Occasional Thoughts

When I tried to update another project to flexmojos-maven-plugin 3.x I realized that I missed a step, when I wrote the upgrade instructions from flex-mojos 2.0.0 to the newer plugin. While the first project was at its very beginning with no Unit tests existing yet, the newer project had already quite some unit tests.

When running maven after I followed my own instructions I go this error:

[ERROR] <PROJECT PATH>/target/test-classes/TestRunner.mxml:[-1,-1] Unable to locate specified base class 'org.sonatype.flexmojos.unitestingsupport.TestApplication' for component class 'TestRunner'.

In case you want to build Flex applications using Maven 2 the Flex Mojo plugin is surely the best Maven 2 plugin to accomplish a fully featured build setup. Unfortunately it lacks documentation. So the best resource for settings up own Maven builds is to look at the examples that the developer Marvin Froeder uses to test the plugin.

Marvin Froeder has also a blog where he used to announce changes. However yesterday I realized that I was still building against the Flex 3.0.0 SDK and was looking for information on how to update the build against the latest 3.3.0 SDK. Fortunately Marvin is very, very fast and responsive in the Google Groups discussion group so I took a look into and searched for information and found a thread, where Flex-Mojo 3.0.0 was mentioned. So I tried to upgrade and get the latest Flex Mojo Maven plugin and it was not as easy as running mvn -up.

So here are the upgrade instructions from flex-mojo 2.0.0 to flexmojos-maven-plugin 3.x:

Just in case you are using an HP xw6600 Workstation just like I do and you feel that it is has an awful performance. There is a BIOS update available that might boost the workstations performance.

In my case on the workstation a full project build took over 16 minutes before the update, while my laptop, which is 3 years older,  was able to do the same in just 12 minute. After the BIOS update the workstation did the same job in 7 minutes, so in less than 50% of the previous time.

As I already wrote I have visited the JAX conference last year. Two of the best sessions have been repeated at the W-Jax in Munich and are available online (both in German language):

• Angewandte Architekturkommunikation, Dr. Gernot Starke
• Java Programmierung im Multicorezeitalter, Angelika Langer