Flex 2 and AS3 without Eclipse

I wanted to call attention to a post by Sam Robbins regarding setting up a third party editor to compile Flex 2 and Eclipse. Of course, Flex Builder 2 is in public beta and is now free, but the free ride is going to expire soon, when the real deal comes out. Then you are going to need to shell out some serious cash to continue playing with it.

If you are a serious Flex developer, earning your living by creating Flex applications, you should go forth and purchase it. A carpenter should buy the best tools he can afford. Likewise, a developer should have never hold back on paying for the best tools to do his job.

However, if you are just a hobbyist, or do the occasional Flex or AS3 app for fun, that’s deep reach into the wallet. Especially if you’re already paying for the Flash IDE on top of it.

The good news is that Adobe has announced that they will give away the command line compiler and framework for free! But now you need a way to edit your code and compile it. This comes down to two issues: having an editor that “knows about” mxml and as3, and setting up some kind of automated build and launch process.

Sam’s post addresses the second part. We actually worked together on this for a couple of days, getting it to work in the PrimalScript editor. However, what is outlined there can easily be adapted to work with FlashDevelop or SEPY, as long as there is some way to launch an external program, in this case, Ant.bat. The setup that Sam wrote about allows you to launch the compiler, add any command line parameters that you want, use a specific flex-config.xml file, etc. It then compiles the new swf, moves it to a bin directory and lauches it right in the PrimalScript editor (something I didn’t even know was possible until earlier this week, and is totally awesome). Of course, if you are using another editor, you can substitute the standalone player instead of PrimalScript as an editor, or even create an html wrapper for the swf and launch that in a browser. Think of it more as a base script that you can customize to your own needs.

The first part of the problem is a little tougher to tackle. Currently, there are no xml schemas or as3 intrinsic files available. This means no code hinting, completion, parameter lists, etc. in any editor outside of Flex Builder 2. I’m not sure if Adobe will be releasing such things, but my feeling is that they won’t. Thus is will be up to the community to create them, and then up to the makers of editors to implement them. I can say this, that the next version of PrimalScript will almost certainly have AS3, and possibly Flex 2 support (as well as a lot of other mind blowing features, which I’d love to tell you about, but then I’d have to kill myself).

I can only assume that someone in the OSFlash community will start (or has already started) working on the project of creating intrinsic as3 files and a mxml schema. I’d be happy to join in the effort.