Antennae: Powerful Ant Templates for Flex Projects

March 7, 2007 on 2:34 am | In Flex, Programming |

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.

5 Comments »

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  1. I’m using the Antennae templates to build our flex project but I’m having a probelem gettng the Flex data services to work properly. I added the -service arg and provided the path to service-config.xml but the application does not connect to the Flex data Services. Have you had to use the Fex data services?

    Comment by Tom — March 12, 2007 #

  2. Tom, I have not tried building any FDS applications with Ant (or on the command line). To save time, I would try getting a basic app to work properly with a command line compile, then transfer that knowledge to your Ant target definitions.

    Comment by joe — March 12, 2007 #

  3. Hi Joe, great presentation at 360Flex! You mention above that Antennae handles “HTML page token substitution and web app deployment”. I assume that this is for generating the html wrapper for the swf, but I wasn’t able to find anything in the build files to do that? Am I missing something? Would you mind explaining a little bit more about what that is and how to get it to work? Thanks!

    Comment by Aaron King — March 14, 2007 #

  4. Aaron, If you look in multi/app/build.xml, you will find a “stage” target. This makes use of a task with embedded filters and regexp mappers, in which all files matching web/template.* are subjected to token substitution. One such file is web/template.index.html, which is the HTML wrapper for the SWF.

    Comment by joe — March 15, 2007 #

  5. Hey Joe,

    Looks like a really usable tool - are you planning to release this under any opensource license or am I free to use it in any kind of project?

    Cheers

    Sean

    Comment by Sean O Shea — June 7, 2007 #

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