A first step towards official Flex Maven support

One of the things I will miss the most in the coming Flex release is official Maven2 support. There are a few contributed alternatives out there, like Israfil and ServeBox, but I’ve tried both of them and had blocking issues. Don’t ask me which ones, I haven’t tried in a long time.

That’s why I filed a bug in Adobe’s issue tracking system and I try to encourage people to vote for it (or double-file it now that it has been deferred and you can’t vote anymore).

I know that the jury is still out to determine whether Maven2 is good or not, but as far as I’m concerned, I’ve “crossed the road” and after more than 2 years dealing with Maven idiosynchrasies, I feel comfortable enough to use it on all my personal projects and advocate it on professional projects as well. Now I’m convinced that official and up-to-date support from Adobe on a Maven2 plugin that would offer all the possibilities of the command-line and make it easier to configure the mxmlc compiler is a must to really integrate Flex 3 in serious projects with unit tests, continuous integration, and so on.

Well, I found out today that there is now a Java API for the Flex compiler, something that could make it even easier to develop a Maven Mojo around it. Let’s hope that it’s coming soon.

My name is Sébastien Arbogast, I’m 26 and I’m an IT consultant for Axen in Brussels, Belgium. I’ve been working there since I graduated in Computer Science Engineering from the “Institut National des Sciences Appliquées” in Rennes, France. Sebastien is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 24 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website.