What is the best (most productive) FLEX IDE?

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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 :-)

Oleg answered 22/11, 2008 at 23:13 Comment(0)

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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!

Otiose answered 20/2, 2009 at 18:16 Comment(4)

I didn't realize there was a debugger plugin for FlashDevelop. I'll have to try that out. – Surat 20/2, 2009 at 18:20

You can find the debug plug-in on their 3rd party plug-ins page. The svn version (upcoming 3.0 rc2) has this plug-in included, so I think the next version of FlashDevelop will be shipped with the debugger always included. – Otiose 20/2, 2009 at 18:31

In my opinion, FlashDevelop is the nicest to code in, and much less bloated than FlexBuilder, but FlexBuilder has very nice debugging & profiling. – Spotter 10/4, 2009 at 16:48

After using IntelliJ IDEA for some time, I don't go back to Flash Builder. Despite a bit of learning curve and lacking of savvy CSS/skinning scaffolding, IDEA is awesome in terms of speed, stability, and suitability for large-scale AS3/Flex development. – Charlenacharlene 10/10, 2013 at 4:25

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There are only 2 I know:

Flex Builder

IntelliJ Idea

Foretop answered 22/11, 2008 at 23:18 Comment(0)

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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

Boatman answered 10/4, 2009 at 16:35 Comment(1)

Intellisense is another "must have". – Oleg 18/11, 2010 at 21:34

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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.

Denverdeny answered 1/10, 2012 at 21:30 Comment(0)

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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.

Ingaingaberg answered 23/11, 2008 at 0:59 Comment(3)

Does Flash Develop let you do GUI style design? – Oleg 23/11, 2008 at 18:12

No. The only Flex IDE I know of that has a GUI builder is Flex Builder. However, I much prefer FlashDevelop for code editing. – Surat 20/2, 2009 at 18:19

The GUI drag-and-drop designer isn't all that useful for large applications. For a quick mockup it's nice to throw things together, but once you start building anything kind of complex you really have to dig into the MXML yourself. FlashDevelop is much nicer for that, due to its better autocomplete – Spotter 10/4, 2009 at 16:49

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Netbeans also has a plugin called FlexBean. But by now isn't powerful.
How about SapphireSteel Amethyst Personal Edition? It's based on VS.

Sidra answered 2/4, 2009 at 3:51 Comment(0)

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Quite a few prominent Flex+Flash developers swear by FDT

It's an Eclipse plugin, and it's probably the most expensive Flex development tool out there, but it's very good.

Boletus answered 26/11, 2008 at 5:19 Comment(0)

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Flex Builder. And BONUS you can get it for FREE if you are a teacher or student.

Osorio answered 26/11, 2008 at 5:26 Comment(0)

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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

Welch answered 1/10, 2012 at 20:46 Comment(0)

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