I have to admit, it’s pretty cool.
December 2003. Everyone’s screaming about PrimalScript. I liked SciteFlash at the time, but figured I’d give Primal a shot for a week. I never looked back. Until now. Everyone’s screaming about FAMES, FAMES, FLAMES. Then Macromedia announces partnership with Eclipse. Hmmmm… maybe there’s something to this.
OK, OK. Downloaded Eclpse, ASDT, Flashout. I already have the M and S. Took a bit to get it all set up, but damn. Syntax checking as you type. Hard to find an argument against that. The code completion works better than I understood it to. Still some minor differences from PrimalScript here and there, but nothing I couldn’t adjust to.
Sapien is supposed to come out with another release of Primal this summer. We’ll see what they have to offer. Will it be worth the upgrade price, or will I be fully converted by then?
well, i’ve been using eclipse for a while, but only as a php ide. When it came to actionscript, sepy was my tool, but i guess now it’s time to switch completelly to eclipse
does it support shift-del to delete one line at a time ?
if so, i will be the next switcher…:p
Keith I didn’t think I’d see you coding outside of PrimalScript 🙂
One thing you’ll probably find lacking is the level of integration you and Daniel had acheived using your PB & Jam setup. I’ve been trying to pickup Ant a little more to achieve something similar in Eclipse.
*ahem* Told ya so! 😉
Tim, yup, I’m reading up on Ant now too.
Darron, I was sure you’d come around with that smug look on your face and say something like that! 😉
Keith I posted a message or two on the osflash list regarding a build script I threw together last night. The details are over on my site. The following two links provided most of what I needed to get started.
http://ant.apache.org/manual/using.html
http://ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTasks/exec.html
There are other ways of setting up the build file to do what I’m doing, but I think for my purposes what I have now is fine because it keeps it simple and handles the job just fine.
Just gave it a shot, and IMO the code completion is crap. Do I really have to remember the order of args for createTextField? For PHP I don’t think anything even comes close to Zend. Other apps should take a page from their book when it comes to code completion.
Tim, thanks. That helped a lot. I posted my own, derived from yours in the Ant section at osflash.org.
Ben, I’m not sure what your point is. The code completion in Eclipse with ASDT is as good as PrimalScript, and both are far better than any other Flash editor out there, in that they show you the methods and properties of your own custom classes. Maybe Zend is better if you’re doing PHP, and VS is better if you’re doing C#, but neither helps you much if you’re doing Flash.
Eclipse is not perfect, but I believe it’s the best AS editor out there at this point.
I just wonder why, if they can show you the methods and properties in an inspector window (for custom classes), why can they not give you autocomplete as well?
And for built in classes, they show you the method names and args at first, but the hints go away as you enter the args? Just seems silly.
Autocomplete works fine for me, but I agree that the hints disappearing is a pain.
By the way, as far as I know, this is a “feature” of ASDT, the ActionScript Development Tool, which is the Eclipse plugin allowing you to write AS. This is open source and under active development, so this could be fixed up any time.