Macromedia joins Eclipse Foundation

Macromedia said it will join the Eclipse Foundation and create a “next-generation rich Internet application development tool,” code-named Zorn, based on Eclipse.

News article on news.com.

Further Macromedia now speaks of a Flash Platform i guess as a pendent to the Java Platform.
Now Flash Developers can be called “Flash Platform Developer” .

This is very good news. The flash opensource community around osflash.org (me included) already uses Eclipse in combination with several components and plugins to build flash applications with opensource software (FAME).

Also Ant can be integrated in the build process:

build.properties:

mtasc=C:/work/eclipse/mtasc/mtasc.exe
swfname=C:/work/projects/projectname/project
custom_classpath=C:/work/classes
mx_classpath="C:/Program Files/Macromedia/Flash MX 2004/en/First Run/Classes"
main_class=C:/work/classes/toplevel/package/Run.as
suffix=_test

build.xml:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<project name="ProjectName" default="ProjectTarget">
 
	<target name="ProjectTarget">
		<property file="build.properties"/>
 
		<copy file="${swfname}.swf"	tofile="${swfname}${suffix}.swf" overwrite="true"/>
 
		<exec executable="${mtasc}">
			<arg line='-swf ${swfname}${suffix}.swf -cp ${custom_classpath} -cp ${mx_classpath} ${main_class}'/>
		</exec>
	</target>
 
</project>

In this example the C:/work/projects/projectname/project.swf gets copied to C:/work/projects/projectname/project_test.swf and is beeing compiled.