Flex Builder Linux

I read in a Linux magazine that Adobe were releasing Flex Builder for Linux. I thought this was really exciting as it was a great chance to use my new Linux box for some development and write a basic Flash application. It regularly annoyed me that I had never developed a Flash application.

Adobe Flex Builder Linux Public Alpha is currently up to alpha 4. It is a plug-in for Eclipse, a very popular, extendable development IDE build on Java. I had to install Eclipse 3.3.2 because earlier version weren't working on my machine and later version have problems with the plug in. I wanted to use OpenJava but I couldn't get Eclipse working on it, so I decided it would just be easier to use Sun Java.

Once I got Eclipse and Flex Builder working it was pretty fun. I was surprised how much of the stuff I learned for Silverlight could be applied to Flex Builder. In fact quite a few things I thought were unique to Silverlight were already features in Flex Builder.

I found ActionScript was quite easy to get into, it looks similar to JavaScript but with extra type information. The intellisense for ActionScript with Eclipse and Flex Builder is really good and really helped.

Anyway here is my first Flash application!

It was great from me to solve the mystery behind Flash files and find it is just source code. In this application there are some ActionScript classes, the main MXML and HTML/JavaScript to host it. Get the source code here.

Well that was pretty fun but there is so much more. I'd like to write an application that interacts with a server and try some of the cool data binding Flex Builder supports.