Concept

With the ever growing complexity of mobile development most other modern development platforms have a series of package management and merge tools to simplify the development process, particularly around adding third party components. These tools simplify the process of adding a component / library / plugin into an application, managing dependencies and merging manifests or plists.

If AIR is to progress as a modern development tool I believe it is well past time that we have some similar tools at our disposal and as a community agree upon a series of standards around component descriptions.

I know there are proprietary tools that manage certain aspects of this process such as ane-lab and Adobe Air Assistant owever these tools are highly customised to the integrated ANEs and would probably be better suited as UI components built upon a common standard.

This tool will be similar to:

• npm (node package manager);
• gradle (Gradle);
• mvn (Maven);
• pip (package installer for python);
• haxelib (Haxelib)