Flash Project Compiling without Flash IDE

Question

Is it possible to compile a Flash project without the use, or presence, of the Flash IDE?

Thanks, Jacques

Answer 1

Technically all you need to compile a SWF is a text editor and the flex compiler. Download and unzip the flex sdk (which contains the flex compiler), write up some code, and compile the code into a swf using the command line. Something like (note there are a lot of command line options that can be passed to the compiler):

path_to_flex_sdk/bin/mxmlc -file-specs path_to_document_class.as -o path_to_output.swf

As xxiaojun mentioned FlashDevelop is a free, open-source actionscript editor that does a nice job at keeping things simple, but it is Windows compatible only. It comes with build/run scripts, project and class templates, code snippets, etc.