metaas : Java library for manipulating ActionScript source code

About

metaas provides Java applications with a 'Document Object Model' for ActionScript 3 code. Its primary function is generating code, but it allows existing .as source files to be loaded, and simple modifications to be made.

Note, metaas does not actually generate Flash movies or ActionScript bytecode. You will still need the Flash IDE for Flex for that.

metaas is released under the terms of the Apache License, version 2.0.

Why not just use Velocity?

Velocity and other templating languages are great for general text-generation tasks, but metaas' special knowledge of ActionScript can make the life of the metaprogrammer easier when handling the complicated stuff.

For instance, metaas can,

• auto-indent generated code, so you don't have to worry how the output will look
• enforce syntax rules, so attempting to generate syntactically invalid ActionScript should fail
• allow postprocessing, e.g. an 'organise imports' process runs before code is written to disk
• modify existing code, whereas a basic templating system could only generate new code

Documentation

Read the API documentation.

Downloads

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Current

0.8 2008-03-21

metaas-0.8-bin.zip

Changes since 0.7:

• Switched to Apache License, version 2.0
• Initial support for ActionScript expressions in the DOM
• Provide for dynamic and final class modifiers
• Support for break, continue, default xml namespace try catch finally and throw statements
• Fix broken assumptions that statement bodies will be code-blocks
• Many bugs fixed!

Previous

0.7 2007-03-17

metaas-0.7-bin.zip

Changes since 0.6:

• Added more support for creating and reading JavaDoc-style documentation comments, including shortcuts for describing method parameters.
• Fixed a brace-formatting bug in for-loops
• Added support for parsing and creating 'rest' parameters which use the '...' operator.
• Prevented an error calling getType() on an ASArg declared with type '*'.
• Fixed broken formatting when an expression is added to an ASReturnStatement.

0.6 2007-02-17

metaas-0.6-bin.zip

Changes since 0.5:

• Fixed the embarrassing bug that broke example code on the documentation front page
• Added representations for most types of ActionScript statement, so that the application can modify these.
• Added a method to list the ActionScript statements in a StatementContainer

0.5 2007-01-30

metaas-0.5-bin.zip

Changes since 0.4:

• Seperated auto-import processing out from ActionScriptProject#writeAll() - the new performAutoImport() method must now be used
• Fixed several bugs in interface-related code generation
• Added a 'classpath' to ActionScriptProject to support the auto-import process with project-external code
• Allow for regular-expression-literals, so we no longer raise SyntaxException on encountering one
• Assorted parser fixes to accept more examples of valid AS syntax, including several instances of 'keywords' that are also valid as identifiers

0.4 2006-12-17

metaas-0.4-bin.zip

Changes since 0.3:

• Added support for metadata tags (e.g. [Bindable])
• Renamed some interfaces so that use of 'AS' prefix is consistent (e.g. ASSourceFactory is now ActionScriptFactory, CompilationUnit is now ASCompilationUnit). All 'AS'-prefixed interfaces moded to a 'dom' subpackage. No more renamings planned!
• Allow for E4X XML-literals, so we no longer raise SyntaxException on encountering one
• Extracted a common Documentable interface for types and members
• Fixed incorrect formatting when a single-line-comment is inserted
• Fixed some bugs in auto-import code
• ASMethod#addParam() now returns ASArg rather than void
• Now supports the default xml namespace statement

0.3 2006-09-24

metaas-0.3-bin.zip

Changes since 0.2:

• API improvements to cover a bit more AS3 syntax
• Major rewrite to port internals from ANTLRv2 to ANTLRv3
• Improved code formatting for generated code
• Preserves formatting of imported code
• New 'ASProject' helper for managing the generation of groups of files in one run
• New 'auto import' feature to simplify management of references between files

0.2 2006-08-01

metaas-0.2.tar.gz

Changes since 0.1:

• Allows access to several parts of the source code which the 0.1 release didn't, including fields, interfaces, documentation-comments, superclasses/superinterfaces. This includes the ability to remove most of these things from the code.
• Fixed a bug in floating-point number recognition
• Hopefully fixed byte-order-marker handling
• Helper methods aid in the construction of control statements like loops and conditionals.

0.1 2006-07-16

metaas-0.1.tar.gz

• Initial relase
• Don't rely on the API too much yet

Code

To obtain a copy of the latest code, use the Subversion repository at the URL:

http://svn.badgers-in-foil.co.uk/metaas/trunk/

See also the Maven2-generated metaas code reports site.

Contact

If you have any questions or have some code to contribute, please subscribe to the mailing list.

Due Credit

metaas was inspired by the JaxMe JavaSource framework for generating Java code.

metaas was originally based on the ActionScript 3 ANTLR grammer from the ASDT project, though the metaas fork is now significantly different. Authorship of the original as3 grammar appears to be claimed by Martin Schnabel. Many thanks to him, and the other ASDT authors for their hard work.

Related Software

Projects using metaas:

• VASGen
• CairngormFlex Assistant
• wsdl2as
• asxsd

Code Generators:

• JaxMe JavaSource
• StringTemplate

Websites:

• Code Generation Network

Language Metamodels / Document Object Models:

• Eclipse JDT DOM
• Spoon
• Sun's CodeModel
• ASPOJO