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Showing posts from May, 2009

Don't Package on Every Single Compile, Flex Compiler!!

One of the problems I have with Adobe's Flex technology is that Flex compile times are very slow. Yes, I know, Gumbo is going to make compiles somewhat faster. I also know about the Flex Compiler Shell, and other projects to distribute compilation. Yes, I've also tried incremental compilation. All of these things really miss the true problem with the Flex compiler. And it is really at the heart of the Flash technology itself. The problem really lies in granularity of a compilation unit that Flash and the Flex compiler produce. Basically the output of a compile is a SWC or SWF which is fully ready to be deployed. I think the scope of compilation unit that the compiler uses is way too big. The Flex compiler should be producing an intermediate level compilation unit tied to the source file level, or at least some smaller scope. I'm just a dumb Java guy, but SWCs and SWFs look a lot like JAR files to me. They include all the bytecode and embedded resources needed for