What is the best (most productive) FLEX IDE?

Question

Some requirements:

• Step-by-step debugging & Break Points
• View variable values while debugging
• IntelliSense (auto-completion). Ideally done with "smarts" so it only shows you the syntactically valid options to complete something. E.g., Textbox. would trigger members of that class (.Text, .BackColor), etc. And then Textbox.BackColor= would trigger a list of valid colors.
• Drag'n Drop style GUI design.

I'm not concerned about cost (Ok, over $1K gets a little pricey looking :-)

Answer 1

From the discussion above, below is the list of IDEs for Flex with debugging support

• Powerflasher FDT
• Amethyst
• Adobe Flash Builder
• IntelliJ IDEA (Ultimate Edition)
• Flash Develop

Answer 2

Step by step debugging with variable view (and often with additional views like stack or global variables etc) is working in some IDEs. FlexBuilder, FDT3 Enterprise (only the enterprise version allows debugging), FlashDevelop (with extra plug-in). You can also try the (free!) Visual Studio plug-in Tofino (Ensemble), so you can debug inside Visual Studio.

But the best implementation for debugging I found in the Eclipse based IDEs. I'm not much impressed with FDT3 at all, so I recommend FlexBuilder for debugging (+profiling) and of course coding of AS and eventually (visual) design for MXML.

You can try FlashDevelop with the FDB plug-in. Many people prefer this free IDE for coding because of the nice code assist (IMHO the best of all known IDEs). Debugging is working with this plug-in but I wouldn't say that is the "most productive". But give it a try, its free!

Answer 3

I was interested in the comments on debugging above. I am one of the developers of the Amethyst Flex/AIR IDE for Visual Studio. We are very keen to have the best Flex debugging available so I would appreciate any feedback to help us achieve this.

The current beta of Amethyst has breakpoints, watch variables, locals, call-stack, step-into/step-out/step-over plus drilldown expansion in the debugging windows or in hovering debug tips in the code editor. There's a small movie showing a few debugging features of Amethyst here:

http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Debugging-Adobe-Flex-Applications

Shortly we will add more features (e.g. tracepoints and conditional breakpoints). But if there are any features we've missed, now would be a good time to tell us ;-)

best wishes

Huw Collingbourne

SapphireSteel Software

Answer 4

FlashDevelop from FlashDevelop.org is another free editor that appears to be gaining momentum. It's windows-only but seems to be pretty feature rich.

Answer 5

There are only 2 I know:

Flex Builder

IntelliJ Idea

Answer 6

I've used them all and I can say without a doubt IntelliJ is the most powerful of them all. http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/flex_ide.html

It also is the best JS IDE, and unless you are using .NET on the back end it is probably the best IDE for your back end language. These guys really have it going on.