Buzy week for Adobe Labs

The first week of June has been a buzy one for the Adobe Labs web site, where several new applications have been posted. First and foremost is the beta release of two important development with regards to the Flex community, Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst 1. Yes you read that right, with the next release, Flex Builder has been renamed Flash Builder so that it fits properly under the Flash Platform umbrella. I also believe that the renaming is also a good idea, because too many times in the past people got confused about the cost of Flex, or shall I say Flex Builder. See now you can clearly distinguish between the two and say, the Flex SDK is 100% free and open source, whereas the development tool called Flash Builder is not, it costs XX dollars to purchase for use.

Also the first build of Flash Catalyst is available, which is the tool built for designers. Meaning a designer can create the look-and-feel of an application and then pass it on to a developer who will use Flash Builder to add the business functionality and complete the application.

Another cool thing announced this week is the BrowserLab, a web-based tool that you use to preview a web site you are developing on different browser and OSes, so you can tweak your web site to look the same across the board. The are limited spaces however to try this tool out, so better sign up now if interested.

Last, but not least, Status was announced, a framework that allows you to built Flex applications that can incorporate peer-to-peer communications between two Flash Player instances at run-time. I remember seeing this at MAX last year and thought this was one of the cooler demos that were shown. Think of chat application with the server basically.

So like a said, a buzy week indeed :)

Download Flex Builder 3 plugin

If you have been searching for the link to download the Flex Builder 3 plugin... then search no more, here is a little hint:

1. Goto the FB 3 download page
2. Click the last link at the bottom of the page!
   

Flex Builder Enterprise plug in

Just came across this, the Enterprise IDE Plugin, this morning. Although I haven't tried it yet I wanted to pass it around and let people try it out. It has features that the community has been asking about, Java-AS code generation, Cairngorm integration and more. Definitely worth a look see. I will take a look at it and post some feedback when I get a chance.

Intellij 7 Flex Module

As a follow up to my previous post, nicity was kind enough to point out that Intellij 7 does allow you to add a Flex module to your project. You do this by going to 'Settings | Project Settings | Modules' and press + (New) and select "Flex". Once that is done you can specify the path to your Flex SDK which I did.

This seems to kick off the reading of the content in the Flex SDK folder (and sub-folders), but it doesn`t seem to do anything after that. I tried editing an AS class and a MXML file to see if code-hinting was provided and such and there doesn`t seem to be any new options. Oh well, I guess this is only the beginning of the Flex support.

Intellij supporting Flex

Once upon a time I used to be a big Intellij user, before the popularity of Eclipse. Love the IDE and actually I still do, but since everyone at my company uses Eclipse and of course due to Flex Builder, I haven't used Intellij in years. However I was recently looking at the feature set of Intellij 7.0 and noticed something interesting, they support Flex! So I was ok, let's download and see what they mean. So I did play around with it for an hour or so and here is what I discovered.

For MXML, they do syntax coloring but there is no code-hinting as far as MXML properties are concerned. But if I remember from way back, there is way to configure this in Intellij if you have the schema for MXML. One thing I noticed is that code-hinting does work for any AS code you write in a script block in an MXML component. As for ActionScript classes, they do syntax coloring and some code hinting, because they are basically supporting the ECMA 4.0 standard, which ActionScript 3.0 implements. One cool thing I noticed is basic refactoring is also supported which is great!

Unfortunately there is no way to point Intellij to your Flex SDK of choice (either 2.01 or 3.0) so it can provide code-hinting/auto-completion for the framework classes. As for compiling, you can configure Intellij to run externals applications, so basically point it to mxmlc with the right parameters and you should be ok.

So it is a good start for those using Intellij and building applications using Flex. I am sure someone will build a Flex plug-in at some point in the near future that will do even more, or JetBrains will simply upgrade their current support. Great to see that a major IDE has acknowledge the presence of Flex in this large development world :)