Get Started

Sprouts needs two items installed before you can get going. Start off by installing Ruby. In case you're wondering, Ruby is...

A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write.

Its a great language for many things, one of which is writing utilities and automation tools.
Once Ruby is installed, head on over to RubyGems and follow their installation instructions. RubyGems is a cross platform package management system allowing for quick installation of source code, libraries and tools.
To make sure everything is working properly run the following from your commandline: sudo gem --help #Windows users drop the sudo If you are greeted by RubyGem usage information, the installation was successful and you can proceed to installing sprouts. If not, check with RubyGems FAQ's to see if they have a quick solution to your problem. Failing that head over to the Sprouts ListServ on Google Groups and post your problem in our forum.

The big moment has arrived. To install Sprouts, type the following into your commandline:

For Windows gem install sprout For Mac/Linux
sudo gem install sprout If the installation was successful you should see the following output:

Attempting install of sprout
Successfully installed sprout-x.x.xx
1 gem installed
Gems installed: sprout

Sprouts is ready to do thy bidding. Enjoy!

If you run into any trouble, you can always find help in the forums.

In this quick "Hello World" example for Sprouts, we'll create a new Flex project and a simple Utility Class. No long introduction required.
Open up your commandline and cd into the path where you'd like to create your project directory: cd C:\projects Now enter the following command to create the project: sprout -n as3 SomeProject You should see sprouts downloading and unpacking a number of required libraries and tools. It took me about a minute to download everything the first time. Now cd into the "SomeProject" directory and run the "rake" task. This will compile and launch the pre-configured application. The first time you run rake against this project, all of the required tools will be downloaded and configured. This may take awhile, especially when we get to the Flex SDK. Once it's done, you can enter: cd SomeProject rake If everything is going well, you should see a nice photo prominently displaying the Sprouts Logo.
Next we'll create a new Class called "utils.MathUtil" and its corresponding test Class. script/generate utils.MathUtil Not too shabby so far :)
You can run all the unit tests in your project with the following command. rake test Do not worry if the tests fail. Its supposed to do that so you remember to write your unit tests for each Class you generate. Perhaps I'll leave that discussion for one of the more advanced documentation.

Welcome to Sprouts.

Here are a couple ways to learn more about Sprouts.

• Get Informed - Check out our screencasts and documentation.
• Get Active - Join the community discussion or make some time to contribute fixes and features!