The Problem

There is currently no industry standard way to structure, grow and deploy an ActionScript project.

The number of tools and environments that one may use is bewilderingly complex. Working with even small teams of developers, designers and business people, project configuration can quickly become burdensome and inefficient.

Ali Mills and I have worked on a wide variety of ActionScript projects over the years and have put a considerable amount of time and energy into how best to structure an ActionScript project in a way that maximizes clarity, simplicity and flexibility, both in the file structure and requisite tools.

Over the years, we have been tasked with projects spanning from the mundane 'Slide Show' to scalable, modular front ends for enterprise content management systems. After all this time, we have arrived at a project layout and tool set that seems like it might be useful for other people and we're hoping to automate it and share it.

Guiding Principles

• Cross Platform: AsProject should support developers consistently - regardless of their choice of platform.
• Tool Agnostic: We use a variety of tools in our day-to-day life and often find a new tool that solves a particular problem better than one we used to use. While it's important to define integration points for common or popular tools, it's critical that we minimize dependencies so that AsProject continues to provide value regardless of other tool choices.
• Convention over Configuration: While we hope to arrive at an easily and immensely configurable solution, we are striving to set up and follow intuitive conventions so that one can quickly become familiar with and productive using these tools.

The Solution

AsProject is made up of 3 separate components.

1. asproject: An extremely flexible project templating engine that allows you to not only take advantage of and modify existing project layouts, but also to create and share your own. This terminal application allows you to instantly create a new, fully-configured and ready-to-deploy ActionScript application for ActionScript 2, ActionScript 3 and even Flex framework projects.
2. asclass: A tool that sits on top of the asproject templating engine, but is used for creating new ActionScript classes, interfaces, test cases and test suites. This tool allows you to easily manipulate the base templates for an arbitrary number of named types including ActionScript 2, 3 and MXML. It allows you to store these modified templates for all projects on your computer or even just for specific projects.
3. utilities: There are a variety of utilities that AsProject brings in order to simplify the process of compiling, testing and deploying an ActionScript project.

These utilities automate and simplify across platforms and flash players, the following tasks:

• debug flash player download and installation
• appropriate mm.cfg file configuration
• Flash Player Security settings
• Flash Player trace output logging and presentation
• compiler selection, download, installation and configuration
• unit test tasks
• deploy tasks

Status

AsProject is currently in pre-alpha phase. We're not quite feature complete, but getting closer by the day.

The asproject, asclass and rake tasks have been tested and verified on:

• DOS Shell
• Cygwin
• OS X

None of these features have been extensively tested, but please feel free to use them and give us some feedback.

We're actively developing and testing the installation and build tools and expect frequent releases in the coming weeks!

Be sure to frequently update your installation until we're more stable, you can always get the latest release with:

gem update asproject

(use sudo if you're on a mac)