Is there a way to build a Flash 9 SWF from an FLA file without using the Flash IDE?

Question

Two reasons this would be useful, in case there's some other way to achieve these goals: 1) Building in the Flash IDE is really slow; I was hoping a third-party compiler would be faster. 2) It would be nice to be able to build projects on machines that don't have the Flash IDE installed. I'm familiar with other AS3 compilers that are out there, but I don't know of any that take FLA files as input.

Answer 1

There's a plugin for Eclipse called FDT. It uses the open source compiler MTASC and supports ANT. The tool is free for OpenSource developers. Get more Infos here: http://fdt.powerflasher.com/

Hope it helps :)

Answer 2

FDT (or more precicely mtasc for as2 or flex for as3) can't take a .fla file as input.

Fla files are for design, timeline animation etc though, if you're doing to do programming only you don't need fla files or the Flash IDE. FDT is an amazing tool for coding, although there are other alternatives too (FDT is pretty expensive, unless you have a project on osflash.org).

Answer 3

http://www.projectsprouts.org is something you should definitely look at. It automates project creation for as2 and as3, downloads libraries if you don't have them (like mtasc, or the Flex compiler) and so allows you to compile swfs without the Flash IDE.

Of course this is not exactly what you were asking - I'd say that no, there is no third-party compiler which takes FLAs and compiles swfs - if there was it would be unauthorised / non-commercial, as the FLA format is not open, only the swf format is.

Answer 4

I also recommend using FlashDevelop. It's another open source tool that's a very lightweight IDE (SciTE based I believe) that integrates SWFMILL, a popular tool which can create SWF layout items from XML files, and mtasc, a popular third party compiler for Actionscript. I am not entirely sure you can take .FLA files as input, but you CAN avoid FLA files altogether by creating the layout in XML, or if the designer / Flash Developer who creates layouts for you can simply provide a compiled, empty (as far as code) SWF file, these tools will allow you to inject compiled actionscript directly into the SWF file. This technique can also be used on the command line to generate build scripts and so forth.

Here's the website: http://www.flashdevelop.org

Answer 5

To answer the original question, there is no way to compile FLAs without using the Flash IDEs.

The only partial solution to to use a command line script that automates opening Flash Authoring and compiling the FLA. You can find one such example here:

http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2004/02/20/flashcommand-flash-command-line-compiler-for-os-x/

If you just need to compile ActionScript code and assets, there are a number of options (some included in this thread), including the mxmlc compiler included in the Flex SDK (provided by Adobe).

http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/

Hope that helps...

mike chambers

[email protected]