HFCD Upgraded to Support Flex 4.0.0 Beta 2
Some developers told me that they were interested in using HFCD with Flash Builder. They’ve already moved to Flash Builder beta as their primary development tool and they would really like to see HFCD support for Flex 4. I initially was a bit cautious about integrating HFCD (currently in beta) with Flex 4 (also currently in beta). But in the past couple of weeks, I looked at the compiler code in Flex 4 and thought “hey, the changes look pretty manageable”, so I took a stab at it and integrated HFCD with it.
You can now download HFCD 4 by following this link:
http://stopcoding.org/hfcd/4/download
HFCD 3 is now here:
http://stopcoding.org/hfcd/3/download
I strongly encourage you to use the installer (Mac only) because it takes care of downloading, installing, copying and configuring HFCD server, client and plugin for you. Windows folks, sorry, I’m working on the windows installer. I hope to get it out asap. BTW, the manual installation is not that bad, as long as you know how to use ant and install a plugin in Eclipse :-).
UPDATE (Nov 25th, 2009): The installers for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux are now available.
Stop Coding! 
I set this up, and it works, here’s a comparison in speed in compiling my large project (three libraries, and several flex modules in the main project)
*Flash builder 2:
Build entire project: 35sec
Change file in small module & rebuild: 2sec
Change file in large module & rebuild: 16sec
*HFCD
Build entire project: 33sec
Change file in small module & rebuild: 1sec? it’s so fast it’s hard to time 🙂
Change file in large module & rebuild: 10sec
Admittedly I have an already quite fast PC, but the time savings are still nice. I can imagine the savings being even greater for people with average or slower PCs.
I have however one question: How can I make HFCD use a custom SDK, not the one bundled with eclipse? I have recompiled the Flex SDK to fix one minor (but very very annoying) bug, and I changed the build.xml to point at that SDK instead of the eclipse one…but HFCD seems to be using the eclipse Flex SDK still.
Thanks!
David R
October 21, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Hmm…I just noticed you override mxmlc.jar and asc.jar…that’s the issue right there (since my changes to the SDK get compiled into those JAR files). Since these are open source components, have you released your changes to the source anywhere? I could just apply those changes to my flex sdk source, recompile, and that should be it I think.
Thanks
David R
October 21, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Hi David,
Yes, I made some fixes and additions to both Flex 3.4.1 and Flex 4.0.0 beta 2 in order to get everything to work. According to MPL, I have to make my codes available to others and this is what I intend to do. As to when I’m going to make it available, I plan to release it in the December HFCD milestone… That could happen in November, but I can’t guarantee it now.
I’m also going to talk to Adobe about contributing my codes back to their mainline (I still know some compiler folks there :-). If they take my changes, great. If not, no biggie. I’m just going to include it in my distribution.
Clement Wong
October 21, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Hi there.. Very awesome indeed.. I have tried to use your compiler, but i have run into some issues. I am sitting on Windows Vista and I am using Flex Builder 3 Standalone Version: 3.0.214193. When I run the clean on my project i get following message:
unable to open ‘\E\Playground\Awesome\libs’
Now this looks to me as a MAC url? At least thats what I’m being told 😛
Any clue where in the process I’ve done something wrong? I am looking forward to test your compiler and hopefully save some time, since my compiling also have come to a point where it is ridiculously slow.
Thx.
Fedlarm
October 22, 2009 at 3:46 am
Hi, most developers saw this error message when they did not “upload” the files to HFCD. This post explains some basic steps on how to setup your projects. Please take a look.
Basically, what you need to do is open the “HFCD FileSet” panel” (click ‘Windows’ –> ‘Other Views…’), specify the directories where your SWC files are located and select ‘Upload Files’ in the panel’s pull-down menu.
It looks like I need to add some help wizard steps into the plugin to guide users through the project setup…
Clement Wong
October 22, 2009 at 8:18 am
And sorry for putting it here.. it should probably be in one of the other posts, since this one is about FB4.
Fedlarm
October 22, 2009 at 3:48 am
The steps I described in my previous reply apply to FB4 as well. Like I said in my previous reply, I think adding some wizard-like help into the plugin will definitely help. Also, I need to beef up the documentation. My bad.
Clement Wong
October 22, 2009 at 8:23 am