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After donation, Gordon Smith of Adobe, who has worked on Falcon from the beginning of the Falcon project, is on loan to Apache Flex for one day a week to improve Falcon's MXML support, with the goal of making it a suitable replacement for the legacy compiler.

Everyone can contribute to Falcon's development by using it to compile their Flex applications and reporting any bugs you find in Jira. Reducing a bug to a simple test case will make it infinitely more likely to be fixed.

Initial development efforts:

• Run the source code for all Apache Flex SWCs through Falcon to see if it reports spurious problems. Falcon is pickier than the legacy compiler, so we will need to update the source code in some cases for Falcon.
• Get various test apps besides Checkinapp compiling and running.
• Get Mustella tests compiling with Falcon and passing.

Falcon's Original Goals

• Reduced compilation time for both full and incremental compiles, especially for multi-project workspaces.
• Reduced memory consumption, especially for multi-project workspaces.
• Usefulness as a code-intelligence engine and incremental compiler for an integrated development environment; not just a command-line compiler.
• Modular design that is easy to understand and to evolve.
• Generation of beter bytecode for better runtime performance.

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In the summer of 2012, Falcon was ready for donation to Apache.

Architecture

Falcon is designed from the beginning to support compiling multiple targets in multiple projects in a workspace, as exist in an IDE like Flash Builder. By contrast, the legacy asc was designed to compile a single AS file, and then the legacy mxmlc was built by another team on top of that.

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Falcon includes transcoders for the various types of embedded assets, which read, for example, a PNG file and convert it to the form required inside a SWF. It does NOT support font trancoding, because this relies on proprietary Adobe technology which Adobe has not donated to Apache. Instead, you must use a separate fontswf tool to convert your font files to SWF files and then embed the fonts from them.

FAQs

Please add questions here and people who contribute to Falcon will be happy to try to answer them.

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