Developing Flex applications without the Flex Builder

Posted by Dennis on Dec 6, 2006 in Flex • 4 comments

Thanks to the free Flex 2 SDK, you can develop Flex applications without the Flex Builder. Some work has been done to make this possible in Eclipse, but a lot needs to be done to get it working. FlashDevelop, an Open Source IDE, is a lot easier to configure. I made a how-to to show you a way you to make this work. Most information was gathered from the FlashDevelop Forum, but I added some points and merged some scattered information to offer a complete picture.

  • Make sure you have the Java Development Kit installed
  • Download the Flex SDK
  • Download the latest FlashDevelop release
  • Download the MXML definition file and unzip into FlashDevelop/Data/
  • For ActionScript 3 code hinting, download the ActionScript 3 intrinsic classes and add them to your global classpath (in FlashDevelop: Tools > Global Classpaths)
  • Download the updated DLLs (v1.4) and unzip them to FlashDevelop/Data/
  • Download Ant and add the Ant bin directory to the “path” environment variable
  • Download Keith Peters’ ANT-based project templates, unzip them to FlashDevelop/Data/ProjectTemplates/ and open the build.properties files in FlashDevelop/Data/ProjectTemplates/05 AS3 Project and FlashDevelop/Data/ProjectTemplates/06 Flex 2 Project. Change the “flex2.dir” property to point to the right location.
  • To run ANT with a toolbar button, edit FlashDevelop/Settings/ToolBar.xml and insert this piece of code: 
    <button label="ANT Build" click="PluginCommand" image="54" tag="Run;SaveAll;ant" shortcut="CtrlF7" />
  • Run FlashDevelop and modify the path (ASCompletion.Flex2SDK.Path) to the Flex 2 SDK in Tools > Program Settings
  • That’s it!


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4 comments

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  1. Anonymous on Dec 9, 2006, 7:13 pm:

    You don’t need both “FlashDevelop 2 plugins” (FlashBuild) and the “ANT templates” - they are 2 possible workflows.

  2. Dennis on Dec 11, 2006, 9:58 am:

    Thanks for the tip, I removed it from list.

  3. abhishek v. ambavane on Nov 15, 2007, 6:37 am:

    its good to know how to run flex without FlexBuilder, but is there any anather easy way than it to run application, and where i can get good ,ore good information and samples of FLEX 2.0

  4. tekkie on Jul 8, 2009, 12:33 pm:

    FlashDevelop is exclusively for Windows, Eclipse is cross-platform. That’s a huge argument against using it.

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