Well MTASC seems to be the buzziest technology in the Flash world these days. Jester just coined the acronym FAME – Flashout, Eclipse, ASDT, MTASC. (I know he didn’t come up with the process, but I think he was the first to acronymize it.) While I’m sure the Eclipse route is great, I myself couldn’t be pried from PrimalScript, and have already posted my workflow here in a couple of other posts. Not to be outdone on acronyms though, I came up with one that describes my setup: PB & JaM: PrimalScript, Batch-files, JSFL and MTASC!
One thing I’m loving about the batch file approach is how you can customize your compile, even compiling and running multiple swfs. For instance, I’ve blogged about other solutions where I need to compile a swf, then compile another swf and load the first into the second. With MTASC this is such a breeze. You just write your batch file so that it compiles the loaded swf, then compiles the loader, and then, only if everything compiled ok, it runs the loader swf. In fact, in many cases, I don’t need to compile both, so I just comment out the line for the one I don’t need to recompile. Thus the batch file becomes sort of a make file.
Another thing I just saw and I’m going to try to fit into my flow is this swfmill xml generation tool. Since this is all command line stuff, it should be able to be dropped right into my batch file. I’m liking where this is going.
Your anacronym is cooler…
Dude, that SWFMill thang is pimp, thanks for the link!
Love the acronyms. Have you heard of “AFLAX” technology? 🙂 Yep, command-line is where it’s at, so much more powerful and flexible. It’s like we’re becoming *real programmers* or something. When I was working in C#, Visual Studio handled the command-line for me but now I appreciate how an optimal workflow can come together. Plus I get to dust off my teenage DOS batch file skills (which girls dig almost as much as bowhunting skills).
What’s weird is how much fun it is to compile SWFs now with MTASC. It’s hard to explain, but the week I got MTASC running on my project, I was a bit giddy. I felt somehow lighter and more liberated. Often you don’t realize how much a tool annoys you until you find an alternative.
Hi Keith,
just posted an article based on your post, but this time using swfmill. Just in case you’re interested:
http://www.protozoo.com/index.php?postId=77
regards,
Daniel
If you haven’t used it yet check out ANT or NANT. Once I started using these I couldn’t believe I was ever trying to use batch files for this stuff!
The flash ant task works ok but I have since dropped using that and now use NANT and Mike Chambers .NET command utility for compiling FLAs and MTASC for compiling all the code 🙂
I also love Primal Script, it rocks! The Flash Eclipse pluggin is great but it hasn’t been able to wow me enough to pull me away from Primal Script yet.
Also in the mix I use Perforce as my repository. Much much better than VSS and works SUPER good over even a modem connection! Additionally Primal Script works with Perforce and NANT has a task for Perforce so I can do full automated builds for my Flash programs!
Cool. ANT is on my list of things to check out.