What IDE can be used for ActionScript 3 coding?
What IDEs can be used for coding ActionScript-3 with most of the support..
I know following IDEs:
- Flash CS3 - horrible - but have to use to debug!
- FlashDevelop - My favorite
- Seppy - No much AS3 support
- FlexBuilder - Heavy on system
Also, any advice for choosing between them would be appreciated.
Answer
Practically speaking there are really only three contenders: FDT, Flash Builder and FlashDevelop. Of these two, only FDT and Flash Builder are cross-platform, Flash Develop being Windows only, with no foreseeable port to OS X or Linux. Sepy is OK, but was last updated in 2005.
If you're Windows-based, and are only interested in an IDE for Actionscript, then FlashDevelop is an excellent choice and, being free, the best value for money.
The other two - Flash Builder and FDT - have the advantage of being Eclipse based. This means that you can install a huge range of other plugins to make it a comprehensive web dev environment. I use FDT with Aptana and the combination is awesome: in one package I have the ability to develop Actionscript (with support for Ant tasks, debugging with MXMLC), PHP, HTML, Javascript, XML and SQL queries, with code hinting for all the major JS libraries like JQuery and Ext, PHP libraries like Zend and Doctrine, etc, etc.
Between Flash Builder and FDT, I use both regularly and have to say that for me FDT is the clear winner: support for live error highlighting, refactoring, code completion and formatting is simply much better.
Addendum: As mentioned elsewhere, I should have flagged TextMate as another solid - if less comprehensive - IDE: it has support via bundles for AS3 and MXML and ties in nicely with the Sprouts development framework for testing and debugging. Mac only though... albeit I hear good things about the E-TextEditor clone for Windows.