for ActionScript Codegen

In conjunction with a talk I just gave at 360Flex on code generation, I’ve posted a proof-of-concept Hamachi module for generating ActionScript value objects and Cairngorm command/event classes. It’s called asbeans (downloadable from the link you just read). Here are the slides — at least, a backup draft of them, after PowerPoint turned the final version into a zero-length file.

(Hamachi is a really cool open-source project developed by my colleague Nate Abramson, one of the smartest people ever. It could be loosely described as a code generator generator.)

To install asbeans, unpack it in the samples/ directory of the hamachi-0.1 distribution (right next to the simplebeans/ directory).

Disclaimer: asbeans is just a very simple example of how to use Hamachi to generate AS code, but not really a full-blown system. It does generate code that compiles, but I don’t use Cairngorm much and I have not actually used the code it generates in an application.

At Allurent, we do use Hamachi to generate code that we rely on, though! Just not with this simple asbeans module. We have other, more complex modules that generate web service definitions, HTML documentation, and so on. Pretty cool.

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Antennae: Powerful Ant Templates for Flex Projects

The Antennae open source project (now hosted at Google Code) is a set of templates for building complex Flex projects with Ant. It is intended to give anyone a running start on a workable, extensible way to use Ant that will scale to very complex development projects. It includes:

• Macro tasks for invoking mxmlc and compc (at the moment I don’t recommend the Ant Tasks from Adobe Labs, though that should change)
• Readymade templates for application projects and library projects
• A robust system for importing and exporting assets from one project to another
• A solid way to compose projects inside “container” projects
• Dependency checking on sources and libraries to avoid unneeded recompilation
• Handling for HTML page token substitution and web app deployment
• Automated unit test integration with Flexunit

Antennae is not my personal creation; it’s a distilled, stripped-down version of the more complex build framework we use at Allurent, and it includes lots of ideas from many of my colleagues. Special props to Marty Frenzel and Daniel Rinehart, who put in lots and lots of hard work in this area.

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