Hi,

I am currently working on compiling the examples in asjs with maven. The reason 
for not having any [ASJS][FALCON] whatsoever, is that this could apply/affect 
all types of Flex SKDs.


Currently we have the flex-config.xml in the frameworks directory. This defines 
a lot of namespace elements in which - sometimes multiple - manifest files are 
assigned to one and the same namespace uri. I would interpret this as the 
compiler creating a map for each namespace uri and adding the classes defined 
in each of the manifests to these maps. This is probably why the namespace 
"library://ns.apache.org/flexjs/basic" contains classes of multiple SWC modules.


The downside is now that I always have to reference the framework directory in 
order for the compiler to find the flex-config and hereby find the definitions 
of all classes in the SDK. With maven Flexmojos used to trick the compiler by 
packing up all these files in a zip and deploying that. When using it, this zip 
was unpacked and the compiler used this unpacked directory.


For me this seems rather ugly and hacky. I would like to propose a little 
change, that should not affect any of the old SDKs or the Ant build.


The manifests are xml files, we could add a targetNamepsace attribute to the 
root-element. Next we could pack the manifest xml files inside the SWCs 
(eventually inside a "manifests" directory) this would make a SWC self 
contained. It would allow the library developer to define which classes he 
wants to expose using which namespace. The ideal solution would be that the 
compiler knows about this and looks in the SWCs for these definitions. I would 
however also assume this would involve some tweaking of the compiler. The other 
option would be that I generate one unified manifest-xml for each namespace 
referenced in the classpath in the target directory and pass that to the 
compiler.


While we are at it, I would also propose defining XML Schemas for each of the 
Xml formats we use and to reference these in the files, this allows automatic 
validation of xml content in the IDE.


What do you think?


Chris

Reply via email to