Feb 05

We need a package manager like RubyGems for distributing Flex components

Tag: Flex — Derek Wischusen @ 2:22 am

It’s nice to see that there is a lot of interest in developing Flex components, and the FlexComponents discussion list is a great start towards providing a single place to learn about the components that the Flex community is working on, but I would really like to see something like Ruby’s RubyGems package manager (or Perl’s CPAN) for distributing Flex components. Having a single centralized, standardized means of distributing Flex components would make it a lot easier for Flex developers to take advantage of the work that other Flex developers are doing. 

For example, if I came across a nice component, such as this spring loaded tree, it would be great if all I had to do to add it to my projects is crack open a command line and enter something like:

flexc install spring-tree

Better yet, it would be really nice to see this type of functionality integrated directly into Flex Builder 3.

Just a thought…

5 Responses to “We need a package manager like RubyGems for distributing Flex components”

  1. Brian LeRoux says:
    February 5th, 2007 at 2:39 am

    Great idea — haXe has a package management system modeled after gems so the actionscript community isn’t going totally without.

    Perhaps you should fire Ray Camden an email and see if RiaForge would be into it.

  2. J Aaron Farr says:
    March 1st, 2007 at 1:30 pm

    +1

    It’s a good idea and it’s early enough to do something about it. Having something in place for when Apollo comes out would be nice too.

  3. Neil says:
    March 3rd, 2007 at 9:31 pm

    “ifbin” is sorta of like a package manager

  4. Luke Bayes says:
    December 31st, 2007 at 7:54 am

    Just stumbled over this old post and thought I’d comment in case someone else does the same.

    I’ve been working on ’sprouts’ for the past year and finally landed on an architecture that actually sits on top of Rubygems for package management. Even though we have a functional pre-alpha in the wild right now, we expect to release a production-ready build before the end of January 2008 that will really support versioning via Rubygems the repository.

    Check it out: http://www.projectsprouts.org

  5. flexonrails.net » We need a package manager like RubyGems for distributing Flex components - Revisited says:
    January 24th, 2008 at 6:31 am

    [...] a year ago I wrote a post about how the Flex/As3 community needs a package manager like RubyGems for managing libraries and [...]

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