Automating ActionScript Projects with Eclipse and Ant

Using FDT’s Ant Tasks

When you’re using FDT, there are a lot of specific Ant tasks you can hook into or use to make compiling and debugging even simpler.

At the time of this writing, here is the complete list of Ant tasks for FDT (there will probably be more implemented in the future, as FDT is being developed really quickly):

• fdt.loadProjectProperties (only from FDT 4.1 and up)

• fdt.browse

• fdt.extSWFViewer.focusWindow

• fdt.extSWFViewer.startSWF

• fdt.flashCompile

• fdt.launch.application

• fdt.launch.library

• fdt.launch.resetFlexCompiler

• fdt.startDebugger

• fdt.startProfiler

FDT works with launchers, which are basically shortcuts for viewing your project in a specific version of the Flash Player. You can use them when calling the swflauncher argument with your Ant targets. Here is the list of launchers you can use with FDT:

• External SWF Viewer

• Adobe Flash Player

• Browser

• Internal SWF Viewer

• AIR Debug Launcher

The first built-in FDT Ant task we’ll look at is fdt.launch.application. With this task, you can compile, debug, and profile your application. Let’s take a look first at compiling.

Compiling (with FDT Ant Tasks)

Compiling with FDT Ant tasks is a bit simpler than directly calling the compiler:

<target name="compile-fdt" description="Compile a SWF with FDT Ant Tasks" depends="create-timestamp"> <fdt.launch.application debug="false" projectname="${FDTProject}" mainclass="${project.classpath}${project.document.class}${project.file.extension}" target="${project.bin.path}${file.separator}${project.document.class}_${current.date.time}.swf" ...