So I know this has been blogged about before… but I feel like it’s a relatively obscure little gem in the Flex/Flash world so I thought I’d throw it up on the wall again with the hope that it might give other people the desire to create useful Flex/Flash/AIR plug-ins.
One of the readers of my last post on my Flex Builder 4 wishlist commented that Flex Builder shouldn’t be built on Eclipse and Adobe should open it up to other vendors such as JetBrains (of IntelliJ/ReSharper fame). While I am a huge fan of ReSharper and IntelliJ… I believe the reasons for having the Flex Builder code base built on the Eclipse platform far outweigh the benefits of having it be built as an IDEA plugin.
The largest reason being that the Eclipse core is open source and according to the EPL any code derived from the Eclipse source must also be open source. This means the core of Flex Builder… the Eclipse code that was derived for Flex Builder… which includes editor code, debugger code, workbench code… must also be open source.
You can find the Flex Builder 2 source based on Eclipse 3.1.2 here: http://www.adobe.com/go/4b243413
Aside:
The flexibility of the Eclipse platform to adapt itself as development tasks evolve will be a cornerstone to it’s usefulness as an IDE and will act as a catalyst to propel the evolution of Adobe’s Flash/Flex/AIR tooling. Evidence of this can be found in an excellent plugin built by Stephen (Spike) Milligan (main contributor to the CFEclipse plugin) at http://www.yellowbadger.com/ which was targeted at the Flex 1.x/AS2 framework and built on the Eclipse platform. I had discovered and was using this plugin a full year before the Zorn (Flex Builder 2) release had been rumored. I was also using Eclipse for all my Java development at IBM and lately… I’ve been using it to teach myself Ruby. Having one editor with multiple perspectives for doing radically different development projects is my dream come true. Eclipse is not without it’s fault’s and does have some shortcomings (It can be a memory pig with a capital P1GB). But ram is cheap… Who doesn’t run 2 gigs?
March 7, 2008 at 10:39 am
So does this mean that someone could create their own Flex plugin for Eclipse based upon this code? Has anyone actually done anything with this yet?
March 9, 2008 at 8:59 am
Yep… you can create a plugin… here’s an example…
http://www.morearty.com/blog/2006/06/07/writing-your-own-plugins-for-the-flex-builder-debugger-part-2-a-fully-functional-sample/
I’ve been talking with David Zuckerman from Adobe about creating a plug-in for eclipse that uses the code DOM for AS3.. watch his blog for more info.
September 4, 2008 at 8:50 am
Then the other day I bought some beautiful midsized (about 6 to a kilo) avocados for 25 cents each or 1. 50 a kilo. This is less than we were paying for avocados when we left Mexico (paying about 18 pesos a kilo). What it is coming down to financially speaking is four major things are less in Mexico right now– Medical and dental, property taxes, skilled labor and inexpensive fuel. Of course those four categories can amount to a lot of one’ s annual expenses. Some food is lower, some not. If you need to buy…