Archive for November, 2009
Flex Builder Linux got an alpha 5, umm woo hoo?!
So just released on the Adobe Labs website is a new build of Flex Builder 3 for Linux. When I say new build I mean that all the same problems that applied to alpha 4 are there, with the exception of the product’s expiry date, which now gives us over another year to bask in the glory of this dying product.
So, if you’re keen on trying it out then go ahead, you will probably still be best to follow the step I outlined in a previous post as well as use a patch created by James.
On the other hand you could try out feiy’s port of Flash Builder 4 Beta 2 to Linux, which I have had some good success with.
Another product people seem fairly pleased with is FDT and according to their site version 3.5 will include better MXML support. As a free plug for them, they support the Red5 project which is now at v0.9.0 RC2 and is a great, free, replacement for Flash Media Server.
All in all you should hope, pray, petition and/or sign FB-19053 (choose whatever suits, but Adobe probably only reads the bug reports…) so that they can give us a working version of Flex/Flash Builder for Linux.
Could there be a Flash Builder 4 port to Linux?
I was alerted early this morning to a post that an enterprising developer by the name of feiy had made on his blog.
Quite simply he claims to have Flash Builder 4 Beta 2 working natively under Eclipse in Linux. He backs up this claim with screenshots and a downloadable eclipse archive of his work.
I will report back later today if this has worked for me or not but if you are interested in this sort of thing then you should check out his blog here
UPDATE:
So I’ve tested it, compiled with it and even threw an existing, fairly large, project at it. It works great. There is no design mode for those wondering, but I choose to view this port with a certain amount of reserved optimism that if one person can do this quite easily, then Adobe shouldn’t have much harder of a time…..or they should hire feiy.
There were a few things that I initially came up against that bugged me, but were very minor. First being that the archive wouldn’t decompress for me until I stripped the .gz off the end (could be my quirky system).
Second, which was probably due to trying this in a VM of Ubuntu 9.10 that I haven’t set up properly, I couldn’t just add the directory to the sources list in Eclipse. So I ended up just dropping the files over the top of eclipse.
I was successfully able to compile both Flex SDK 3.4 and 4.0 projects and I did it all in Eclipse 3.5, Galileo.
As per usual, if you haven’t already, go and vote on FB-19053 to show Adobe how much we want this to happen. And if you’ve been too lazy to sign up so you can’t vote then maybe now’s the time you finally pull your finger out and get involved.