I’d vote for FlashDevelop, myself…

Posted on January 24, 2010
Filed Under Computing & Software Systems | 2 Comments

flashdevelopI’m just excerpting my email response to one ‘Abe’, who used my contact form when I wasn’t looking and whose email therefore has languished for a few weeks elsewhere in a barely-looked-at account… I hope it will help the others who keep turning up at my flex/eclipse* article from ages ago:

“That article was written a long time ago, and Flash/Flex is not really my core activity or focus. However, if you are still interested in this technology, I strongly recommend that you abandon the eclipse** approach and get a much faster, lightweight tool: FlashDevelop.

FlashDevelop is an editor that, once you’ve downloaded the flex sdk, will allow you to develop both flash AND flex applications without the Flash IDE. For full-fledged web dev and RIA dev, it’s an editor for html, xhtml, css, php, xml, mxml, as2 and as3 scripts. In short, everything you need as a flash/flex developer. You need the .net runtime to run it, but that’s easy to install and free to download.

Once you’re comfy with it I would also suggest downloading the exportSWC plugin for flashdevelop. That will allow you to build .swc files (again, without the Flash IDE).”

Hope that helps someone…

—-

*in fact it has been the greatest source of irritation that my flex/eclipse posts were getting the most hits… I’ve really tried not to link to them up till now, and I pre-filter them out of my analytics reports… GAH! This isn’t really an IT or programming blog…

**bloated overkill, imho.

Tenuously Linked (blame my tagging):

Comments

2 Responses to “I’d vote for FlashDevelop, myself…”

  1. anon on May 6th, 2010 6:15 pm

    well, you can’t expect people getting a new IDE just for the flash stuff, if they used to have an IDE for literally everything.

    i see your point that flashdevelop might be better for flex in general. but its not really a strong argument to people who are programming in many other languages, like C++, C#, Java, Python just to name a few of the “big” ones …

  2. leona on May 6th, 2010 11:55 pm

    Howdy…
    Noone who’s a multi-platform devver is going to ditch whatever they’ve got and pick one tool to the exclusion of all others just for flash…

    But if you’re almost exclusively a flasher/flexer with a bit of basic scaffolding webdev on the side, flashDevelop most def lets you have your cake AND eat it :-)

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