Building AIR mobile project for multiple customers with gradleFX

Question

I have a piece software that should delivered to many customers. Each build should get a customized set of assets (icons , splash screen etc. ) and a bunch of config files, but also a different app id (eg. com.myself.myapp.customer1 ; com.myself.myapp.customer2 etc... )

Also I need builds for different OSes like Android, iOS , PlayBook.

The way I handled this up to now was: I created a new Application.mxml for each customer, which opened the right locations and passed the files to the MainController. This leaves it to me to pick the right assets, certificates and iOS-provisioning files to be packaged each time I need to compile, and I had to repeat this steps for each customer, which is very error-prone and , especially in case of iOS, extremely time-consuming.

So I need to get into automated building quickly...

I already downloaded and installed gradle/gradleFX, but I don't find the documentation very friendly to beginners in this subject.

Now the questions:

1. How do I have to convert the (Flash Builder- ) given project structure to conform the gradle conventions? Are there FB-plugins or tools I could use?
2. Can I use gradleFX to build for debug sessions as well? FB 4.7 has a lot of issues with that I really like to circumvent.
3. Can an ipa be "signed" and packaged with assets after it's principle compilation, so I don't have to wait 15 mins for each compile?

Many thanks

Answer 1

How do I have to convert the (Flash Builder- ) given project structure to conform the gradle conventions? Are there FB-plugins or tools I could use?

There is nothing to convert. Unless your project structure is extremely exotic, you should be able to configure GradleFx to work with it.
Note that by default GradleFx uses some Maven-style conventions: for instance, the default source folder will be src/main/actionscript. If you want to configure a typical FlashBuilder project you'll have to explicitly declare the source folder:

srcDirs = ['src']

As for FB plugins: there are none. But you can use an "external build tool" instead of FB's built-in configuration. IntelliJ IDEA has Gradle support, but nothing specifically for GradleFx. GradleFx itself has a flashbuilder plugin, but its purpose is to generate an FB-compatible project from a build script - I don't think that's what you're looking for.

Can I use gradleFX to build for debug sessions as well? FB 4.7 has a lot of issues with that I really like to circumvent.

You can build a debug-enabled version of your application simply by setting the debug flag to true (as described in Adobe's mxmlc docs). GradleFx does not expose all compiler options in its API (there's just too many of them), however you can use the additionalCompilerOptions to define whatever additional compiler flags you require:

additionalCompilerOptions = ['-debug=true']

I don't know how you should tell FlashBuilder to hook up to the compiled swf for its debug session though :( Perhaps through the "external build tool" configuration.

Can an ipa be "signed" and packaged with assets after it's principle compilation, so I don't have to wait 15 mins for each compile?

I know too little of mobile support to give you a meaningful answer here, but I can tell you that a major upgrade in this area is in the works right now and will be released soon. Perhaps you should ask this question on http://support.gradlefx.org/; @Slevinbe is very helpful and quick to answer.

I don't find the documentation very friendly to beginners in this subject

If the docs don't work for you, perhaps the example projects might be more helpful. That said, you could help us make the docs better for beginners by telling us how we could improve them. Just start a discussion on support.gradlefx.org

Multiple outputs

One more thing: your main issue seems to be that you need to create multiple outputs from a single code base. This is one thing that GradleFx doesn't provide out-of-the-box (yet). However, there's a fairly unobtrusive workaround that I've described on my blog. If you find the basic concepts difficult to grasp, then I suggest you don't start with this part, but rather concentrate on getting a single project building first.