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January 28, 2007
Speeding Up Builds with the Flex Compiler Shell
Two Flex projects were recently released on Adobe Labs, Flex Ant Tasks and Flex Compiler Shell. You would expect the Ant tasks to be the more exciting of the two from the build perspective, but the compiler shell (fcsh) could be the better choice for large, complicated projects. That's because fcsh allows multiple compilations to occur in one process without the need for reloading SWCs, restarting Java, etc. When you can use fcsh in a non-interactive manner, this can be very helpful for speeding up a build.
How can you use fcsh, which is supposed to be an interactive shell, in a build file? Simple piping of a file will do the trick. As an example, put the following in a file named "buildscript":
mxmlc -library-path+=frameworks/locale/{locale} -source-path+=samples/photoviewer/locale/{locale} -locale=en_US samples/photoviewer/PhotoViewer.mxml
mxmlc samples/restaurant/recentReviews.mxml
mxmlc samples/restaurant/finder.mxml
mxmlc samples/explorer/explorer.mxml
mxmlc samples/flexstore/flexstore.mxml
Then call the following:
bin\fcsh < buildscript
In Ant, you'd use the input attribute instead of "< buildscript".
I see a roughly 50% increase in the compilation speed from this example. But there's two problems with using fcsh:
1. Status codes are not returned correctly. Hopefully Adobe can fix this, but in the meantime, you'll need to search the output yourself for "Error".
2. You don't get the wildcard fileset benefits of the new Ant tasks.
Apollo on Techcrunch
I was doing some morning reading and was interested to see an Apollo article from Ryan Stewart on Techcrunch. The comments were the most interesting part, seeing the confusion and differing opinions on what Apollo will do. Most of the negative comments have to do with security: it's more clear to me now how important the security perception battle will be for Apollo. I couldn't find any public security articles to point to, so hopefully someone at Adobe will come out with one now.
For anyone coming from Techcrunch looking for more Apollo information, here are a few places to look:
Developer's FAQ
Detailed presentation
Screenshots
Blog posts
January 26, 2007
Random Videos
Gus And Chippy A favorite of my mine from the Brightcove Pets channel. I think you'll be able to guess which dog is Chippy.
Cat Opening a Door The first step in global cat domination.
More from Barak Obama Another in the long-line of videos from candidates, but I liked the quality of this one.
A Very... Uh... Interesting Person Fast forward to 7:00. The digg comments about this video are hilarious.
I'm not planning to post a lot of Brightcove videos here, but you may see a few more random videos from time to time. On the topic of Brightcove, PBS and PC Magazine have recent articles about online video and Brightcove.
January 23, 2007
Flex Talk Tomorrow in the Boston Area
The illustrious Joe Berkovitz is speaking tomorrow at 7pm in Brookline. Read more (and get directions) here. The speech is a part of the Boston Flash User Group meetings. I've really enjoyed going to these meetings lately to learn more about Flash/Flex and drink with fellow coders.
January 17, 2007
Brightcove Raises $59.5M in Financing
Yesterday, Barak Obama announced his run for the presidency using Brightcove.
Today, Brightcove announced the completion of a major round of private financing for $59.5M.
Tomorrow, I expect to see the announcement of Jeremy Allaire's 100M war chest and presidential run.
Well, perhaps not, but I'm very excited that Brightcove has obtained this financing and that the company can continue to grow. It means we can keep working hard on and investing in the interesting projects you'll see in the year ahead.
January 5, 2007
FlashType Support in Flex 2.0.1
One major feature that wasn't talked about in Ted's post on 2.0.1 is the addition of FlashType support in Flex. Whenever you embed a font, the font will now use FlashType by default.
What is FlashType? It's technology in the Flash Player for providing clearer text, especially when the text is small. Here's an example:
Before 2.0.1, in order to use FlashType, you had to first embed the font in Authoring and then use the Authoring SWF in Flex. Now, you simply need to embed a font in Flex, and FlashType is automatically enabled.
Also, as an update to the ASDoc fixes, note that Linux support was not added. I could have swore that I read that this was added, but I just read the release notes and see it as an open bug. Ah well.
It feels strange to talk about FlashType and ASDoc, as these were the last two features I developed at Adobe. From now on I'll have to wait for Matt, Ted, and others to blog about features to know about them!
Posted by Brian at 12:59 PM
