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Incremental Compilation from the Command-line

A not-well-known but powerful feature of the command-line compiler is the "incremental" parameter. You should add this parameter to any command-line compilation that you call frequently. Flex Builder uses a version of this feature to speed up its compiling. It's also similar to the FastMxmlc idea that I posted about for Flex 1.5, except that this one is built-in and faster.

You can read the documentation for this parameter here.

As a related aside, if you're trying to find the Java class names for mxmlc and compc, they're flex2.tools.Compiler and flex2.tools.Compc.

Comments (4)

This was my #1 feature wanted for Flex 2. While Flash Player 9, and the new component framework are great... incremental compiling was my top need. Hotness, and thank you Adobe!

Brian:

Well you can specifically thank Clement Wong if you ever see him. He's the guy who pushed this through and got it done.

This feature was really needed as projects grows (and that's inevitable in Enterprise RIA projects).

Anyone out there how test the speed using incremental parameter with huge projects? some thoughts or comments comparing mxmlc with MTASC?...can we say "no more coffee while compiling flex apps"? ;)..hope so!

Thank for thinking about this :)

Carlos,

I believe, incremental compilation makes sense for large projects. If you use it for small projects it would give you results similar (while not using it).

To test speed, you can compare the time taken. Compiler gives you total time..That's one way of doing..