I am at the point where I am running into incredibly long build times for my project and more projects to come. I would like to make a build server but I have not had any experience with them aside from downloading files from them as an end user.
My ideal setup is this: A GitHub where I can place my .fla file, classes and ANEs. The server sees this, compiles it, and allows me to test it remotely or hook into some debugger that lets me see stack traces and active variables at breakpoints and errors like Adobe Animate or Flash Builder.
Now I see there are GitHub plugins for Jenkins. I see there are questions referring to how to set one up with Flex/AIR. I come here with a few issues.
I am too far into my project to switch over from using Animate to something like Flash Develop or anything ADT related. The only thing I have found is how to take existing elements from my library in Animate and have them in a .swc for handling. However, this doesn't let me access existing elements in the Timeline and would rather not try to export/position/handle them in code (which is the only workaround that I see if this is not possible)
I run ANEs that are dependent on Google Play services and other Android specific libraries. Thus, I haven't been able to use the standard mobile debug launcher for AIR. I see Jenkins has some specific abilities for Android. Is it possible to somehow use this to give me a proper window for testing? I am thinking that I would need to run their emulator after compiling everything but I am unsure if there is a more efficient method or if it would even work.
I have never worked with Jenkins before or any other tools capable of automating tasks. Any step by step explanations is appreciated if you have the time.
Related
After already searching the site for the answer to the question, I've found this:
Is it any way to run two instances of debuggers?
I need the Flash Professional CS5.5 version of the answer to this question.
Basically - I need to know if there's a way to debug 2 different .fla files in Adobe Flash Professional CS5.5 at the same time. One of them implements the Adobe AIR framework (for using the SocketServer class), the other is a standard AS3 project. It'd be nice if I could debug the client-server interaction easily using the IDE rather than using extensive means to do so.
Anyone have any ideas? Thanks.
This is not an answer to your question but a suggestion to take a different approach.
The Flash IDE and it's debugger are inadequate but for most trivial programs. Variable inspection and breakpoints work randomly and it's next to impossible to drill down into more complex objects. Flash IDE is all right for creating the visual resources for Flash programs but for any serious coding, it just falls on its face. The compiler included with the Flash IDE is also very poorly written and generates unoptimized code.
I'd suggest to switch over to using FlashDevelop - it's a free, open source IDE that runs on top of the Flex and Air SDKs and uses a better compiler that performs more optimizations. (You can mark functions for inlining, etc.) The debugger - while not Visual Studio - is much, much better than the IDE: breakpoints work and object properties can be inspected easily.
Because FlashDevelop is geared towards coding, you can create a project in it with multiple source files, define your resources and then compile to multiple platforms. Compilation is usually fast with hundreds of source files (don't import every type in every package) and you can do debug/release builds. If you can port your code from Flash to FlashDevelop, you'll have a much easier time managing your project.
I could use some help getting my #AS3 / #AIR application running on #iOS !
Right now I have a .SWF (v11) that I'm converting to an .IPA using Adobe AIR (v3.7) on Windows (7).
If I do the conversion with the -target of ipa-test-interpreter it works great.
If I do the conversion with ipa-test, ipa-debug, ipa-ad-hoc, or ipa-appstore, the application seems to compile fine but upon execution of the app on my iPad it just shows a black screen.
Connecting my iPad to a desktop and monitoring console output, I see not crash or error messages generated; the app appears to behave fine internally, it's just lost all external output.
This means I can test and develop but I won't ever actually be able to deploy to the app-store. Anyone else run into this?
Googling around I've run into other people encountering this problem, but no solutions yet. One thing I tried was removing all native extensions, and I also tried removing the -C compiler directive. No luck on either.
To be clear, the app runs totally fine on Mac, PC, Android, Browser, and on iOS in interpreter mode; it's just native-compilation on iOS that's broken. I've heard rumours that ipa-test and ipa-interpreter have different memory allocation routines, but I don't know enough about the low-end here to figure this out.
The remote debugger (in FlashDevelop) doesn't seem to connect either. I think it's failing before the runtime fires fully, somehow? I'm also watching the console output using the iphone-configuration-utility and there isn't anything abnormal showing up.
Temporary file link with sample project and instructions: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1348446/test.zip
Figured it out. Rundown:
The ADT command line has a -C flag to change the current working directory on the command line, which allows you to keep your project better organized and keep the command line a bit more sane. -C can be called as many times as you want when importing assets, and I used it several times. IDEs like FlashDevelop also use -C in the AIR template files so this is sorta standard behaviour. As a quick example of asset inclusion:
ADT.exe [blah blah] assets/icons/icon1.png assets/icons/icon2.png
is the same as
ADT.exe [blah blah] -C assets/icons icon1.png icon2.png
(and, with wildcard use) is the same as
ADT.exe [blah blah] -C assets/icons .
As I have different compiling instruction sets for iOS, android, steam, etc., I had adt switch directories with a variable to the current config and execute from there.
This all works fine and as-documented in ipa-test-interpreter mode. When in native-code mode (ipa-test), however, including the main executable .SWF after a -C command [somehow for some reason] messes up the internal pathing; the file ends up being included but ends up being all "file not found" internally when executed, hence the blank screen and no code executing.
So the fix is simply to include the .swf from the current directory, before any calls to -C. As a quick example of my workaround that just tested a-okay:
copy /bin/flash/game.swf ./
adt [stuff] game.swf -c assets/icons .
del game.swf
I've gotten in touch with Adobe about this and hopefully they'll fix -C so it's functionality is the same for both compile targets in the future.
I have seen this happen in the past due to utilization of components "restricted" from use within iOS builds of Air apps. Specifically back in the day before being able to sandbox the loading of app resources with the loader class.
Start shutting down and turning off whole modules of your app and see when the app will build and run on iOS. I'm willing to bet there is some code somewhere that is ipa-test-interpreter safe but has odd behavior under ipa-test
I see you're still stuck with this issue. If you can find a Mac to test on, I bet xcode instruments will show you're exceeding you're memory limits. It is the iPad one right? Are you using flash's embed meta tags?
Is Black your swf background color? If it is, maybe it's a cross domain loading issue because you're loading your swf and app.xml from 2 different places. I don't know if this is causing it, but I usually keep them in the same place.
Have you ever seen your provision & p.12 work on a device? If not, it might be a problem with them.
What IDE are you using to make this, Flash IDE or Flash Builder, Flash Develop/ANT? And if you post src code it would help. Sometimes putting your metadata in the wrong place can screw things up on iOS but look fine in the browser...so it could be many things.
Good luck.
Disclaimer: I am relatively unfamiliar with the flash build processes, so some/all of this may be misinformed nonsense. Please feel free to suggest alternative approaches.
We're currently developing a flex web app and our build situation is far from ideal. At present we're (as in individual developers) just building using FlashBuilder and deploying manually. The programmers are currently screaming bloody murder for two reasons, though:
The lack of CI is like going back to the stone age
We don't much care for FlashBuilder
(Note: We're only using FlashBuilder because it was the easiest way to set up a flex project in conjunction with Away3d and get it building / rendering correctly -- it's a stopgap solution).
As a predominately .NET development shop, we're used to doing continuous integration as well as continuous deployment. Ideally, we'd like to get something comparable to this for our flash projects without tying ourselves to a particular IDE.
Requirements:
The build process must be:
.. runnable via the commandline
.. runnable on both developer and CI build machines (and certainly not requiring an IDE!)
.. preferably as IDE-independent as possible (pragmatism will kick in though; if this causes a lot of friction we'll just pick one).
.. able to run on Windows (we develop using Windows)
We don't mind a touch of duplication or a few manual steps (e.g. tarting up the build scripts if we add a new project via an IDE, or generating one configuration from another if tools exist), but the less duplication / maintenance required the better.
I've read quite a few articles / blog posts and watched some short screencasts, but most of them are very thin on the ground on how the build system sits alongside IDEs. Most articles/screencasts have the same formula: How to create a "Hello World" build using a single file & text editors (no IDE).
I've not seen the topic of multiple libraries/projects etc. being broached, either.
After reading around the issue for a while, I'm considering investigating the following options:
Project Sprouts
Flexmojos
Maven Flex Plugin
buildr as3
Does anyone have any experience of the above solutions (or others I'm unaware of) and, if so, what do you make of them? Any help / pointers appreciated.
I recently started building with Gradle and the GradleFx plugin and I immediately fell in love with its power and ease of use.
Gradle is ANT + Maven + Ivy evolved and is primarily used from the command-line. You can:
write scripts in Groovy (a powerful Ruby-like language that runs in the Java Virtual Machine)
access all existing Maven and Ivy repositories as well as your own repos
use existing ANT tasks
integrate with CI (in Jenkins you just tick a checkbox to activate Gradle support)
although it has originally grown from the Java/Groovy community, it is in fact language agnostic. You add language-specific plugins for added functionality. GradleFx is such a plugin that provides you with additional ActionScript/Flex building tasks.
do easy multi-project builds. e.g. you can compile, unit test, package and deploy both your .NET service layer and your Flex client application with just one command.
use convention over configuration: if you stick to the conventions, your build scripts will be extremely terse
generate all kinds of reports: unit testing, checkstyles, codenarc, ...
generate Eclipse, IDEA or other IDE projects
all the things I haven't discovered yet
And best of all: it's very easy to learn. I had no knowledge of Maven before I started with Gradle and could get a multi-project build with some customizations working quite quickly.
Edit (comparison to Buildr AS3 and Maven)
I can compare this only to one of the projects you mentioned: Buildr AS3. It seems to start from a philosophy that is similar to Gradle's. But I've tried to use it about half a year ago and couldn't even get a simple 'Hello World' app to work. I e-mailed the developer for help: no response.
Compared to GradleFx: I had a small forum discussion with the developer (on a rather philosophical topic, since I didn't really need any help because it just worked right away). He answered within minutes.
As for Maven: (for what it's worth) I've only glanced at some configurations and they seem overly complicated when I compare them to a Gradle script.
There is one thing Maven does that you can't do with GradleFx (yet). It can pull the right Flex SDK from a Maven repo and build against that. With GradleFx you have to have your SDK's available locally.
I'm quite familiar with using maven as the main build tool and the flexmojos plugin from Sonatype. My experience has been a bit of a roller coaster with flexmojos. Maven is completely solid, it works all the time without issue, the only issue is the flexmojos plugin which has fluctuated a lot between versions. If you choose to go this route make sure to grab the source for flexmojos so you can see what your configuration options are actually doing to the command line parameters etc. For Flex 3.x flexmojos 3.x up to around 3.9 is good and works fine with regard to the goal for generating the .project eclipse files, believe there's also a mojo (a maven plugin) for generating intelliJ IDEA project files as well as others. If you're using Flex 4 you can compile with the latest flexmojos 4.0RC2 but it appears to me that the goal for generating flex/flashbuilder project properties is now gone (I'm not sure if this is because it's been replaced by another plugin altogether or what the deal is). However building with maven and flexmojos does fulfill all of your goals above (we also use it for building our service layer, so in a single mvn clean install we get a jar packed in a war packed in an ear with everything configured and a swf, that part is really nice). Also you can do continuous integration using bamboo (or simply write your own script that is triggered from a cron job or in windows as a batch file executed with a scheduled task if you don't have a *nix server around). Let me know if you'd like any more details or if I missed something major.
Shaun
I have been using Hudson, now Jenkins, with Ant for Flex automated builds and FlexUnit testing. Jenkins has some really useful plugins for integration with eclipse (and hence, FDT or FlashBuilder), Jira, SVN, Git etc., and it's free. Also, you can integrate the Ant build into Maven scripts, so I've found this to be a good and flexible solution for all purposes I've come across so far.
The Flex SDK comes with Ant tasks, and writing even elaborate Ant build scripts is quite easy - in fact, I'd been using Ant locally before, and I could reuse my existing scripts with only a few added extra compiler options for FlexUnit tasks.
However, it took a while to set up the system correctly for unit testing, because I'm running a headless server on Linux, and that implicates a rather complicated environment for ActionScript tests, because they run only in Flash Player. This, of course, is true for all CI scenarios using FlexUnit, regardless of which server you use.
Here's what I've learned:
FlexUnit needs a standalone debugger version of Flash Player installed, but Adobe only distributes binaries for the standard version on Linux. Therefore, compiling from source was necessary, and since my server system is stripped down to the bare necessities, it took some effort to install all the correct dependencies and get them to work.
The Flash Player needs hardware to run correctly: It uses graphics, therefore it needs a graphics card, and sounds, therefore it needs a sound card. On my headless server, this meant I had to install a VNC host to get it to run at all, and I had to eliminate any tests using sounds (those will now only run on local machines). If anyone ever comes across a working sound card emulation for openSuSE that I could use with the VNC client - you'll be my hero forever!
If you've set asynchronous timeouts in your unit tests, and/or you need to use setTimeout() to send delayed procedure calls, make sure the intervals aren't too short - I've had problems with tests that ran fine on any local machine, but broke the build on the CI server, because the Flash Player is considerably slower on the VNC client than on an actual graphics card.
I've also found this last issue to be a healthy lesson: Criteria for unit tests should not be based on assumptions about the system's performance, or at least be tolerant enough to succeed even on a slow machine.
I have been given the task of creating an Autorun installer for a distributable CD, and thought I would challenge the task with Flash. In previous versions of flash it was possible to use fscommand and trickery to run other local exe files, but due to virus creators and what-not, this has been reworked and totally destroyed for others to use.
So as a Flash developer I have hit a bit of a brick wall with this, and am asking out for any alternative ideas anybody may have? I am quite open with learning new languages/programs, and would like any expert advice from people in the know.
Just as a heads up for what features are required:
GUI with simple graphics/buttons
Ability to launch external exe/pdf files
must be able to be compiled to an exe, which can be launched by any windows machine without installing third party software eg Java.
The only simple solution I have thought of is making an html page, but using a browser is something I want to avoid doing!
Please Help :)
Christian
You can continue using flash freely if you want. There is a bunch of projector tools like northcode swf studion, Zink, mProjector and others. You can also create your own tool using any system programing language that produces windows executable - the only thing you will need - is to create an ActiveX instance of Flash Player and set up minimalistic API to allow Flash call required system functions.
I'm looking to unit test some SWT and Swing code for a project I'm working on and the tests run fine as long as I'm running them from eclipse.
As soon as I run them in my hudson environment it fails since hudson runs the tests in headless mode.
What's the best way of doing this? Open source solutions only please (since the project is open source).
You could run Xvfb (X virtual framebuffer, an X11 server that performs all graphical operations in memory) and this works fine.
But there is another solution with Hudson's plugin for Xvnc. Simply install the plugin and check the checkbox in the job configuration screen:
alt text http://www.justinedelson.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/xvnc_box.jpg
Hudson will then automatically start up a Xvnc session and set the DISPLAY environment variable to the appropriate value and then shut down the session when the build is complete. One advantage this has over the Xvfb method is that if you have multiple Swing/SWT projects building simultaneously, each build has its own X session. This may not be an issue at all but it seems like a good idea.
Before using this plugin, you obviously have to have Xvnc installed. What's less obvious (although sensible) is that you must also set a password. You do this by running:
$ vncpassword
This has to be done as the same user Hudson runs as.
Try the Abbot Java GUI Testing Framework and SWTbot. At least SWTbot should be able to do it.
If neither offers a headless mode, then this blog post might give you some ideas how to get rid of the UI for testing.
Using Swing I tend to organise things so that the component tree can be created without a Window at the top. Doing this allows you to simply create a JPanel in a unit test and use that as your top-level component. There are certain things you cannot test, such as focus and any logic involved in the creation of the Frame for normal operation, but the vast majority can be tested.
You may want to look into the FEST library to make life easier whether you go headless or not, it looks very good: http://fest.easytesting.org/swing/wiki/pmwiki.php
I was sure I posted this here before, not sure what happened to it.
Cacio allows for running Swing app headless.
http://rkennke.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/cacio-for-ui-testing/
I don't know about SWT, but with Swing you can't. Any instantiation of a Window (JFrame, JDialog, etc.) even if it is never set to visible will blow up in headless mode (on JDK 5). What we did was not run in headless mode and install Xvfb to provide the windowing without actually having a real windowing system installed.
You could try RedDeer Testing framework
https://github.com/jboss-reddeer/reddeer
• Support for running tests in a Jenkins CI environment (Hudson like)