Creating a free Adobe Flex Toolchain
I've noticed a couple of people who are having difficulty learning Adobe Flex because the (online) documentation is highly Flex Builder-oriented. This makes perfect sense since Adobe has released Flex for free to the world. They need something to make a little scratch back (some would argue that they've been bleeding us dry for way too long, but I really do not agree with that fully).
So I decided to put together a simple, free Flex toolchain. It is not nearly as friendly as Builder, nor does it have Builder's excellent features and support. It also doesn't have the excellent documentation that can be purchased separately from Adobe (and which I believe every Flex developer should have in their arsenal).
But, considering people are having such a difficulty with setting up a working toolchain, I thought I might just give it a go. Here are my primary requirements:
- Free. All tools and scripts should be free for end-users.
- Run external programs from within the editor. There are several free editors, and the point here is to run it through a project editor which will generate the index.html as a test site and copy the generated FLA's into place for testing...and then loading it up in the browser.
- Same as above, but with an AIR launch option.
- Editor with language configuration for MXML and AS3.
- Run from a Jump Drive (ie. no registry changes, etc).
Those are the five primary requirements currently. I'm going to get started on it; who knows how long it will take since my life is becoming very, very busy very, very quickly with Cash on Delivery starting soon.
Meanwhile, get up on your Flex dev skills with the 60-day eval of Flex Builder from Adobe and a little reading material.
