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Flash Builder, Eclipse PDT, and other incredibly nerdy things

Last night, my friend John C. Bland, II gave an amazing talk on creating Flex applications with Flash Builder (you should check out John’s blog if you get a chance — knowledgeable developer, funny dude). There are some very uninteresting details surrounding the scheduling of the primer, but they essentially sum up to me seeing a Flex application, me being curious about how it was built, me doing some Googling, me remembering that John is pretty good with Flex, and me asking a favor of him. He obliged, and what followed was great.

I don’t have Flash Builder, but now I want it. I’ve never written anything in ActionScript, but now I really, really want to. I use Eclipse PDT for all of my development (I’ll get into that a bit later) so I was already familiar with Flash Builder’s Eclipse-based UI and familiar features like code completion and packaging. All of those features make development in any language reasonably enjoyable (as enjoyable as programming can be which, I guess, is actually an unreasonable notion if you really take the task apart from some POVs); but put all of those together with something as powerful and simple as mxml, then add a scripting language like ActionScript into the mix, and now you’re talking about the perfect setup for creating engaging, attractive, responsive web and desktop applications in a matter of minutes. I know I’m using a ton of buzzwords, and those are probably keeping you from realizing how excited I am about the idea of this thing, but try to push past all of them and realize that I’m actually blogging. I’m writing a blog post. About code. Anyway, go listen to the talk at this URL.

Watching John cruise through the development of a basic application with Flash Builder made me realize how many of PDT’s features I’m not using that could potentially free up my time and streamline my workflow (buzzwords galore). I’m talking mainly about working sets (just never got around to looking into them), importing user libraries (never tried before — and no, I’m not a huge fan of the ginormous Zend Framework), and debugging (I’ve got my own debugging functions for use in the browser, but integrating everything in the IDE would probably be beneficial in most cases… it is, after all, an integrated development environment). I’m looking into all of these things now, and am pretty excited about what could come about as a result. I may update this blog with my new setup, if I deem it interesting enough to share.

John’s going to be doing a part 2. Check his blog for updates.