Getting Dirty With the Flex SDK

Getting Dirty With the Flex SDK Nate Beck Senior Adobe Developer at T-Mobile USA & Co-Founder of BugQuash.com

Flex is Open Source So What?

So, Flex is Open Source We get to make a great product even better. We have the ability to submit our own ﬁxes. Collaboration is key for a successful platform.

What’s in it for me? As I’ve already said, Open Source is a good thing. But there are some other reasons why you should get involved. Bragging Rights! Know the Flex SDK better than 90% of every other Flex Developer out there. Free Stuff! The Flex Team will buy you an Adobe related book for every 3 patches that are accepted.

What this talk is about The tools and processes that are used for development of the Flex SDK. Tips and tricks that will make your life easier. And hopefully, a quick demo.

What this talk isn’t about In-depth Operating System specific setup (with the exception of some tips). OpenSource.Adobe.com/flex has excellent resources for your specific OS.

Where to start Adobe’s Open Source Website (http://opensource.adobe.com/ﬂex) Select “Developer Documentation” under the Flex SDK Project. Then select “Set up your development environment”. Tip -- There are links near the bottom of this page for your speciﬁc operating system.

What you’ll need Subversion (command-line or a GUI) Apache Ant Java 2 Software Development Kit Configure your Flash Player Configure your operating system (Adobe provides a script to take care of this) Cygwin (if you’re on Windows, read the Windows specific setup)

Wow Nate, that’s a lot. It’s not as hard as it seems. You only need to set this up once on your development machine. Let’s dive in.

Subversion Subversion (commonly known as SVN) is an opensource version control system. There are two ways you can work with subversion: You can use the command-line tool. You can use a GUI. SmartSVN (mac) || TortiseSVN (win) are good options. TIP -- Adobe’s OpenSource site assumes you are using command-line. So we’ll use that in this talk.

Ant (Another Neat Tool) Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. It is similar to make but is implemented using the Java language. Therefore, it requires the Java platform. Ant uses “build ﬁles” to automate compilation of the Flex SDK.

Java 2 Software Development Kit Tip -- Windows users need to follow the Windows instructions carefully. The Flex SDK build script assumes that the Java JDK is installed in a very speciﬁc directory. Tip -- On Mac OS X, Just run Software Update. This ensures that you have the latest Java binaries. Thanks Apple.

Okay, I think I’m good to go. Great! Let’s double check our setup. Open up your command-line. Terminal on Mac, Cygwin on Windows. ant -version svn --version java -version echo $JAVA_HOME (echo %JAVA_HOME% on Windows)

Sweet... now what? If that worked, pat yourself on the back and get a drink... because we’re just getting started. I’ll wait.

Time to check out... the code that is.

Getting the Source Code Head back to Adobe’s Open Source Flex site (http://opensource.adobe.com/ﬂex) Select “Source” under the Flex SDK Project. TIP -- Use the Flex project skeleton provided on this page so you don’t have to check out EVERYTHING. TIP -- Using the “svn up” command will allow you to select which directories and ﬁles you want to download.

Finding bugs to quash... (If you don’t have your own) “Software is by its nature an imperfect science and often small defects exist. With enough eyes, bugs are much easier to see, understand, and eliminate.” -- Ted Patrick, Adobe

Sign up for Adobe’s Bug System (JIRA) Go to Adobe’s Bug website: http://bugs.adobe.com/ﬂex/ Register if you haven’t already. This is the site where users come to submit bugs against the Flex SDK. This is also the site we use to ﬁnd relevant bugs for us to work on.

On the hunt for a bug If you don’t have a “pet” bug in mind already that you want to work on, you can find one in the Adobe Bug system. TIP -- The bug system has a special milestone called “SDK Community Bug Fix Candidates”. There are bugs that the Flex Team specifically has asked the community to fix (http://bit.ly/aEEfa).

Become a contributor Before you can submit a patch, you must become a contributor. It’s easy, just ﬁll it out and send it in (but, read it ﬁrst of course). Once submitted you will have a new link when you are logged in to Adobe’s Bug System (JIRA) called... Submit Patch. Another perk to being a contributor is you get a sandbox to play in.

Time to get dirty... Ninja-style

Setting up Flex Flash Builder The Flex SDK Team has been very kind to us... they have given us all that we need to use Flash Builder to develop the SDK. TIP -- When using Flash Builder to develop on the SDK, remember to add a Linked Resource for “FLEX_SDK”. TIP -- If you run into problems when switching between different versions of the SDK, make sure your Linked Resource setting is correct.

The Woot Label Demo

Set Environment Variables The SDK has scripts that will automatically set your environment’s variables. Change to the version of the SDK you are working with... (ex. 3.x or trunk) and run: source setup.sh TIP -- On Windows, you should be running this command from Cygwin. (more info here: http://bit.ly/1aNlDp)

Configure Flash Player Follow the steps found on the Open Source site (under Configure Flash Player on http://bit.ly/1aNlDp) to: Make changes to or create mm.cfg if it doesn’t exist. Download FlexSDK.cfg into FlashPlayerTrust. TIP -- If you run into SecurityErrors you may need to add more paths to the FlexSDK.cfg file. I had to add / flex/sdk/branches/3.x and /flex/sdk/trunk.

Testing The Fix The Flex SDK team has an automation tool called “Mustella” which they use to test the SDK. To run the check-in tests from command-line, change to the version you are working on and run: ant checkintests

Creating The Patch svn status svn diff Label.as > patch_wootLabel.diff

Where to go from here Additional Resources

OpenSource.Adobe.com Be sure to spend some time looking around this site. It has almost all the information you could ever want about the Flex SDK... including: Detailed Setup Instructions Coding Conventions In-Depth Specs and Whitepapers

Bug Quashes are fast paced, high energy events. With food and drinks, good music, lots of code and breaking things. Good times to be had. Created by Nate Beck, Marty Mickelson & Mike Johnson The next BugQuash event is being planned right now, the date is currently being determined. http://www.bugquash.com

Show off with the BugQuash badges Automatically updated Available at http://www.bugquash.com

Thanks! Now get out there, and do some good! These slides and this recording will be posted on my blog at: http://blog.natebeck.net Questions?

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Getting Dirty With the Flex SDK

by Nate Beck on Jul 09, 2009

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Getting Dirty With the Flex SDK — Presentation Transcript