Compiling Flex with Maven 2 (Flexmojos)

Over several months I've been compiling my flex applications using Ant and Adobe Flex-Tasks, but here comes a day when our company decides to use Maven. So here is my advice for those who happened to find themselves in the same situation.

For now flex is not very popular in maven community and there are not so many repositories for flex libraries and plugins as well. So I'd like to recommend a great plugin for maven to compile flex applications - Flexmojos from Sonatype. It's well documented, supporting flex 2-4 versions, rsl, modules, localization and has it's own repositories.

For those who haven't work with maven at all, I strongly recommend to read this book at least first two chapters to understand the philosophy of maven. For those who think that he or she is a God of maven then I recommend to read the same book from chapter 17.

As for me I like to use maven as much as possible. So first I'll create a folder structure for our flex project. For this action maven has a great plugin archetype that will create a folder structure and necessary pom.xml files for you.

Flexmojos has its own archetypes for flex application, so here they are:

Create library:
mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeRepository=http://repository.sonatype.org/content/groups/public -DarchetypeGroupId=org.sonatype.flexmojos -DarchetypeArtifactId=flexmojos-archetypes-library -DarchetypeVersion=3.2.0

Create application:
mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeRepository=http://repository.sonatype.com/content/groups/public -DarchetypeGroupId=org.sonatype.flexmojos -DarchetypeArtifactId=flexmojos-archetypes-application -DarchetypeVersion=3.2.0

Create modular application:
mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeRepository=http://repository.sonatype.org/content/groups/public -DarchetypeGroupId=org.sonatype.flexmojos -DarchetypeArtifactId=flexmojos-archetypes-modular-webapp -DarchetypeVersion=3.2.0

We will use the second one flexmojos-archetype-application to create a simple flex application. To run this archetype simply copy it from post and past into a shell. You'll need to answer some questions before the plugin will create you a folder structure. If everything was good you'll be able to have such a screen.

If you haven't installed Flexmojos yet, maven will do it automatically.
Now let's take a look at the folder structure that maven has created for us.
So, all your code goes to src/main/flex folder. In this folder you should create your packages and write your code. As you see Flexmojos already has created the main application file Main.mxml. Also there is a test folder for all your tests: src/test/flex/{groupId}, so you can write tests for your application.
But the most interesting part is pom.xml. Let's take a look.

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">

  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>ua.com.xoas</groupId>
  <artifactId>testapp</artifactId>
  <version>1.0</version>
  <packaging>swf</packaging>

  <name>testapp Flex</name>

  <build>
   <sourceDirectory>src/main/flex</sourceDirectory>
   <testSourceDirectory>src/test/flex</testSourceDirectory>
   <plugins>
    <plugin>
     <groupId>org.sonatype.flexmojos</groupId>
     <artifactId>flexmojos-maven-plugin</artifactId>
     <version>3.2.0</version>
     <extensions>true</extensions>
    </plugin>
   </plugins>
  </build>

  <dependencies>
   <dependency>
    <groupId>com.adobe.flex.framework</groupId>
    <artifactId>flex-framework</artifactId>
    <version>3.2.0.3958</version>
    <type>pom</type>
   </dependency>

   <dependency>
    <groupId>org.sonatype.flexmojos</groupId>
    <artifactId>flexmojos-unittest-support</artifactId>
    <version>3.2.0</version>
    <type>swc</type>
    <scope>test</scope>
   </dependency>
  </dependencies>

</project>

If you need to configure your build simply add a configuration element inside of the build element, like this:

<build>
 <sourceDirectory>src/main/flex</sourceDirectory>
 <testSourceDirectory>src/test/flex</testSourceDirectory>
 <plugins>
  <plugin>
    <groupId>org.sonatype.flexmojos</groupId>
    <artifactId>flexmojos-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.2.0</version>
    <extensions>true</extensions>
    <configuration>
      <!-- put your configuration options here -->
      <debug>true</debug>
      <allowSourcePathOverlap>true</allowSourcePathOverlap>
    </configuration>
  </plugin>
 </plugins>
</build>

I've added two more options to build:
debug - Turn on generation of debuggable SWFs.
allowSourcePathOverlap - Allow the source-path to have path-elements which contain other path-elements.
Use this link to get a list of available configuration options.

To compile this application you'll need to run: mvn install -DflashPlayer.command={path to flexplayer} (path to flashplayer is required otherwise you'll get an error during test phase) If you want to skip test phase run this: mvn install -Dmaven.test.skip=true

The last thing I'd like to pay your attention to is dependencies element. One of the pros of the Flexmojos is that you don't have to install flex-sdk - it will be downloaded automatically and all you need is to add a dependency, in "maven style", to flex-sdk.

<dependency>
 <groupId>com.adobe.flex.framework</groupId>
   <artifactId>flex-framework</artifactId>
   <version>3.2.0.3958</version>
   <type>pom</type>
 </dependency>

P.S.
Great documentation, great support makes Flexmojos the best plugin for maven to compile flex application.

Almost forgot: use flexmojos:flexbuilder goal to configure environment files for flexbuilder.

Have a nice code :)