The state of Eclipse as an ActionScript editor – October 2006
Every few months or so I find myself downloading and installing the newest version of Eclipse. I tell myself that I really need to unify my development environment and given Adobe’s push toward Eclipse based IDEs, that I would be best served adopting Eclipse as my primary code editor. However, after fumbling around with it for a day or two, I inevitably fall back to my preferred (albeit specialized) tools. For instance, I am a huge fan of the SE|PY ActionScript editor. It’s lightweight, familiar and does almost everything I need an AS editor to do.
Well, it’s been a few months since my last attempt and I’ve decided to make another go of it. I bought a couple of books (because I am serious this time 
) and am forcing myself to use Eclipse exclusively, whenever possible. I have done a fair amount of research into the available AS plugins, but most of the information I found is at least a year old. So, I thought I should reach out to other Eclipse users and get some advice on the best plugins (specifically for AS editing) and any tips or current resources. I would also be interested in your impressions of Eclipse in general – positive or negative. Is a unified ‘Swiss Army knife’ platform really the best way to go?
Eclipse in combination with the ASDT (http://aseclipseplugin.sourceforge.net/wordpress/) is for me still the best option. Unfortunately it’s a bit old and very unstable at times but the CVS intergration, the Bookmark system and Ant in Eclipse are doing a lot to beat the rest for me. I wished before Flex 2 was released that it would be possible to edit Actionscript 2 with it. The commercial FDT (http://fdt.powerflasher.com/flashsite/flash.htm) plugin is also nice but i haven’t tested the latest version (demo).
October 25th, 2006 at 1:02 amFlashDevelop rocks.. Eclipse is way too heavy for an AS IDE. FlashDevelop does the job.. good, fast and simple.
October 25th, 2006 at 1:12 amHey, maybe you give FDT a try:
October 25th, 2006 at 1:42 amhttp://fdt.powerflasher.com
I think you’ve nailed Eclipse’s main flaw-its a pain in the neck to get started with.(After spending hours mucking around with it you find yourself saying-I just needed a decent code editor; this shouldn’t be this hard!) FlexBuilder (built on Eclipse) removes a lot of the pain though. You can get a 30 day trial from Adobe; but be aware-if you opt for the Eclipse plugin vs. the standalone install, it doesn’t work with the most recent version of Eclipse(3.2)-I believe you need 3.1 installed instead.
October 25th, 2006 at 2:02 amEclipse gives developers (of plugins) amazing opportunities but there’s not free good Eclipse plugin for AS around and Flash developers can only blame Adobe that their Flex Builder 2 sucks that much. They even couldn’t developer Templates, the easiest feature one could add to a custom Eclipse plugin editor…
October 25th, 2006 at 2:17 amHave you tried flex builder? I understand it is quite good for editing actionscript 3.0.
October 25th, 2006 at 3:00 amIt took me a good three or four false starts with Eclipse before it stuck – and that’s when my main development was Java (the main focus of Eclipse)! I can certainly understand being challenged from an ActionScript (or ColdFusion) perspective.
Overall I think Eclipse is evolving at an extremely rapid pace, and it will be at a more friendly/generic place sooner than later. Especially as there’s a large amount of development going on in the web tooling side for Eclipse.
I’d suggest to give it a solid try. That being said, for just AS, Eclipse is overkill in my opinion. If you’re going to be doing your PHP, HTML, CF, Java, MXML whatever development in there too, then you’ll be more likely to stick to it.
October 25th, 2006 at 5:37 amI admire your drive – I’ve tried using Eclipse, but I just simply can’t break away from FlashDevelop. Eclipse is too large and clunky for my tastes, especially when it comes to editing actionscript. I like their refactoring tools, but that’s really the main thing I feel like I’m missing in FD. However, I’ve forced myself to get into more of the TDD or UDD (Usage-Driven Development, I develop how I will interface with the object first, making sure that will be clean, readable and extensible) and the approach has really cut down on how much I need to refactor.
October 25th, 2006 at 5:59 amThere is only one interesting AS2 plugin and it currently works only with Eclipse 3.1 – it’s called Flash Development Tool. It is the bomb and there isn’t anything that comes close.
Unfortunatelly the Eclipse 3.2 version will came in “a few weeks” (but it will probably be months, since the authors did that a few times already).
It is said that AS3 support for FDT will come early next year… we’ll see
And yes – FDT is superior to what scite|flash, sepy and even flex builder offer.
October 25th, 2006 at 6:55 amHi,
Flex Builder 2 does have support for pure AS3 projects, not just Flex projects. If you are working with AS3, Flex Builder 2 has the most advanced ActionScript support available right now. It is a commercial product, but if that doesn’t bother you, check out the free trial on adobe.com.
-David
October 25th, 2006 at 7:42 amI am seeing some interesting Eclipse commentary on Todd Sharp’s ColdFusion blog.
October 27th, 2006 at 11:19 pmHaven’t tried the plugins yet, but you bring up a good point about the ‘swiss army knife’ concept. Personally I like to use SciTE|Flash for my AS editing. Flex Builder (built on Eclipse) does have nice AS editing capabilities, so I’m guessing if the Eclipse plugins are anything like Flex Builder then I wouldn’t mind using one of them. Let me know if you hear of a good plugin. Thanks!
October 30th, 2006 at 7:13 amMy apologies to all who posted valid comments to this thread but were not approved in a timely manner. My online email was bombed recently (+10,000 spams in 3 months), so the approval requests got kicked back and I didn’t correct the issue until now.
November 7th, 2006 at 1:57 pm[...] Over the past couple of weeks I have attempted yet again to incorporate Eclipse into my workflow (primarily Flash/ActionScript development) and have again been turned away at the gate. I spent most of this time installing, uninstalling and reinstalling the various flavors of Eclipse and Flex Builder and waiting FOREVER for Software Updates. I say ‘forever’ because more often than not, attempts to update installed features or install new features would fail and subsequently freeze the app (canceling the failed process has no effect other than graying out the ‘Cancel’ button). At this point I could only ‘End Task’ from the Task Manager and restart Eclipse. Similarly, when other features fail, the entire IDE fails. The fact that selecting any of the intro/tutorial links on the ‘Welcome’ screen crashes the IDE, says a lot about what one can expect from Eclipse. As Brian Ferris pointed out in my previous Eclipse post, “this shouldn’t be this hard!” [...]
November 8th, 2006 at 2:21 am