Flex Developer Tools – IDEs
I was doing recently some research on tools that we have available as Flex developers. With this series of my blog posts I would like to share my findings with the community. I will start with IDE tools that we have. As my research shows there is quite a bit of selection depending on the platform and also licensing:
- Flex Builder (commercial license and free for academics – http://freeriatools.adobe.com/) – This is of course my favorate IDE
and I’m using it every day. Its based on Eclipse and as I have a strong Java background it is natural platform for me. It shows strong dominance among other tools with its great WYSIWYG support.
- FlashDevelop (Open Source, only windows version) – It really powerful IDE that supports not only Flex but also Flash, AS2, AS3 and AIR development. It is very fast, only drawback I see is it doesn’t support other platforms then Windows.
- FDT (commercial license) – I don’t have experiance with this tool but I heard some voices that it really rocks when it comes to serious ActionScript development, especially with its code completion, documentation support and very much missing feature in FB code formatting.
- IntelliJ IDEA 8.0 (commercial license) – In Java word IntelliJ is seen by many to be the best of all IDE’s so I expect their Flex plugin can become very important player in our environment.
- Aptana (free and commercial versions) – It lets you edit, build and debug JavaScript/HTML based AIR applications.
- Tofino (Free) – Very new player on the market, its free Microsoft Visual Studio plugin. It is still under active development but there are some builds already available to download and start coding. I’m hoping to see with this one more and more .NET developers attracted by our great Flash Platform. With great .NET server side capabilities and real cross platform UI with Flex I believe it will rock! What do you think?
- Amethyst Personal Edition (Free) – Another Visual Studio plugin looks also very promissing…
- FlexBean (Open Source) – It’s a NetBeans plugin, it is in early stage at the moment with a project wizzard, simple editor and sdk configuration stuff.
- AXDT (Open Source) - “AXDT is a set of plug-ins for the Eclipse Platform that enable you to write ActionScript3 code in an integrated environment. AXDT is based on Eclipse Imp and utilizes the opensource FlexSDK.”
- Tour de Flex (Flex capabilities demo app) – that is of course not an IDE but I find very useful when developing. For those of you that didn’t have a chance to play with this one I recommend getting it ASAP. It is really great application that demonstrates Flex capabilities with code samples and many API’s to things like Twitter, Google Maps…
If I missed something important please let me know. I would also like to hear what are your opinions and experiance with these tools.
[...] Trochę w kontekście poprzedniego posta Pawła na temat Tofino chciałem się z Wami podzielić moimi odkryciami na temat dostępnych narzędzi IDE dla programistów Flex’a. Ciekawy jestem jakie są Wasze doświadczenia i ulubione IDE. Na swoim blogu wrzuciłem listę i parę komentarzy od siebie: http://www.riaspace.net/2009/01/flex-developer-tools-ides/ [...]
Narzędzia Flex programisty - IDE - Flextech - let’s Flex - Adobe Flex / AIR / LiveCycle Development Blog
14 Jan 09 at 8:17 pm
Yea, in my opinion nothing beats FDT. Handsdown its the best of them all… only thing is it doesnt have mxml support, for for flash dev its the best. Flashdevelop is amazing after that – i mean it keeps getting better and better.
Austin
14 Jan 09 at 9:05 pm
I have high hopes for IntelliJ IDEA and while Flex support kind of sucked in version 7, now it’s really improving.
But anyway – once I start contributing to FlexBean project (especially my half baked AS3 editor), NetBeans will rule the world
bartek
14 Jan 09 at 9:43 pm
Only FDT, no doubts for me. Even without mxml support, it’s best as editor for now. A fewf tricks and you can use FDT side by side with Flex Builder in one project taking the best from each of them
sema
14 Jan 09 at 10:32 pm
Nice list, I was thinking you could also add, AXDT (used to be known as ASDT) http://mb0.org/asdt, it’s also still being developped, but there is mxml & as3 support, these guys are doing amazing work.
Cheers
julien
15 Jan 09 at 7:51 am
FlashDevelop could become the best cause it’s opensource license and the code is public and free to everyone so you can write your own plugins end extend it’s capabilities as you wish or rewrite the whole editor as you want.
It could be ported by using Mono to other platforms, as far as I know there are some scintilla porting problems now and there were no people who do all source bugfree compiled on mono, but I think if flash platform will be more popular it’s a matter of time to make FD versions for other platforms
anatinae
19 Jan 09 at 3:08 am
[...] is IntelliSense support. I believe this is great news for Flex community! In one of my previous blog posts I listed number of different IDE tools of course Amethyst was there. As you can see now you can [...]
Amethyst Beta 2 released! at Space of Flex/AIR technologies
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[...] Flex Developer Tools – IDEs [...]
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Пинайте своего хостера – сайт с трудом открылся
Online
20 Feb 09 at 9:52 am
[...] Flex plugin. If you are looking for some other alternative you can check one of my previous posts http://www.riaspace.net/2009/01/flex-developer-tools-ides where I listed all the tools in the market available to Flex developers. This is really great news [...]
Amethyst Beta 3 Released at Space of Flex/AIR technologies
24 Feb 09 at 2:57 pm
Hello,
There is also that :
http://arthurdick.com/projects/as3/
he
2 Mar 09 at 8:57 pm
+1 on AXDT
With this Eclipse plugin you can even do Flash development on Linux:
http://netpatia.blogspot.com/2009/09/flash-development-on-linux.html
josean
17 Sep 09 at 2:00 pm
Nice list !
Thanks for the FDT compliments, it makes me even more proud to have joined FDT Powerflasher team recently. We are now supporting MXML, among other features.
http://www.fdt.powerflasher.com/developer-tools/fdt-3/whats-new/
We are also expanding the team, if anyone interested, please ping me @BrunoFonzi
Bruno Fonzi
8 Dec 09 at 10:29 pm
It’s great list….Currently i am using Flex Builder. Thank for listing different tools for flex. Now it will ease my development time.
Ric - Flex Developer
24 Nov 11 at 10:10 am