ActionScript 3 Log

In a previous post, Ian T made this comment about AIR MiniBuilder:

Tried it out today on Vista – nice work.
What’s causing the cross-platform issues for Mac? Presumably the Java builder code and the AIR package are both cross-platform… is it anything someone else can help you out with?

Thank you for the question. As a matter of fact, yes, I could use some help. In general, any help is appreciated, this is an open-source (GPL) project and it’s intended to evolve into a community.

I use a JNI library, JNotify for the communication between AIR and Java. I didn’t opt for Merapi because the pure AS3 version (non-flex) of Merapi is not yet released and it has issues. Instead, I opted for a file-system notification based protocol. Java “listens” in a directory for message files and in return, AIR polls a file only during asynchronous actions to check the progress. Development with JNotify proved to be a breeze. Also the speed of the complete system is good.

The issue with Mac comes from  JNotify, it only has JNI implementations for Linux and Windows. And it’s the only GPL compatible library I could find.

Any hints will be welcome! More than it, it’ll be extra cool if someone would contribute the entire AS3 – Java link code for MiniBuilder (probably Merapi based). I’m looking to add commiters to the project, based on quality of the contributions. The time I can allocate for this project is limited.

One more issue with Merapi is the firewall because it works over TCP. The way it is now, MiniBuilder does not need any exception in the firewall.

In any case, this is a temporary solution, as soon as  AIR 2.0 is out, the problem vanishes.

Thank you again!

Quick visual tour of MiniBuilder ActionScript IDE running on Ubuntu Linux

IDE Overview
See ActionScript code completion for Player 10

“MiniBuilder is briefly inspecting your folders”
It takes a quick look in your foldes (user dir, up to a depth of 4) looking for Flex projects.
Run it, you’ll be amazed how many forgotten treasures will be unveiled

Build applications for Tamarin VM with MiniBuilder. The code completion provides only natives of shell Tamarin.
Check the console: you need to make the output file executable.
Linux fans, forgive the “.exe” ending, the output is not a windows exe! It is a projector – the Linux AVM packaged together with the abc data (compiled actionscript)

These are just a few of the things…

Help this project, at least by showing your interest and it will grow!
Flash and AIR (especially 2.0) are providing quite some power to play with.

Check it yourself, 2.4M size, it’s tiny: MiniBuilder

Version alpha-1.0
Later Update: click below to install latest version.
Download count:

It works with Flex SDK 3.4 (+Java)
OS: Windows, Linux (Mac not yet)
See http://code.google.com/p/minibuilder/ for details

Flash MiniBuilder Part I
Flash MiniBuilder Part II
Flash MiniBuilder Part III

After a new run of fixes and add-ons, here is version 0.0.2

Most notable news:

• line numbers
• compiler errors markers in editor – tooltips show error message
• minibuilder can now compile targeting player10 in strict mode
• support for AsWing framework

Still missing:

• hint list: it does not fit in the screen, does not cycle, can’s do pageup/pagedown, can’t doubleclick
• completion: protected, internal. (the resolver currently deals only with private). there is a bug with completion at package level.
• other bugs…

One more problem I noticed, the compilation is way slower online(4-6s) than the tests on my computer (0.5-1s). This will be fixed in next release.
Later Edit: issue fixed, abc extracter added to asc jar

Notes:
Compiling with asc is a bit different than with Flex. Asc is just a basic actionscript compiler, it can’t do a full dependency check. But you can use it to create quite complex programs, as long as you define your classes in the order of inheritance – base classes first, derived next. That’s right, you can write as many classes as you want in the same file. Unlike with Flex compiler, enclose each class in a package block. Just as you would concatenate a Flex ActionScript project in one big file. But no private classes.

And here is the playground:
Here is your chance to test the powerful AsWing framework right now. Check the reference and tutorials
(Download-able MiniBuilder web version 0.0.2 in a couple of days)

PS: Thank you iiley Chen for help and support
Thank you all for feedback.
Any help, feedback, bug report or feature request is welcome!

Stay put for new cool stuff, we are a step closer to the desktop version!