Create an EXE from a SWF using Flex 3 without requiring AIR?

Question

I have a simple little test app written in Flex 3 (MXML and some AS3). I can compile it to a SWF just fine, but I'd like to make it into an EXE so I can give it to a couple of my coworkers who might find it useful.

With Flash 8, I could just target an EXE instead of a SWF and it would wrap the SWF in a projector, and everything worked fine. Is there an equivalent to that using the Flex 3 SDK that doesn't end up requiring AIR?

Note: I don't have Flex Builder, I'm just using the free Flex 3 SDK.

Answer 1

In your Flex SDK folders you should see a 'runtimes\player\win\FlashPlayer.exe' which is a stand alone Flash player. Open your SWF with that and you'll see a 'Create Projector...' menu item in the File menu which will create the stand-alone EXE.

Answer 2

imaginaryboy gets it right, I believe. Btw, since you don't have Flex Builder, you might look into the free and open source FlashDevelop if you're on Windows. It's my favorite environment for developing anything Actionscript (the Flex support is pretty great, too).

Answer 3

@Brian:

Oh, I wrote the app using FlashDevelop. I've been using it for a while now (The Flash 8 "IDE" was horrible and painful to use, so I very quickly found FD when I started having to do work in Flash). It's actually one of the better IDEs I've used for any language.

@imaginaryboy:

Wow, that was so easy I feel dumb for not finding it myself! Worked perfectly. Thanks!

Answer 4

There's also Zinc that also provides API:s for accessing the filesystem and other thinks that AIR does, but less restrictive.