The state of Eclipse as an ActionScript editor – Revisited
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!”
Is Eclipse really that bad? I dunno, it looks really nice in the brochure and the locals seem to like it, but I can’t get past the smell. So, I am anxious to leave my Eclipse experience in the rearview mirror and continue my journey in search of a better platform. Next stop – FlashDevelop w/ command line Flex compiler (I hear it’s nice this time of year).
I agree. It is way too hard to setup – and I had the same problems with the example code too.
There is way too much work to do to get it working, and you can’t even demo the experience until it is up and working fully. I believe that Eclipse is still firmly in the relm of the hardcore tweek freak and until you can unzip it and install it and get going straight away it will remain there.
Bring on SE|PY 2.0!
November 8th, 2006 at 4:10 amI found it a bit of a mess around but definately worth it… Admitadly i needed a bit of help/advise from others who had gone through the pain, but now its all running smoothly I can only vouch for its greatness!
From my perspective (designer with an interest in development), its helped me come a long way in a short time in understanding OOP, packages, scope issues with classes… and its helped a lot..
but your right, the installation proccess could be nicer… but when its free I can hardly complain.
November 8th, 2006 at 5:02 amThere are definitely trade offs.
I use Flex Builder as my Flex2 IDE. 99% of the time it works like a champ. There are some memory issues but they seem more to do with the JVM than Eclipse/Flex Builder itself.
FlashDevelop looks nice but since I swing both ways (mac & pc), it’s not a viable option right now. I’ve used SharpDevelop for the last 3.5 years for all my .net development. SharpDevelop is the code base that FlashDevelop is based on and kicks Visual Studio’s ass so I assume FD is very well done.
November 8th, 2006 at 7:11 amHello !
I don’t understand your problems.
In java, we got everything we want as developer 
November 8th, 2006 at 7:16 amTwo instances of eclipse are running on my computer : I am using FlexBuilder to develop the front side, and I use eclipse(MyEclipse) to develop the back side in java and I got no problem at all
So maybe eclipse is not made for you, unfortunately, there are no other IDE for flex
Hi Jybosse!
It makes sense that an IDE written in Java and running on the Java Virtual Machine would be well suited for Java development. If I were a Java developer I would definitely push harder to make Eclipse work the way I need it to. But what I am really looking for is a stable, agile, fast environment for editing AS3, MXML, XML, JavaScript, XHTML/CSS/XSLT and PHP (and throw in UML and SVN/CVS while we’re at it). Ideally I’d be able to compile FP9 SWFs directly from the IDE as well. While I don’t doubt that Eclipse can handle each of these formats individually, it seemed that the more I extended the IDE, the slower and less stable the platform became. I also wonder if it makes sense to try to get all of these features in a single IDE (ala a Swiss Army knife). Maybe the flexibility of several specialized (Win32) applications is a better way to go, rather than trying to maintain the stability of a platform and plugins from so many disparate sources.
BTW, why are you running 2 different versions of Eclipse? Is the Flex Builder plugin not compatible with your version of MyEclipse?
November 8th, 2006 at 2:41 pmThe right thing for Adobe to do would be to open source Flex Builder. I understand the profit motives for not doing so, but FlexBuilder is simply an eclipse plug-in. If it was open sourced, people would start adding to it so you could get the built-in PHP support.
I am a huge fan of Eclipse, and also have two instances of it running on my development machine at work. One of them has a plug in for our company’s special development needs, and the other one is FlexBuilder. The installation for the first one took a small amount of time, setting class paths, etc., and the FlexBuilder installation was completely painless, and has worked well for me.
You may want to take a look at Laszlo, which uses the same declarative type of xml language to describe flash objects as flex and, in fact, made its appearance *before* flex. Laszlo is an open source project (they make money by consulting and providing Enterprise-level stuff). Their eclipse plug-in is at http://www.eclipse.org/laszlo/release/0.2.0/. I have not tried it, but because it is open source there’s a good chance people will start adding cool stuff to it. Looking at the version number it is apparent this is a fairly new project.
November 10th, 2006 at 10:09 amEclipse is REALLY good. It’s not that Eclipse is bad…how many other open source editors out there do you know of to develop Flash/Actionscript? Not many…
BUT I’m just getting into Flash/Actionscript/Flex…I’m really a PHP/HTML/JS developer.
Eclipse is amazing in that it is the only real piece of software that I use anymore…well minus Photoshop/Illustrator and of course InDesign (I’m a graphic designer by nature)…but those don’t count.
I’ve tried “FAME” and it’s ok…but again I don’t know much about AS. I saw FDT and that looked REALLY good too.
I’ve tried Flex Builder 2 from Adobe as an Eclipse plugin and that’s down right amazing. If it can do AS for Flash then I’d stick with that…but Flex is probably on my “out” list due to it’s cost for running servers.
Don’t discount Eclipse just yet. Course it’s been a while since your post here too.
February 15th, 2007 at 8:05 pmHi Craig,
Maybe you also will be interested to look at new platform for flash development based on Visual Studio IDE named as SharpStyle Neutron
For the time being SharpStyle Neutron edition for Flex 2 is planned and currently it is in development.
P.S. Could you please, remove my previous bad-formed post. Thank you!
April 1st, 2007 at 12:52 pm