FlashDevelop

FlashDevelop is an open source, source code editor that is designed for Windows systems. FlashDevelop is built on the Scintilla editor component and is a Microsoft .NET 2.0 application.

History

FlashDevelop was developed by the members of FlashDevelop.org in 2005 as an alternative to Adobe Flash, with hopes of providing a free developing environment, which is particularly useful for beginning programmers, as paying for an expensive development environment may not be worthwhile for a novice. The FlashDevelop team consists of three members: Miki Palmu, Philippe Elsass, and Nick Farina. As an open source project, multiple users and others interested are able to optimize the program, as well as write plugins for any features that May Be missing.

Layout

FlashDevelop has a development environment visually similar to that of Eclipse. It has a collapsible file explorer that makes bigger coding projects easier to navigate. The layout includes a useful snippets panel that has keyboard commands to show predefined commands. This panel can also be customized to show user preferred snippets.

Features

FlashDevelop features include:

• Automatically cleans ASO files of modified AS2 classes
• Syntax highlighting
• Code folding
• File explorer (a sidebar with collapsible directories of projects)
• Automatic JavaDoc creation from methods
• Test movie in Flash IDE
• Multibyte character encoding
• Program menu customization
• Snippets
• Zoom

FlashDevelop makes MTASC (Motion-Twin ActionScript 2 Compiler) compiling simpler, configuring all the necessary parameters for a given project for the user. It also has a "quick MTASC build" option for single files. It CREATES the swf file for the user, so it can be launched from the directly from the IDE. It also contains a integrated project manager to all the projects components, in addition to having smart project templates for starting projects quicker.

Supported Languages

FlashDevelop supports ActionScript 2, ActionScript 3 & MXML and HaXe and also has a web development kit. While its primary functionality revolves around Flash languages and Actionscript, It also has code completion and highlighting for XML, HTML, PHP, and CSS. As with most Scintilla based editors, FlashDevelop is extensible, this allows it to be more flexible and customizable.

Comparison and Faults

Many online reviews praise FlashDevelop for its intuitive interface and its ability to make the programming experience very simple. One of the issues of FlashDevelop is that the debugging tools are fairly primitive, forcing the user to debug through manual means. It not possible to single step through a program and watch values as they change. Another of the more commonly noted issues of FlashDevelop is that there is no way to refactor code. Other criticisms include the lack of a class wizard.

References

fr:FlashDevelop