Flash development on Linux (II)

Once you have set up your Flash / Flex development environment on your Linux box, you are ready to compile your first application.

Open Eclipse with the AXDT perspective

Create your first project. This is done under the menu item File -> new -> AXDT project.... Give a name to your project and select a directory (usually under the directory that you chose as your workspace).



After the creation of the project, you can start to add your source files. The compiler supports both kind of files: as3 (ActionScript) as well as .mxml files. We are going to compile a sample from the AXDT site.

Go to the menu and choose File -> new -> AS3 file



Choose the folder to store the source file (usually src). Optionally you can organise your code in packages. Using packages is optional but becomes more necessary as you project grows. Better being used to manage packages from the beginning. The sources will be placed in a subdirectory tree structure according to the package structure. Finally, give a name to your source file: As in many other OOP languages, the file name must be the same as the name of the class defined in such source file.

After the creation of the source file, write down (or copy + paste) the file contents. At this point, your environment should look more or less like this:



Once created and saved your source file, you can compile it. Just click on the menu item Run -> Run As -> Compile and Open a SWF File. You will see some options to configure the compiler but do not worry about such options right now. You can maintain the default values.



If everything has gone right, you will see your Flash application running on the Eclipse IDE . The swf file created will be placed on the target location (default is deploy), so you can copy such file and publish it on your website.