Due to the efforts of various developers and supporters, FlashDevelop is becoming more and more Flex friendly, so to speak. It’s great to see the progress that has been made in the past few months. It started sometime last winter or spring with a post or two regarding some Ant build files and instructions for adding a new button to the toolbar to launch those build files. It’s now at the point where syntax can be quickly checked at the press of a button and autocompletion works for Actionscript 3 files as well as MXML files.
Philippe has been extremely supportive in getting a lot of this incorporated into FlashDevelop and various community members have been key as well. Keith contributed some great project templates to get people started quickly and autocompletion wouldn’t be possible without Ben’s AS3 intrinsic classes. I’m also amazed at how Philippe finds the time to work on FlashDevelop 3, answer all the forum posts that he does and at the same time investigate the workings of the Flex compiler to see what he can do for us Flex developers.
So what’s the latest on Flex support within FlashDevelop? Well it’s looking good. Philippe has made it possible for plugin developers (or wannabe plugin developers like myself) to easily call the compiler. There are really only a few areas that I see lacking for a full Flex development experience.
- Mixed files such as MXML and AS3 don’t highlight and autocomplete correctly.
- Custom tags don’t work in MXML files.
- Debugging needs to be done command line.
Currently one has to follow a few steps to add Flex and AS3 support to FlashDevelop and this also assumes that you have Java and Ant installed. As I hinted before, I’ve been playing around with plugin development and I’d like to develop a Flex plugin which allows one to configure their project as well as capture debug output within the editor. Since some of the shortcomings might not be fixed until FlashDevelop 3 (with it’s new completion engine), my goal is to make Flex support setup as easy as possible. I’ll hopefully make some progress on this and post updates along the way.
