Ok ... and what exactly is the difference to what you describe from simply 
using Maven to build a Flex application? 
From what I get from your whishlist, It sort of gives you everything you want. 
And it does this really nicely and the solution is somewhat finished allready. 

Chris




-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Yi Tan [mailto:ta...@smartgf.com] 
Gesendet: Freitag, 13. Juli 2012 15:49
An: flex-dev@incubator.apache.org
Betreff: Re: Suggestion : Adopt a package manager like Ruby Gems for Flex as a 
first class citizen of the SDK

Hi all,

I've been following this maillist for months. I seldom post, because my English 
is self-taught. I try my best to express myself simple and clearly.

This post does make me feel a bit sad when seeing 6 of 12 replies against 
adopting a package manager in Flex.

Programming has already become a social activity. In a community with decent 
tools, programmers share, learn with each other and eventually be able to make 
better software in much less time. This is the trend I really hope 
Flex/ActionScript could catch up with, because the major part of my daily job 
is coding in AS.

/* 1. Why a package manager matters */

A real story: we are working on a game app by using AIR for iOS. To reduce 
memory consumption, I need something can make skinnable interface from little 
bitmaps snippets (oh, no Flex framework, it's too enterprise to be fit in 
real-world apps). So I googeled and found a few scale bitmap AS classes. After 
comparing them, I chose ByteArray.org's one (
http://www.bytearray.org/?p=118) . A few days after using that class, I found 
it is not well-thought, there was no need to duplicate the original bitmap 
data. So I wrote my own. The funny thing was when I am about to push my version 
of ScaleBitmap onto github. I found there is a newer version of ByteArray.org's 
already on github and it did exactly the same thing as I did :(  
(http://www.bytearray.org/?p=1206). Because that blog post is newer, it ranked 
lower in google search result, and I missed it. So I wasted half day building a 
same thing and writing test cases for it.

If flex has a decent package manager, programmer can share and maintain code 
libraries in a centralized-managed place. And that will also be the best place 
for all AS programmers to find out is there already some smart guys done what 
I'm going to do.

/* 2. Why Ruby, Python, JS, Perl... whatever script language need */

The answer is so obvious: AVM can not do that job.

AVM is designed to performer heavy multimedia tasks under limited resources. It 
is the best in that filed, but it's not a general purpose VM.
There is no CLI, no REPL, no script ability in AVM.
So when you need something that can talk in command line on-the-fly, you have 
to look on other scriptable virtual machine, and thus other languages.

For this point, I would recommend nodejs. It's built on V8 engine, reads 
javascript, which is familiar to ActionScript 2, and npm is just so easy to
use: http://npmjs.org/
Also for Ruby-friendly people, coffee-script is awesome.

/* 3. What a decent package manager should be */

at least:
- It should let people publish their libs in a few simple steps
- It should let people search other people's libs in a few simple steps
- It should let lib owners maintain there libs in a very easy way
- It will be great if it can be integrated with github


Regards,

ty


On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 4:46 PM, John Fletcher <fletch...@gmail.com> wrote:

> 2012/7/12 Jeffry Houser <jef...@dot-com-it.com>:
> >  It does not affect my point.  But, as I understood it; most people 
> > use
> Ruby
> > today for the server-side of a web site (or other application).
>
> Probably true. It's most commonly used with Rails, which is a 
> server-side framework built on top of Ruby.
>
> > I can
> > install any given application server on my local machine, that 
> > doesn't
> make
> > it less of a server..
>
> True. But in this case we're only talking about the part that really 
> isn't a server. It's like depending on Java, as opposed to depending 
> on Tomcat (a server technology built with Java).
>
> But this is all academic. I think most agree with you that we don't 
> want to introduce other dependencies. But if someone could write this 
> tool in ActionScript (not sure if that's feasible) then you would 
> probably have a lot of support on your hands.
>
> John
>

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