Flex Builder 2

A big part of learning any new language is getting familiar with a new IDE or at least customizing an existing IDE to fit your new language needs. Flex is no different, being a brand new language and quite different from anything Adobe had made in the past (somewhat like adding coldfusion and flash together) the IDE for flex had to be new and support functions and features that were brand new also.

Flex Builder 2, is a great language specific IDE, it isn't as universal as Visual Studio or some of the other commercial apps but being built off of the Eclipse platform it is really feature packed and has tons of great flex-specific functionality. Having only used Eclipse with Java a couple of years ago I never really had any good memories, in fact every memory associated with Java is a pretty bad one but now that I see Eclipse put to use in a productive, yet easy to use language I have grown to like it.

As with many IDEs Flex Builder comes in two view modes, Design and Code. The design view also known as WYSIWYG is actually pretty powerful and doesn't create the mess of code that I am used to seeing from frontpage, dreamweaver wysiwyg editors. Because components need to be placed and ordered into layout containers the organization of the different parts of the website is easy to make look good.

One of the best ways that Flex Builder has made the wysiwyg to produce good looking code is the constraint based layout principle that they use. Every item, container and component alike is constrained by a parent of some sort. The largest items are constrained by the root file and then other items are constrained by it, etc. There are a bunch of options to the types of constraints, you can use absolute positioning within the parent, or mimic the proportions of the parent with specific borders and margins defined. The constraint based layout has made the development of decent looking flex applications fairly easy, and any future addition or modification is easier to handle because a change in one part of the application doesn't ever effect a different part of the application, something that can't be said with inferior wysiwyg editors.

Flex builder because it was built on eclipse has built in debugging that allows you to debug your applications at runtime and see the changes in variables and results of functions. All in all the Flex Builder IDE has helped me get good running, good looking applications ready faster than any other IDE I have used in the past.

Below are some screenshots of Flex Builder 2 in the design or WYSIWYG mode: