AS3/Flex Development With Eclipse
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007I’ve always been fond of Eclipse for its incredible community. And I can’t say enough about Adobe’s move to the Eclipse platform with FlexBuilder. The Flash IDE has always been locked into this schizophrenic designer vs. developer experience. Breeding alot of interactive devigners. But I think its safe to say that we can finally split the roles back to designers and developers. Flash being the animation designers and Eclipse being the development environment. And maybe that’s what Adobe wants. Maybe Thermo will become the Interaction Designers IDE of choice and Flash will become the animators IDE. But for now, with that in mind, I’ve setup my environment in FlexBuilder/Eclipse and I just wanted to provide you all with some great tools I’ve come across over the years to facilitate a great coding experience in Flex.
So there are two forms of FlexBuilder right now, 2.0 and the beta 3.0. Both are using two seperate versions of Eclipse which is very important to how you setup your environment and what plugins and features you can use. First off is FlexBuilder 2 which comes bundled with Eclipse 3.2. To keep things kosher, it may be important for you now to just download the FlexBuilder 2 with Eclipse included because now the Eclipse environment is already in Eclipse 3.3 Europa and unsupported by Flex 2.0. Some of the plugins I’ll refer to that you can add to Eclipse are already included in Europa and you may not want to install them in Eclipse 3.2.
I’ll add the update manager links next to the websites. The update manager, for those of you not familiar, is the best way to install plugins for Eclipse. If you go to help, software updates, find new features to install. You can add a remote site, give it a name like Aptana Updates, add the link to the update manager, and it will install the latest updates for that plugin. For those links that you need to go to the website and perform a standard download, you can add a local site and point it to your local directory. I’d keep them all in a lib folder outside of Eclipse. And my best adivce is to refrain from dragging and dropping the plugins and features into Eclipse as much as possible. It will definitely break at some point and you’ll be cursing for hours. Believe me 
So here are my plugins of choice:
Aptana : Update Manager Aptana is probably the best plugin out there for web development. Its seriously important to start here because it includes coding support for html, css, js, debugging support for js and ftp. Everything a web developer would want to start out with.
XMLBuddy : Xml buddy is one of the best freebees out their for xml support. If you’re hardcore like I am, you’ll want to jump right into Oxygen but it will cost ya. If not another tool I recommend is the XPath plugin below.
XPath Developer : Update Manager Comes with a slew of other great plugins, Multi clipboard for copy and paste craziness, QuickREx which is a great little regex tester much like Xpath dev, and tinyHTML which provides itty bitty html formatting.
JDT Java Development Tools, if you’re downloading FlexBuilder 2 you should download this to get Ant Support. Downloading is a bit different though, go to the Eclipse.org updates, which should already be added to FlexBuilder 2 and select the jdt option.
Subclipse : Update Manager Subversion is definitely the one and only cvs system out there and a great way to manage the repo.
FDT 3.0 : Update Manager For those of you totally interested in FDT I’m going to provide a link but 3.0 is still a little weird and buggy to me as far as AS3 is concerned. Plus the fact that it doesn’t support AS3 debugging yet is a show stopper for me.
FMS : Flash Media Server Editor, if you’re working with the Media Server this plugin is a no brainer and highly recommended.
So here’s a great list of tools that you’ll want to pickup. As far as Europa goes and Flex Beta 3, there are alot more great plugins for you to use that take advantage of the Eclipse Web Tools Project. These involve more of the scripting languages like php and ruby. But installing Aptana will give you alot of what you need. There are installation instructions on how to install other scripting language tools on the Aptana website and I’m just not going to get into them here to keep this post primarily Flash based. But when it comes to other languages there is ALOT more plugins out there.
If you have any other plugins that you like, go ahead and add a comment on the blog and I’ll post them up for others.
