I have finally gotten the chance to immerse myself in Flex code lately. I decided to do this series to capture my first hand experiences with Flex. Please share your feedback on the challenges and strengths I highlight. I would love to know if your experiences differ, or if you can fill in some of the gaps where I might be missing something. For those of you considering Adobe Flex, hopefully this will give you an accurate picture of building applications with Flex.
The compiler is currently my number one frustration with Flex development – it is quite SLOWWWWWWW…… To the point where I have been wondering if we are doing something wrong. I have done dozens of Google searches and only found mild relief.
In general, all compile operations seem quite slow. Our near deal breaking issue is around a SWC library we are building. Here are a few numbers to help quantify what we are seeing:
- 31 MXML source files
- 24 ActionScript source files
- 3 embedded images
- Building typically ranges from: 25-35 Seconds (On ThinkPad T60, Ubuntu, FlexBuilder 3, 2 GB RAM, Core Duo T5600)
We do have a couple of embedded resources, but I don’t see many options here since we do need these as part of our API. We also have the incremental and keep flags set:
-incremental=true –keep=true
It is nice to see Flash Player 10 beta is out with its performance improvements, but I don’t see much talk about addressing the MXMLC compiler performance. Are there plans to address this, or is there a workaround we are missing?
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