Learning Flex 4

Chapter 2. Setting Up Your Environment

IN THIS CHAPTER

Using Alternatives to Flash Builder

Introducing Flash Builder and Eclipse

Running Your First Application

Creating a New Flex Project

Summary

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

— Abraham Lincoln

Adobe’s Flex 4 SDK is free, and with it, you can use any text editor to create Flex applications. However, if you adopt this approach you’ll be working without code completion, and you’ll need to compile applications using the SDK’s command-line compiler. This doesn’t exactly describe a course of least resistance. That said, Adobe’s Flash Builder 4 is designed to simplify Flex development. Regarded as the premier IDE for Flex development, Flash Builder provides a customizable code editor, code completion, informative framework documentation, automated compiling, debugging tools, and utilities that assist team-based development.

Note

A Software Development Kit (SDK) is a collection of library code, sample files, documentation, and/or utilities that enable development in a particular language or for a special purpose.

Almost anyone who’s familiar with Flex and who has used another editor to develop Flex applications will tell you Flash Builder is the IDE of choice. Of course, there are other options available to you, which we discuss next, but this book will introduce Flex development using Flash Builder.

If you don’t have Flash Builder yet, it’s easy to download it from Adobe at http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/ ...