Apache Flex: Flash Catalyst

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Preparing Adobe Flex Development Environment (Part 2), updated

Image by TuttleTree via Flickr

Download Adobe Flash Builder (its a pretty big download of around 300 MB, please feel free to read ahead while download is progressing)

- Flash Builder 4 is available for Windows and Macintosh platform.

- During installation you will be required to close your browser(s) so that the installer can upgrade your version of Flash Player to the debugger version so that you can use the full debugging capabilities built into Flash Builder.

You can also install Adobe Flash Builder as a plugin over an existing Eclipse installation, while doing so it is recommended that you edit the eclipse.ini file for your Eclipse instance, so that it includes the following settings:

-vmargs -Xms256m -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -XX:PermSize=64m

Highlights of Adobe Flash Builder 4.5:

“Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 can be used to Build for Android™, BlackBerry® Tablet OS, and iOS mobile platforms using a common code base”.

Based on an Eclipse™ Plaform
Rapid development of expressive mobile, web, and desktop applications
Support for ActionScript®
Building applications using open source Flex framework.
Supports for mobile application development and testing.
Development of applications using common code base to build apps for Android™, BlackBerry® Tablet OS, and iOS mobile platforms while sharing code from web applications.

Tips

You can install a copy of Flash Builder 4 standalone with Flex Builder 2 or 3 installations on the same machine, it will not interfere with each other.
Workspaces created in Flex Builder 2 or Flex Builder 3 are not supported by Flash Builder 4.
You can import existing Flex Builder projects in Flash Builder 4, but a project modified by Flash Builder 4 will no longer open in Flex Builder 3 or Flex Builder 2.