Setting up your work environment, whether it be your Photoshop workspace or your favorite coding applications panels, can be a very individual thing. Some people like it this way some like it that way, etc.. So I wont be spending any time here talking about visual layout but rather setting up FlexBuilder ( recently renamed FlashBuilder) to provide optimum compiler performance, connecting to the Flash CS4 code-base, a few of my favorite plug-ins, etc.. Hopefully this will help save someone else the headaches I have gone through trying to get everything just right so I can just work.

1. Setting up FlexBuilder 3 to work with Flash CS4

First lets set-up FlexBuilder to import the Flash CS4 libraries. You'll need to modify the paths to follow your specific paths (e.g. change the username)
- Click Images to see full size -

FIRST:
Window -> Preferences -> General -> Workspace -> Linked Resources
Path is : C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash CS4\Common\Configuration\ActionScript 3.0\projects\Flash\src\

SECOND:
Project -> Properties -> ActionScript Build Path -> Source Path Tab

THIRD:
Project -> Properties -> ActionScript Build Path -> Library Path Tab

2. Speeding up FlexBuilder Compile Times

1. Add additional Compiler arguments to your project: Project->Properties->Flex Compiler->Additional Compiler Arguments incremental=true -keep=true. That only updates and compile files and with changes and does not compile all the stuff again. Great results on medium/big projects. For the first time it takes more time to compile (due to cache file generation), but the next compiles are really fast.-keep=true or -keep-generated-actionscript=true can be other good tip, but only for check generated action script files (created under "generated" folder, good for debugging and code-check) but this does not tune up the compiling time.
2. Close extra projects
3. Turn off "Copy non-embedded files to source folder"
4. Turn off "Build Automatically"

3. Lets not forget about Plug-ins

There are quite a bit of Eclipse plug-ins in existence. Not all will help you with ActionScript coding but there are quite a few that will. I use the Snippets panel found in the CFEclipse plug-in, the ToDo panel, and the Status Memory Monitor Plugin.

1. Check out the 3 part series by Lee Brimelow on adding enhancements to FB 3 (especially the Snippets Panel).  Part 1, 2, 3
2. Here's another great post - Pimp my ‘clipse - a list of must-have Eclipse plug-ins for Flex/Flash Development
3. The the Status Memory Monitor Plugin is really cool. It allows you to for Eclipse/FB to run its garbage Collection, freeing up memory and resources. Great Productivity enhancement.

Anyway those are just a few ways you can set up FlexBuilder to allow you to be more productive. Please post your own tips if you have any.

-Dave

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Flash, Flex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.