Development tools for Adobe Flex/AIR?

Question

I'm starting a new development position with a company that implements many of its products in Adobe Flex. What tools should I look to install (Ubuntu Linux options prefered) for Flex development?

Answer 1

If you can, try Flex Builder 3 alpha for Linux. That's the you can get (not without its set of pet peeves though!). It lacks the following however:

* Design view
* States view
* Refactoring
* Data Wizards
* Cold Fusion - Data Services Wizard
* Web Services introspection
* Profiler

Since AIR/Flex are cross-platform technologies, I don't see why you want to limit yourself to Linux. At least for the time being, I think you are better off with the proper Flex Builder 3 on Windows for development. You can then test your product(s) on Linux.

Answer 2

As dirkgently said, installing Flex Builder 3 in Linux is a great way to get going. It's quick and easy to get up and running, and since it's based on Eclipse, the overall environment is decent.

That said, I was able to put together a decent Flex-building environment using Emacs and some third-party packages to get everything running under Linux.

Here's a quick rundown of what I used (this isn't comprehensive--just what I can remember):

• Flex 3 SDK for Linux
• actionscript-mode.el for AS code highlighting
• nxml bundle for MXML code highlighting
• ani-fcsh.el for running fcsh from Emacs
• ECB for code browsing in Emacs
• snippet.el for creating code templates in Emacs

This link was also helpful for getting started. It links to this article which talks about putting together a Flex development environment in Linux. I was able to put together some shell scripts for compiling and running applications.

Note: I didn't do any debugging, though Adobe has some info about it.

Note #2: If you decide to use Flex Builder, it will install the Flash Player 9 debugger version in your browser (you can tell it not to). I would recommend installing version 10's debugger. The builder will output a warning about not supporting the version, but everything else appears to work.