Flex for Java developers (at the BreizhJUG)

First published on February 03 2009 and tagged Tech . Java . Flex . Conference .

Yesterday I had the chance to present at the BreizhJUG (a Breton Java user group) a session named ``Flex for Java Developers''. A crowd of almost 100 happy Java developers and architects was willing to know more about Flex.

image

I had an an hour and half to cover :

  • a basic presentation of the flash and AIR platforms,

  • cool UX flash/flex/AIR demos

  • the latest great features of flash 10

  • and flex, and its ecosystem from a Java developer perspective (mvn framework, testing libraries, building and quality tools, blazeds, lcds)

I ended up the session presenting fna and its maven archetypes. I prepared some new features for this talk. Those features are still under development but are already available in SNAPSHOT releases :

  • I added flexbuilder support to some of my archetypes.

  • I also upgraded the archetypes with flexmojos 2.0 support and up to the latest Flex SDK

Here is how to give the flex-library-archetype a try, (install maven-2.0.9) and use this command line

mvn archetype:generate  -DarchetypeVersion=1.3-SNAPSHOT
-DarchetypeGroupId=com.adobe.ac
-DarchetypeArtifactId=flex-library-archetype
-DarchetypeRepository=http://fna.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/fna/fna_m2_repository /

Build the flex library, by changing directory into your newly created flex maven project, and launch the command :

mvn install

And finally import it into your eclipse/FlexBuilder by using the import command

image

That’s it !

What I did is generating the .actionScriptProperties and the other FB files using the maven archetype filtering capabilities. You just have to specify a M2_REPO linked resource within eclipse to make your FB project fully fonctional. Meanwhile I’m looking forward to seeing FlexBuilder support within the m2Eclipse plugin

I also demonstrated

  • Flex CC with Hudson,

  • FlexPMD (which got a lot of interest from the third of the crowd who was already using PMD)

  • and AS3NCSS,

I posted some of the slides I used for the presentation on slideshare, for those of you who couldn’t make it, or simply don’t have the chance to live nearby the nice city of Rennes. Enjoy !

Flex For Java Architects Ledroff Breizh Jug V Blog Cc

View more presentations from francoisledroff. (tags: maven flex)

PS: I just learned today (on flexmojos forum) that VELO also published new archetypes documented there : https://docs.sonatype.org/display/FLEXMOJOS/Available+archetypes. Thanks VELO