The Flex Compiler Shell (FCSH) is a very useful tool for speeding up flex based compilation. However it requires commands to be pasted into the shell, making it awkward to use inside your own build workflows.

Purpose

Several projects exist for launching FCSH as a separate process, and sending it compilation commands.

For the project I am working on (omixed), we want to be able to provide our Flex code projects to colleagues so that they can build them with as little fuss as possible. Our code projects currently use ant tasks to manage the building, so it would be nice if we could tap into fcsh using ant. Since ant and fcsh both run on Java the solution needs to be Java based.

Our collaborators work on various platforms (Windows, OSX and Linux), so we need a solution that will work for all of them. Also we cannot dictate what IDE they should use.

Since we have already decided that the code must be built using ant tasks, and since fcsh is a Java tool as well, it makes sense that any existing FCSH process manager we use also runs on Java.

Implementation

This project borrows a lot from existing FCSH daemon projects in terms of design and coding, but tries to do so in an platform/IDE agnostic way.

Currently the tool can be accessed via an ant task, but it can also be accessed via the command line making it possible to be embedded in a variety of build workflows.

Many thanks to these projects :

• flexcompile & flex compiler shell daemon (Python based)
• fcshwrapper (Java based, but uses Windows classes)

whose source code helped me put this together.

Documentation

Here are usage examples.