Eclipse, ASDT, FDT and Zorn

Well I said I would talk about our experiences with Eclipse

We started using Eclipse a couple of weeks back as we have begun testing out Flux our flash xml ui product as it is targeted at non-IDE users.

We haven't used Eclipse before as all our previous Java coding has been done in JCreator which is a super fast C++ editor for Java, it is fully featured, with code folding and code completion and yet when it loads it takes only 18Mb of ram and rarely does it get much more than that, compared to Eclipse which being Java is a memory hog, a few days back I got up to 300MB in Eclipse and that was with every window closed!

Anyway Iam getting off the point, after installing Eclipse and getting it integrated with VSS for version control it was time to start editing some ActionScript.

First off we tried ASDT with Eclipse, ASDT is open source and free.
The initial experience was unfortunately bad. Like everyone when you start of in a new environment you tend to play around, so I created a project that would cover our source code that was in the Configuration/Classes folder. This was quite a trivial thing to do, unfortunately ASDT wasn’t happy about creating this project so it gave out an error message and proceeded to rollback. Unfortunately for me there is a known bug in the ASDT rollback code and thank you very much, ASDT deleted every single file under Configuration/Classes, going on for a 1000 classes! I must admit I was warned that ASDT has a tendency to delete files but, you know, I was smarter than that wasn't I! Lucky for me we have VSS so it was easy to replace the code.

After that I was put off for a few days but came back to it and with some help from a friend got ASDT and flashout working together relatively easily.

To be honest I found ASDT rather clunky, for its syntax checking it relies upon MTASC, there is nothing wrong with MTASC but MTASC is a compiler not an editor syntax checker. So here I am working on a class and ASDT says that there is an error in another class that is being referenced, I open that class fix the error jump back to my original class and lo and behold no errors! Unfortunately it’s not true, just that one error has been fixed, I need to get the syntax checker to kick in again to see if there are any more errors, so I have to "touch" the file, just type a space or something, then it will tell me the next error, and we begin the cycle again ..... That to me is a pain, and it was slow, even in the Flash IDE I can click the syntax checker and I get all the current errors displayed. Actually I found I was more productive using the Flash IDE editor and then just tab out to a command prompt to run MTASC than working with ASDT but thats a personal preference.

The issue as I see it with ASDT is that the pace of its development is just way to slow for it to keep up with the requirement needed for professional development, it not a criticism of the developers they have done a good job with the time they have, its just recognizing the fact they are doing it in their spare time and then don’t have enough time to dedicate to the project. It is the downside of open source development unfortunately. Really though there is an awful lot that needs doing and daresay it really needs re-writing from the ground up if it is to become viable long term.

But then in the last week along came FDT. FDT is a commercial equivalent of ASDT produce by PowerFlasher, it is also not exactly cheap! You can get it on a 20 day trial so we downloaded it and gave it a run.
Straight of it felt so much different from ASDT, you felt this was a product that was much more advanced, much more sophisticated. They have implemented there own syntax checking rather than relying on MTASC and this is just a huge plus. Not only do all your errors get labeled in one go but they actually put markers in the margin of your class file to easily see where the errors are and a little tooltip displays the error string. Now here is something which for the first time I would say was a productivity plus over the Flash IDE. FDT also picks up as an error where you havent put a ";" at the end of the line which is nice.

Not everything is perfect, this after all 1.0, we did have problem with classes reporting false errors due to an issue with not being able to resolve the super class. After struggling to sort this out for few days I contacted FDT directly and they were great and resolved the issue very quickly, it turned out to be a path issue which we could alter in the eclipse configuration.
Once that was fixed we were off and away, and I am happy to now report the XPComponent framework is fully compatible with FDT, no errors, no warnings (and also the same with MTASC).

I did mention to Nico at PowerFlasher that one thing that I missed from the Flash IDE was help panel integration. We have the whole XPComponent API in flash help panel format so you can have both code completion and easily get at the same sort of API help that MM provide for there own components when working in the Flsah IDE.
Well, they pointed that in FDT you can convert the Flash help so we ran that and in a couple of minutes we had our help file available in Eclipse. Unfortunately at the moment there is a small issue with the help as currently when it tries to jump to help for say the Button class it doesn’t have the right information to find the specific help file so you get a small list to choose form of all the help files for classes with Button in their name, like Button, ButtonList, RadioButton etc. but to give them there due the guys at FDT are working with us to find a solution to this problem so hopefully soon you will jump right to the help class and method you wanted without needing to pick anything from a list.

Overall when you compare ASDT and FDT the choice is clear, even though FDT is not cheap it is clearly so much better, so much more sophisticated and clearly a product with a devlopement team that are working round the clock to improve it further that’s it is well worth the price.

The only alternative on the horizon is Macromedia's Zorn, but at the moment Zorn is more questions than answers, what is it, when will it be available, how will it be packaged, what will it encompass and to be honest it is unlikley however it is packaged to be cheaper than FDT. So if your currently working in Eclipse I would say you really need to get FDT.