[CS3] prefered coding environment

[divillysausages]

hey guys,
just wanted to throw a quick question out to the community. i'm starting to seriously devote some time to developing in flash and was wondering was people's prefered coding environment is. at the minute, i'm just using the flash ide, but it's far from perfect (few coding hints, none for custom classes, dodgy auto completion, no goto definition, no easy function list in the file etc ). basically, all of the things we've come to know and love in other ide's like visual studio
has anybody any suggestions, or what do you like to work in (preferably without any syntax changed ala flex )?

[tonypa]

Have you tried FlashDevelop? Personally I code in Flash IDE too since I dont really need all that fancy stuff and I like to make movie clips and buttons there, but many people prefer FD. And its free, works with Flex SDK, so you dont even need to buy anything to create swfs.

[Squize]

"preferably without any syntax changed ala flex"

Adobe have really badly screwed up the marketing for Flex haven't they ? So many people even now don't realise you can code as3 using it, that you never even have to touch mxml or the design view or components.

btw I use Flex

Squize.

[dVyper]

I also use Flex. If I didn't have the free educational license for Flex I would probably be using FlashDevelop, but at the moment I have no reason to. I also haven't used Flex for MXML (at home anyway).

[cadin]

I've tried Flex a few times, but I couldn't get into it. It has great coding features, but I find the interface too clunky and unrefined. It feels very much like a Java app and not at all like an Adobe product not a Mac app. I really wanted to like it though. Maybe I'll give it another shot sometime...

In the meantime I'm rocking TextMate (Mac only, sorry), even though it doesn't have most of the features you mention in your post. It's a text editor, not a full-blown IDE.
It's nicely designed and has a really powerful plugin/snippet system that you can use to make up for some of its code-hinting deficiencies.

[bluemagica]

EclipseIDE or NetBeans with flex, work best for totally mad/zombie/geek coders

[iopred]

Flashdevelop is the greatest.

[xMCNUGGETx]

Flashdevelop is the greatest.

agreed

[nolen]

FlashDevelop at work, FlexBuilder at home.

FlashDevelop is great when you work with a bunch of graphic artists who only use the IDE. Just create your document class, edit it with FlashDevelop, hit F6, and it switches to Flash and builds the swf.


I use FlexBuilder at home soley because there isn't an equivalent of FlashDevelop for the Mac. Someone mentioned TextMate before, but I really enjoy the intellisense that FlashDevelop and FlexBuilder provide. Hitting Esc to auto-complete isn't really the same for me.

[justkevin]

I recently switched to FlexBuilder from FlashDevelop. The integrated debugger is very useful. The memory profiler is also good.

The design mode for MXML on the other hand needs work and I rarely use it at this point (although I don't do much MXML, maybe if I did more I would learn its quirks).

[divillysausages]

thanks for the suggestions guys, much appreciated. i've taken a look a all of them and flashdevelop seems to be what i'm looking for, so i'm going to give it a try.

on flashdevelop though, you can run your project in debug, but i'm unable to place any breakpoints. is this something that isn't implemented (i.e. a run-time debugger), or am i missing something simple?

(on a side note, thanks for the heads up on flex code squize. any examples i saw of it were all <mxml> xml style coding so i was just *ignore* )
thanks

[renderhjs]

Flash Develop for previous AS3 complex projects but now Flex because I recently worked with other coders on a bigger project. With Flex and SVN its way easier to update and comit code changes.
I`ve been told that in nearly each big production Flex is usually used because of it. I hate some shortcuts of Flex and its uber- complexity at some points and Adobe complete FAIL at introducing AS3 scripters to it (where to setup what,...).
I like that in Flex you can hold down ctrl and click on classes and keywords to jump to their orgin classes which makes browsing through new code alot easer. Refactoring and Renaming variables through a whole Project is very nice as well if you have ugly variable names to fix into propper ones. Almost realimte syntax checking is nice as well.

Flash develop is speedy, not nagging at all around if you dont want to setup projects while still offering better and smarter code suggersion compared to Flex. I downloaded some plugins for Flashdevelop like one for duplicating a line of code while flipping common variables like x, width scaleX,... to the opposite axis - as well as some other neat ones.

When replying to threads here on FK I usually use Scite or Notepad++ to code its a lightweight and easy editor with Javascript code highlight ability (which is almost identical to AS3).

Flash IDE is bloated and almost on the same technical level as it was in Flash 5