As promised, I’m going to talk about how to install and configure the HellFire Compiler Daemon, a.k.a. HFCD. Again, if you’ve never heard of HFCD before, please check out the following posts:
Before you download HFCD, make sure you meet the following system requirements:
- Java 5 installed (Java 6 highly recommended). BTW, Flex Builder ships with JRE 5. It’s okay to use that, but the point of using HFCD is build Flex apps faster… and Java 6 is *faster* than Java 5…
- Apache Ant installed. Mac OS X ships with Ant. If you use Windows, go download it at http://ant.apache.org.
Now, go to http://stopcoding.org/. Register and download hfcd_3.zip. The installation consists of 2 parts:
- Install the HFCD server and client SDK. In this step, you need hfcd_3.zip.
- Install the HFCD for Flex Builder plugin. In this step, you install the plugin via the Eclipse/Flex Builder Update Manager.
mike nimer said
Hi Clement!! it’s been awhile, I hope your doing well.. So question for you, what about configuring IntelliJ 9 (beta) to use HFCD.. Do you think it would be possible?
Clement Wong said
Hey Nimer, glad to hear from you again! I’ve not checked with IntelliJ yet, but I would say at this point there is more than just some configuration to make IntelliJ work with HFCD. To be more specific, I need an IntelliJ plugin that detects file changes and transfers the changed files to HFCD. Also, IntelliJ currently uses a fcsh wrapper (not the compiler API) to invoke the compiler.
I think adding support for IntelliJ is pretty straightforward. The logic applies to the other IDEs as well. Perhaps the best approach is for me to publish the HFCD plugin API so those who are familiar with these IDE can do their own integration.
Yogesh said
Hi,
I tried using HFCD 4 with my project.
But when i choose HFCD as default SDK for my project, it displays an error. There is no description for error, it just displays main application file name.
While the problems window shows that there is internal error.
please let me know what is to be done.
Yogesh said
I just checked the log file in metadata folder and found that it is not able to locate the main file.
java.io.FileNotFoundException: D:\temp\myproject\src\myapp.mxml
at hellfire.compiler.client.BuilderApplicationStub.init(BuilderApplicationStub.java:120)
Though the file exists at the path, it still throwing an error, can you please tell me where i am going wrong.
Clement Wong said
Hi, make sure you close and open your projects after switching to HFCD. After reopening the projects, if you still see those “unable to open …” error messages, you will need to specify those files that are not managed by Flex/Flash Builder in the “HFCD FileSet” view. This post (How To Setup Your Projects for HFCD) should help. Please take a look. Also, use the latest update I made available earlier today. That fixed a couple of showstoppers.
Fedlarm said
Just a small thing, that I haven’t testet or anything that I am 100% sure about. But I think that after I installed the HFCD plugin for FB3 my workspace stopped build automatically, and whenever I enabled it, closed FB and reopened it, it wasn’t checked to build automatically anymore, and sometimes the refresh workspace was also unchecked. Tried with different workspaces with same result. After uninstalling the plugin and remove my previous workspaces, I don’t have the issue anymore.
I used the HFCD version 3.4.1.10084.
Clement Wong said
Yeah, the plugin disables “Build Automatically” when FB3 starts because HFCD works best when “Build Automatically” is disabled. The plugin should have used a dialog box to notify users of the setting change… shouldn’t just do it silently.
HFCD always attempts to build incrementally in the background, so technically speaking, it’s like “Build Automatically” on the HFCD side and that’s why there is no need to “Build Automatically” on the FB3 side. When “Build Automatically” is disabled in FB3, you’re free to make and save code changes while HFCD is building in the background.