Apache Royale Compiler
Turn your source code into compiled output
Apache Royale provides a compiler (some call it a transpiler or cross-compiler) and a command-line debugger to turn your source code into compiled output you can share with users. The compiler takes AS3, MXML, and CSS as inputs.
The main output of the compiler is JavaScript. The compiler can also output the SWF format for the Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player runtimes. There is some initial work on Web Assembly output.
The compiler is architected in a way to make it possible to add additional output formats in the future.
The code is based on the ActionScript Compiler 2.0 that Adobe donated to Apache. The SWF output was pretty much working at the time of donation. Volunteers working on the Apache Flex and Royale projects have created the JavaScript output code.
User Guide
The Royale Compiler does many things besides compile MXML and ActionScript into JavaScript and/or SWF. But if that’s all you want to do, you can use the compiler with Apache Maven, Apache Ant, asconfigc, several IDEs, npm and through the command-line. Below are some pointers to getting started:
Apache Maven
Apache Maven is a command line tool for automating builds, and a plugin is available for compiling for Royale projects. There are some examples in the apache/royale-asjs repo in the examples folder. The pom.xml files should be useful as a starting point. There are also Maven archetypes available in Apache Royale releases.
Apache Ant
Apache Ant is a command line tool for automating builds, and custom tasks are available for compiling Royale projects. In an Apache Royale distribution, there is a compiler-royaleTasks.jar in the js/lib folder that contains Ant tasks for the Royale compiler. There is an <mxmlc> task for compiling applications and a <compc> task for compiling SWC libraries.
Add the following to your Ant build script to load the custom Ant tasks for the Royale compiler:
<taskdef resource="flexTasks.tasks" classpath="${env.ROYALE_HOME}/js/lib/compiler-royaleTasks.jar"/>
If you don’t have the ROYALE_HOME environment variable defined, replace ${env.ROYALE_HOME} with the path to your SDK.
Then, you can use the <mxmlc> and <compc> tasks in your Ant build script.
asconfigc
asconfigc is a command line tool for compiling ActionScript and MXML projects configured with an asconfig.json file.
The asconfig.json file format was originally designed for the ActionScript & MXML language extension for Visual Studio Code, as a way to enable code intelligence features and run build tasks. Later, asconfigc was released as a separate command line tool that could read asconfig.json configuration files and launch the compiler with appropriate options outside of Visual Studio Code.
Refer to the asconfig.json documentation for the full list of project configuration options.
IDEs
Consult the documentation for your IDE or editor to learn how how to launch the Royale compilers. If building the SDK from source, you can generate a distribution compatible with IDEs using either Apache Maven or Apache Ant.
NPM
Both the mxmlc application compiler and the compc library compiler will be available on the system path to run from the command line after installing Royale via npm with the -g flag. Use mxmlc --help or compc --help to see the list of available compiler options.
Command line
The js/bin directory in the SDK contains the mxmlc and compc scripts that will launch the compilers. Use mxmlc --help or compc --help to see the list of available compiler options.
To use mxmlc to compile a Royale application, pass the path to the target file that will be the application’s entry point.
mxmlc src/MyApp.mxml
Additional compiler options may be specified as well. The following options specify that the app should be built for JavaScript only, it should be a debug build, and that source maps should be generated for debugging.
mxmlc -targets=JSRoyale -debug=true -source-map=true src/MyApp.mxml
Compiler Options
Royale provides several compiler options to customize the use. You can check the list of compiler options here:
Read about how to contribute to the Apache Royale Compiler.
