Clever::Tagline::Pending

I’ve never liked the default code editor that comes with the Flash IDE, so when the I discovered that I would need to develop actionscript code for a project, my first thought was to use Textmate instead. Incidentally, some people are already doing this.

I’ve used MTASC to compile Actionscript files before, the most important difference that surfaces when comparing it to Macromedia’s Actionscript compiler (MMC), which is the one that’s packaged in every installation of Flash, is that MTASC is much stricter on enforcing proper syntax. This is intended to reduce occurences of hard to find bugs that arise from improper scripting. The other feature that MTASC touts is its faster compile speed, however I’ve not experienced a visible variance between it and MMC. I would think that this speed improvement would be more apparent when compiling large projects consisting of more than 50 Actionscript files.

I’m using dirtystylus’ Textmate command for checking the syntax of my files, it took me a while to get it working as I organised the dependencies differently. Following my conventions in using MacPorts which is installed in /opt/local/, MTASC and XTrace were placed in /opt/local/managed/. The executable for MTASC was stored in /opt/local/managed/bin/ while XTrace.app was copied to the Applications folder. All supporting scripts were moved to /opt/local/managed/lib/.

This is the customised command that I’m using after trying for about 2 hours.

[code]
FLASHPLAYER=SAFlashPlayer
MTASC=/opt/local/managed/bin/mtasc
CLASSPATHS="-cp /opt/local/managed/lib/mtasc/std/ -cp /opt/local/managed/lib/mtasc/std8/ -cp /Users/douglas/Library/Application\ Support/Macromedia/Flash\ 8/en/Configuration/Classes/"
SOURCE="$TM_FILEPATH"
OUTPUT=test.swf
VERSION=8
TRACE="-trace com.mab.util.debug.trace"
TMPFILE=/tmp/as-compile.err
compileResult=`$MTASC -main "$SOURCE" -wimp -version $VERSION -strict $CLASSPATHS $TRACE 2>&1`
echo "

"
if test -n "$compileResult"
then
errorLine=`echo $compileResult | sed 's/.*:\([0-9]*\):.*/\1/'`
echo "$compileResult";
else
echo "
fi
[/code]