Occasional Thoughts

Spring Actionscript is a great library - no question. It makes it much easier to mock Cairngorm service delegates and rewire them for testing with FlexUnit. Testing the full event/command/delegate workflow is pretty easy.

However today I had quite some "fun" with the Maven artifact and it's transitive dependencies in combination with Maven 2.2.1. Spring Actionscript has some dependencies to these artifacts:

• as3commons-lang
• as3commons-logging
• as3commons-reflect

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: