Tools: FDT + Eclipse vrs FlashDevelop August 8, 2007

So after another round of flux in my development environment, I resorted to using Eclipse (for coding) AND FlashDevelop (for compiling and quick projects) in tandem (along with SOS for trace debugging).  Talk about a lot of desktop space!

This is because FDT+Eclipse, my favorite tool for ActionScript development is still in Beta (still a great code editor!) and in general building requires Ant tasks in Eclipse, which doesn't support the Flex Compiler Shell (huge speed increases), while FlashDevelop is an good editor, but has great compiler support.
About 2 months ago, with significant trepidation.  I finally bit the bullet and made the move to AS3. It's been about 2 pretty turbulent months since. Learning the IDE of 2 major tools (Flash CS3, Flex 3.0 beta ), the massive syntax changes, new workflow,  starting to get large libraries converted....breaking across the rocks of different paradigms.    Then midway the Flex beta license ran out (30 days is after all reasonable),. It wasn't worth it spending $300-$500 for a license to FlexBuilder 2.0 to keep going.

• I'm going to Max in October, I know 3.0 is out in a few months,
• The code editor is an order of magnitude weaker than FDT, and still quirky enough to make it unuseable at times in the beta, I guess some of my code does some tricky things which causes Flex's language parser to barf.
• I don't plan on using FlexBuilder/Flex on most of my projects...we aren't that data/standard control centric.

This created a window of no reasonable workflow. FlashCS3 does compile AS3 well (I first started having to use it with FlexBuilder 3.0, when running into quirks in it's parser). But the editor isn't much better than a plain text editor, for dealing with large libraries and components.  So I started investigating other platforms, Sepy and FlashDevelop...etc.  Which is about as motivating as looking at a bicycle after driving an F1,...but admittedly better than walking barefoot or standing still.    I was hoping that in my lack of paying attention that the years since I last reviewed would have some new releases, and while I didn't have time to investigate Sepy, I was pleased with FlashDevelop Beta 3. In a sunday afternoon I got from ground zero to building an AS2, and an AS3 project both using the Flash CS3, and separate the Mxmlc.exe, which nicely prompted me to look for the 'Flex Compiler Shell', which I hadn't heard of before.
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex_Compiler_Shell

The compiler shell is designed to startup once then talk with it, telling it to recompile files, typically by getting an id back on the first compile then recompiling. This can amount to huge timesavings. Once installed and incremental compiling is on, It's similar the speed jump to me from using Flash to using MTASC.
YAY!!!!

Incremental compiling has been high on my list of things I've been looking for out of AS3,  Java has had this for almost a 8 years, and I grew to depend on it.  Java is still way ahead...you can hot fix code running in the VM without restarting...while debugging, even remotely (if allowed)!.
FlashDevelop Beta 3 supports the Flex Compiler Shell without anything special, just drop in and go (very nice!).  Sadly for Eclipse/Ant/FDT it won't work well, as the major performance increase is from not having to startup the mxmlc.exe everytime, but ant starts up and closes down as soon as it's finished, and there is no easy way to modify Ant/Eclipse to keep the process/dialog open.  But since it's not terribly difficult to have both open, that's what I've done.
The biggest thing that I miss via this is the errors output by the compiler (both the syntax check, and full compile errors) show up in FlashDevelop, which clicking on lets you jump to, when I'd rather do it in Eclipse.  Both tools are smart to watch for file changes, so it's possible to edit in both places. If a bit more UI to wrangle than idea;