Publishing Source with Flex Builder 2

So in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been using Flex Builder 2 a lot more, and I’m actually starting to like it. I’ve hardly touched the Flex part of it – not at all in the past few weeks – but I’ve been doing a lot of AS3 stuff.

One of the cool features that I haven’t really heard mentioned a whole lot is the Publish Application Source function. This is in the Project menu. Choose it and you get a dialog allowing you to pick what project to publish, which files from that project to publish, and what folder to put it in. You can also choose to include a zip file of all the source files.

I started using this in the Lab, on my first AS3 Lab experiment. You can see the results here. It creates a nice Flash-based tree navigation of all your classes and packages in the left panel (which is resizable), and when you click on any file, it shows the source in the panel on the right. Notice that on the bottom, there’s a link to the zip file it created as well.

Although this obviously doesn’t replace having an SVN or other repository for large open source projects, it’s perfect for someone just sharing an interesting file or demonstrating some new technique, like me! Nice work on that one, FB2 team!