Hi folks, Yesterday, I was able to manually create a folder of files that contained no Adobe AIR or Adobe Flash files and still was an acceptable Flex/FlexJS SDK for Adobe Flash Builder and allowed me to compile DataBindingExample for JSFlex output only (it did not build a SWF).
This is interesting because it could significantly change the way we package FlexJS releases. We could have a default package that is a ready-to-use zip of this folder of files. Then the Installer is no longer needed if your goal is just to install FlexJS, fire up an IDE, and see how it works in the browser without Flash and you don't need to see how it looks in Flash. If this sound good to folks, I will try to alter the Ant build scripts to produce such a package (maybe some other volunteer can take on doing this in Maven). In case you are wondering, what I did was fake some of the Adobe files that Flash Builder looks for by making copies of some Apache files. For example, I copied the js.swc that contains the Object definition for the browser to be airglobal.swc and playerglobal.swc. So far, it appears that Flash Builder is only checking for existence of files, not actual classes in these files. But we might hit some bug later as we test this further. Then the next question is, what do folks do who want to get SWF output? We could try to write a script for the Installer that downloads the AIR and Flash SDK and puts them in the right places in the SDK folder but it will run into the same memory limits that is currently a problem for the Installer. We could write a new AIR app that brings down the AIR and Flash SDKs. We could provide Ant scripts that download and deploy the Adobe bits. I think we already have bash scripts that do this. Not sure if folks on Windows will be happy with that or not. Using Ant has the advantage that it works on Windows, Mac and Linux. Bash scripts require a shell on Windows. I believe AIR apps have issues on Linux. We could try to teach the compiler to look for and expand the AIR SDK if it finds that someone specified SWF output but the AIR SDK is not found. It would look in Downloads folders for the most recent AIR SDK package name. So folks who want SWF output go to the Adobe site, download an AIR SDK and then run the compiler. This does make SWF output somewhat "second class" and I still believe that folks who want strong-typing and will be using modules will benefit from at least testing in a Flash/AIR runtime, but I think it makes the releases truly appear independent from Adobe. Thoughts? -Alex
