Eclipse and Actionscript 3

Question

Does anyone know of any good solutions (Eclipse plugins presumably) for using Eclipse to develop in ActionScript 3?

There are a number of solutions for developing with ActionScript 2, leveraging MTASC, Swfmill and other open source tools, but I'm specifically looking for AS3 support.

It's simple enough to use Eclipse as an editor, and a place from which to invoke Ant scripts to compile with the Adobe command line tools, but I'm looking for syntax colouring, autocompletion, refactoring, debugging - all the modern IDE luxuries.

Other tools I've used:

• FlashDevelop: free and good, but Windows only and doesn't have refactoring. Nevertheless a nice piece of work.
• IntelliJ Idea: very nice ActionScript 3 support, though not quite as slick as their Java support. Unfortunately AS3 is not supported in the free/community edition of Idea and I'm not ready to purchase the full version as yet.

Answer 1

I own Flex Builder and FDT. I use FDT Professional, I admit the original purchase price seemed steep, but if you're going to code AS3 for a living it will pay for itself in pretty short order.

With the most recent (3.5) version able to edit MXML with code hinting, there is little I miss it for. The major exception I've found being the visual layout tools of Flex Builder.

Other thoughts:

• In my experience of both products, the pure AS3 code editor tools (hintng / autocompletion / templating) of FDT are well ahead of Flex Builder.
• Some versions of FDT can inspect .swc files and provide code hints for compiled classes within (which I'm pretty sure Flex Builder can't do, I believe FlashDevelop can). This allows for workflows where
  • designers create dummy classes for ui elements (through the 'linkage id' mechansim of the Flash IDE), use named MovieClips to identify ui elements etc
  • design exports swc, which you include in your class path
  • you extend these dummy classes with AS3 class code
  • FDT will give you code hints for all named instances on a MovieClip's timeline.
• You can compile, test and package AIR applications (pure AS3 or MXML-based) from within the IDE.

Answer 2

Two good commercial options:

1. Adobe Flash Builder. Available as either standalone or Eclipse plugin (standalone is just Eclipse with the plugin already bundled). http://www.adobe.com/products/flashbuilder/

2. FDT. Eclipse plugin. I used to use the AS2 version but I've heard really good things about the AS3 support. http://www.fdt.powerflasher.com/

Answer 3

If you get Adobe Flash Builder, you can also purchase SourceMate as an addon to give more refactoring / other tools. But it's a lot cheaper than FDT.

Answer 4

AXDT is very bare-bones, but it does actually work fairly well if you don't want to pay for FDT. The debugging feature is fairly impressive, and in that you get most of what you do with Flex Builder 3 (which is enough). It doesn't do any kind of code hinting or package exploration, and it has some issues, even on basic stuff like bringing in the fl packages to your source directory... e.g. it doesn't recognize Tween as a valid class, and throws a warning even though the compiler will still work. If you don't mind coding your AS3 in basically a plaintext editor, and just need an easy way to compile out of Eclipse, it's serviceable.