Open source alternatives to Flex Builder?

Question

Are there any open source (read free) alternatives to Flex Builder? I do not qualify for their student waiver (sad)

Detrition

Answer 1

FlashDevelop seems to be the most popular.

Some others include

• FDT
• IntelliJ IDEA

Tooling

+1 for FlashDevelop, assuming you're on a PC. If you're on a Mac there aren't really any great alternatives. I run FlashDevelop thru VMWare Fusion and a system builders version of XP which ran me approximately $80 (Fusion) and $90 (XP)... – Wandawander

I use Flash Develop for my old AS2 stuff (yeah, we still have a couple of old apps we maintain) and it's pretty good. Not as good as Flex Builder or Visual Studio, but decent. – Pull

@Sam: "Not as good as Flex Builder or Visual Studio" - 1. that totally depends on what you're doing 2. it's really subjective. Personally, I really dislike both Eclipse and Visual Studio for a number of reasons. Also, in my eyes FlashDevelop is much better for pure AS3 than Flex Builder is (as is FDT). Flex Builder is better for MXML and a number of other things. But I'd never dare to say it is better or worse than FD. – Overstock

Open-source and free alternatives are surely usable, but quite frankly, none of them is actually up to scratch if we come to professional Flash dev. My choice is FDT 4. Its Release Candidate came out just yesterday and those of you who are not convinced can get a free 1-month trial for it (good till Oct 17th): tekkie.flashbit.net/flash/… – Scrivener

your first link is broken – Shiite

@Shiite - thanks, I've updating my answer to reflect the changes – Tooling

Answer 2

The answers to these questions should help you:

DO I need Flex Builder?

Flex development on Linux, what’s a good free environment?

What is the best (most productive) FLEX IDE?

Since the flex SDK is free and open source you can really used any IDE you already use, only do command line compile.

If your on linux the flex builder plugin is still free, and from the looks of things it will stay free for a while as I don't see them putting more work into it anytime soon. I personally think its perfect as I don't use design view ever anyway and that is most of what is missing you still get great code hinting and so forth.

Lole

Answer 3

They also have an unemployed waiver now too:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/free/index.html

Overall it seems like they're saying "try me out, if you like me, upgrade me to premium" especially since the premium version offers a boatload of new tools.

Hydroxyl

Answer 4

Whilst FlashDevelop is windows-only, there's also AXDT: open-source cross-platform alternative for Flash development.

It's not a competitor to Flash Builder or FDT that are way more comprehensive, but it makes a good setup for small things or for those just starting to develop for Flash Platform.

Scrivener