Introducing Flash Ant and Flash Ant Lite

Welcome to the permanent new home of Flash Ant, an enhancement of the excellent Flash task for Apache Ant by Ethan Malasky.

Flash Ant is based on Mike Williams' and Ethan Malasky's Command-line Flash Compilation release for Central. That release contains everything you need to compile Flash apps with Ant, however newcomers to Ant might find it a little difficult to customize it for use with non-Central applications.

Starting with Ethan's excellent task, I have added and or changed the following things in this release:

The big change here is that the build process no longer needs to shut down the Flash IDE for batch compiles. This should come as both an added safety feature and a very nice workflow enhancement for development builds.

Note that the Flash task is backwards compatible and should work exactly as it did before if you would rather have Flash shut down after publishing the SWFs. More information is available in the README.txt file.

There are two packages being released: Flash Ant and Flash Ant Lite.

Download the latest versions here.

Flash Ant contains all of sources and the build script compiles the Flash task each time (this is how Ethan's original Central release functioned.) Flash Ant Lite does not contain the sources but has the compiled Flash task. Also, the sample build file *does not* compile the Flash task every time (saving a few ms of your valuable time!) :)

The behaviors of the compile_single and compile_all targets in the build file have been slightly modified. Compile_single now compiles a single FLA whereas compile_all compiles all FLAs recursively.

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