Today I’ve taken my first steps in the open-source world: I became a committer to the GradleFx project.

What project say you?

GradleFx is an automated build tool for building Flex and ActionScript applications. It’s a plugin for Gradle, which is an alternative to the ubiquitous Maven. Actually calling it an alternative would not be doing it justice: it’s Maven, Ivy and ANT mixed up and put on steroids.

Until GradleFx came to the scene, us poor Flex developers only had FlexMojos (a Maven plugin with the same goal) at their disposal. And truth be said: it has some very annoying bugs. So when I discovered GradleFx I was delighted.

When I first gave GradleFx a try, I got a few builds up and running in no time. Unfortunately, I soon found out that GradleFx - being a fairly young project - was missing a few pieces. But since Gradle was designed to be an easily extensible framework, I worked my way around those shortcomings with some custom tasks.

First steps

I soon discovered that GradleFx’ codebase was fairly transparent (as opposed to FlexMojos’). So I forked the project on GitHub and I started adding some minor features. Yennick, one of the founders and currently the only active committer, seemed to like my ideas. He merged them into the codebase rather quickly, encouraged me to keep on contributing and before I knew what happened, I became part of the ‘team’.

Contributions

So far I’ve added only a few minor improvements:

• a theme dependency scope: well, it was missing
• localization conventions: use localized .properties files with zero configuration
• the frameworkLinkage convention: a possibility to determine how the Flex framework is linked into the application

Coming up:

• a flashbuilder plugin that generates a FlashBuilder project with all the dependencies on its build path