Free IDEs for Flex and AIR Development

http://blog.rainwebs.net/2010/01/14/free-ides-for-flex-and-air-development/

There’s not much improvement since my first look at free Flex IDEs. The use of a full-blown visual designer is still a challenge. So, Flex Builder for Windows is still your first choice – and worth every penny.

Nevertheless, if you are not one of those full time Flex developers and only wanna have a look at what already exists, e.g. for code reviews, these free alternatives can help:

• FlashDevelop (.NET based IDE for Windows)
• axdt (Eclipse plugin)
• Adobe Flex Builder Linux (Eclipse plugin)

Windows

FlashDevelop is your choice if you want to work on Windows. The installation is pretty simple. Exceptional from the two others: you have to install the Flex development tools yourself. The configuration of FlashDevelop only needs the path to your installation then. If you create your first Flex (AS3) project you will be asked for setting the path if required.

FlashDevelop supports Flex and AIR projects. Although, I had trouble to run an AIR project (the default settings seem not to work). Pretty interesting with FlashDevelop is the number of different Flash-related projects you can create. You can also use it as a Web development tool.

FlashDevelop is different from the Eclipse usage. But, because of the long history of the project the workflows are easy to learn and the user interface is appealing. You will have fun when working with it.

Linux

The other IDEs are also usable in Linux environments. Whereas the free Flex Builder only works on Linux. For my tests I used a virtual machine on Windows.

Using such a virtual machine image based on Ubuntu on an average Windows host is no problem any longer. Using it feels like working with a native Windows application although you use a fully equipped Linux system behind. Best of all you can share this image with your co-workers and set up a team for Flex development in minutes.

Virtual Machine on Windows

I installed Ubuntu 9.10 in a Sun VirtualBox on Windows XP. I downloaded the latest VirtualBox release and chose “Linux” as operating system and “Ubuntu” for the version. I used 1 GB for memory and 12 GB for the virtual hard drive. To get a useful screen resolution I also installed the VirtualBox host extensions.

axdt

First, I installed Eclipse Galileo with the Ubuntu Package Manager. axdt can be used with this release.

If you follow the installation on the axdt site for Eclipse 3.5 you get into some dependency trouble with a fresh Eclipse installation from the Ubuntu Package Manager. We have no update site set in the Eclipse plugin installer. To solve this use the following update sites and download the mentioned package(s):

1. http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo/ (Modeling/EMF)
2. http://download.eclipse.org/tools/gef/updates/releases/ (GEF 3.5.1)
3. http://download.eclipse.org/technology/imp/updates (all, but skip sources)
4. http://update.axdt.org/ (all)

You may start Eclipse via the Ubuntu main menu and test it with an axdt project. Although it is nice that the result is shown inside Eclipse and not in the browser or an external application viewer, like Flex Builder is doing it, experienced users recognize that the axdt project is missing some features, that even the limited Adobe Flex Builder plugin delivers. Although you can use the visual editor it does not synchronize with the text editor at the moment. Would be nice if we could use this part together with the Adobe Flex Builder plugin.

Adobe Flex Builder Linux

First limitation with the free Adobe Flex Builder plugin is that it can only be used with the Eclipse Europa release. The second limitation is that the plugin only delivers a fraction of the functionality you can find in the Windows release.

The main workflow for the plugin installation was already described in the tripu blog for Ubuntu 9.04. We still can take parts of it to follow. Meanwhile some things have changed: the OpenJDK is installed by default with Ubuntu and the Adobe Flex Builder plugin has a new release, so that we can skip the AIR hack.

The Ubuntu Package Manager does not allow to install the Eclipse Europa release. So, we have to do this by hand. The installation is done in parallel to the Eclipse Galileo release. We also use a different workspace. You have to choose this one if you start the Eclipse Europa release for the first time.

The Eclipse Europa installation steps are:

wget "http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/technology/epp/downloads/release/europa/winter/eclipse-java-europa-winter-linux-gtk.tar.gz"
tar -xzf eclipse-java-europa-winter-linux-gtk.tar.gz
sudo mv eclipse /usr/local/
mkdir ~/workspace-flex/

You may start the Eclipse Europa release now to test it with a Java project. We continue with the Adobe Flex Builder plugin installation steps:

wget "http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flex/flexbuilder_linux/flexbuilder_linux_install_a5_112409.bin"
chmod u+x flexbuilder_linux_install_a5_112409.bin
sudo mkdir /usr/local/flex-builder/
sudo chown $USER:$USER /usr/local/flex-builder/
./flexbuilder_linux_install_a5_112409.bin

For the install folder select /usr/local/flex-builder, for the Eclipse folder choose/usr/local/eclipse. Keep the Debugging Flash Player checked to get a browser runtime installed for debugging.

When the installation is done you may start the Flex Builder to test it (/usr/local/flex-builder/Adobe_Flex_builder.sh). After this you can create a link in the main menu for later use.

Both, Flex and AIR applications will run without any extra hands on.