General Idea

In a first version the Apache maven-flex-plugin should be compatable with all Apache FDKs but not necessarily with Adobe FDKs, especially pre Flex 4 projects. A lot of complexity of Flexmojos was due to the compatability with older Flex versions and in Flexmojos 6 it was particularly hard to add support for FDKs with the groupIds "com.adobe.flex" AND "org.apache.flex". Skipping the support of legacy FDKs will allow to develop a better optimized version of the plugin. Eventually adding support for the other versions could be dealt with after having a finished version.

Also I would suggest limiting the plugin to a reduced set of frameworks. Here I would concentrate on implementing an extensible solution, but only implement one single adapter to a particular framework.

These are the frameworks I would suggest to support:

• Code Generation:
  • Gas3 Code Generator (http://www.graniteds.org/confluence/display/DOC/3.+Gas3+Code+Generator)
  • Some tool able to generate AS versions of Java classes defining constants (Flexmojos had a custom implementation for this)
• UnitTesting:
  • FlexUnit 4.1 (http://www.flexunit.org/)
• Optimization:
  • Apparat (http://code.google.com/p/apparat/) As it has major advantages over the flex optimizer.
    -Code Coverage: I would skip this in a first version

In general it would be wise to have the plugin configured the same way as required by the Flexmojos plugin. Only if there is a reason to do it differently. If there are multiple equivalent approaches, I would prefer the flexmojos way as this makes it easier for users previously using Flexmojos to migrate to the new plugin.

The suggested default structure of a flex project, no matter what type, should be the following:

/pom.xml
/src
    /main
        /flex
        /resources
        /locales
            /{locale-code
    /test
        /flex
        /resources
        /locales
            /{locale-code}

The plugin should support the following packaging types:

• SWC (To generate swc libraries)
• SWF (To generate swf files)
• AIR (To generate air packaged applications)
• WAR (To copy the needed SWFs and RSLs to the web-app directory)