Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 9. Customizing Flex Builder 3

There are many things you can do to work more efficiently in Flex Builder. These techniques fall into two main categories: working faster and working smarter. The first section of this chapter will look at techniques to optimize the efficiency of the Flex Builder environment. In the following section, you will learn how to optimize your workflow through workbench customization. And finally, a detailed tutorial on using the Subclipse repository plug-in.

Optimizing Flex Builder Performance

There are times when developing a large project in Flex Builder that the performance of the IDE can be a little slow. But there are many things you can do to work faster and more efficiently. One is to employ certain best practices in your workflow, and another is to tweak the Eclipse environment itself.

Project Development Best Practices

There are a number of things you can do in Flex Builder to ensure that your code compiles faster, the workbench updates sooner, and the workflow is more efficient that have to do with how you use Flex Builder:

• Turn off "Build Automatically." This is a great feature for small projects, spikes, and prototypes, as it saves you from pressing that Run button all the time. Just refresh the browser after saving and voila! But the moment your project begins to take on a medium size (thousands of lines of code versus hundreds), having Flex Builder recompile every time you save one small change in one file is a huge time sink. Turning this ...