[mtasc] MTASC with Eclipse

[Ron Wheeler]

I am a bit in the same situation except that I am pretty well committed 
to Eclipse. It is a very nice working environment, free and well 
supported and starting to get some Actionscript support.
Ant was really easy to set up once someone showed me a reasonable 
template. I now have a simple way to ensure that ALL swfs get compiled 
when a common class is modified and I have a way to automatically build 
my test suite for unit testing of classes.
With the MTASC compiler, I do not even mind compiling extra modules 
since it all happens so fast when it is automated with Ant. I have 
separate Ant targets so I can just compile 1 thing or a set of things if 
I really want to save a bit of time.

I have figured out how to pass parametes around so that I have one core 
compile routine and a bunch of modules that set up the names of the 
class to be compiled and the compile routine takes these parameters to 
do the compiles. Makes it easy to add a new class to the library or a 
new test program to the Test Suite.
Still lots of things to automate with Ant but I am prety confident that 
Eclipse will make a really nice environment for people with a wide range 
of skill levels (sales, instructional designers, graphic artists, sound 
technicians and programmers) that need to share assets and have a 
central repository.


We have not really started to use the versioning of Eclipse/CVS but that 
looks like it will be very helpful when we are in a big push and things 
happen very fast and one good idea breaks an old one and you need to go 
back to see what the previous versions did and figure out how to 
reconcile the developers' visions.

I do not have an automatic test tool yet and have not really started to 
look but it would be nice to be that well organized.

Ron


Thompson, Daniel wrote:

>>I bult an Ant task in Eclipse to do my compiling.
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>Well, I hadn't even thought of that. I saw the External Tools and thought
>I'd see where it took me.
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>>How did you configure it as an external tool? What does this give you?
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>In Run > External Tools. I use the built-in variables to pass MTASC a batch
>file that I wrote. Pretty low-tech, really. But, my goal is to have everything integrated in one
>environment. Ant is definitely more robust (and I'll have
>to try that).
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>>Do you use the Actionscript plug-in for Eclipse?
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>Yes, this is why I was even in there. By "use" I mean evaluating. I have a
>project still in the wireframe stage that I'd like to use swf for. There
>are several tools that are looking promising. Basically, I've been evaluating
>the ActionScript Plug-in for Eclipse, AsUnit, MTASC, SEPY, et al.
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>Thompson, Daniel wrote:
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>>By the way, I have MTASC working with the ActionScript Eclipse plugin 
>>(configured as an external tool). It's working well!
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>--
>MTASC : no more coffee break while compiling
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