Posted on by JesterXL

I Tried Eclipse, ASDT, MTASC, & Flashout – FAME

I ran through the tutorial in the Towards Open Source Flash Development article. Upon compiling my first open source SWF, a “Wow!” escaped my lips through a nervous laugh; my hands started to shake. When I got the Alert component part to work, the same thing happened again… “Wow! HA HA!!!”

There are a plethora of instructions, both on the site, and in each of the pieces’ intsall instructions… but none of it was painful at all to install and configure. And Eclipse, geez, so far it feels pretty nice. I’ve tried for 4 years, unsuccessfully, to use another external editor other than Flash to create & manage my ActionScript in. I won’t know for another few weeks if we have a winner, but I must say, I like the workflow so far. Why?

I don’t have to leave… sort of.

The “hack” as it’s described ActionScript.com’s site doesn’t feel that hackish at all. You just instantiate your class & include the necessarey components in the library. That’s not hard, nor evil feeling at all; it’s a fact of Flash development life.

More investigation is necessarey to see how it compiles my current projects, how diffucult it is to set them up in Eclipse, and what, if any, code is needed to change to ensure it compiles correctly with MTASC.

So far, the tabbed interface, a Project panel that actually works well, an Outline view (which has yet to prove its usefulness), all visible at the same time with colored code… feels nice. The Flashout tab makes things feel professional. I have a SWF, traces, and compiler configuration controls built right in.

Why am I using the Flash IDE again? This is cool! Let’s see if I’m singing the same tune in 2 weeks; that’s been my Acid test over the past 4 years. I am recently starting to have to utilize Java at work, so that adds a few points for the Eclipse route.

I encourage others to try it out.

Reference links:

I’ve been trying to come up with an anacronym from the letters of “E”, “A”, “M”, and “F” to describe these various technologies that make up this new workflow. FAME, perhaps?

10 Replies to “I Tried Eclipse, ASDT, MTASC, & Flashout – FAME”

  1. I’ve been using ‘FAME’ everyday at work for quite some time now, and I would never switch back to a different editor. With the right plugins, Eclipse is the ultimate environment. ASDT is a little rough around the edges, but there’s nothing that bothers me enough to stop using it. I hope MM sees the need for *really good* development tools, and how incredibly useful ASDT is.

  2. I can see why you’ve been using it everyday. For a bunch of free, open-source, 1.0’ish technologies, I’m seriously impressed.

  5. I followed Carlos’ tutorial when it was first published, and putting together the whole thing wasn’t as painful as it looked when just reading the material. As a matter of fact, I’ve been trying Eclipse for the rest of my coding needs ever since. It’s only when writing ActionScript that I still find myself missing a few features from SEPY every now and then. However, Eclipse’s extensibility is impressive, and I’m sure future plugins will be much better.

  8. Welcome to Fame, JesterXL. Once ASDT matures a bit this will truely be the ultimate environnement for everyone.

    And all this for the cost of contributions and donations. Long lives Free Software.

  9. Hey Jesse .. I was going to trackback, but I can’t find a trackback url on your site anyway .. so I’m posting a comment instead :)

    For those who prefer to do their FAME development under Gentoo Linux, or those who are simply experimenting, I’ve created some preliminary ebuilds that will automate the process of downloading and installing Flashout, ASDT and MTASC (and also swfmill). I think I can also generate RPM’s from those ebuilds.

    I’ve posted a blog entry to go with them, available here:

    http://cliffrowley.com/blog/?p=61

    The one thing I didn’t do is provide any instruction on actually using the ebuilds (d’oh), but I’ll rectify that today ;-)

  10. Cliff: are you saying Flashout is working in Linux? I tried to get your ebuilds, but there were dead links only…

    Can you help me get them?

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