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.

Flash development on Linux

Recently I am getting more and more interested in flash development. Since the adoption of actionscript 3 (as3) as programming language Flash is becoming more and more a serious option to develop applications

The main inconvenient that I find is the fact that the development tools are almost just available for the Windows environment. This is an operating system that I stopped using almost two years ago, and I do not have any intention to come back to such family of operating systems.

I am into free software, so I will try to do flash development based on open source tools as much as I can.

This is my development environment:
A four years old Pentium IV based computer, running a 32 bit version of Ubuntu 9.04

Eclipse (you will need to have Java -JRE- installed in order to run Eclipse)
AXDT: This is a set of plug-ins for the Eclipse platform that enables the user to write ActionScript3 code in such a framework.

We can start having a look at the installation instructions on the AXDT site.

The first step is to download the "Eclipse IDE for Java Developers". In our particular case, we will choose the 32bit Linux version (eclipse-java-galileo-linux-gtk.tar.gz)

Then we will have to uncompress that somewhere on our hard disk. We have chosen to install it on the /opt directory.


$ sudo tar -C /opt -xzf java-galileo-linux-gtk.tar.gz


After that, we launch the Eclipse application. First thing will be to choose the workspace directory. We can maintain the default option: just a directory called "workspace" under our home directory.

In the menu, we choose Help -> Install new software...

Click on the "Add..." button, and type the following:

Name: Eclipse IMP
Location: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/imp/updates/



On the lower right corner of the main Eclipse window, you will see an indicator. The program is getting a list of available software components. Some seconds after that, it will show you those components. Do not choose anyone in this moment, and continue to the next step.

Name: AXDT
Location: http://update.axdt.org/



Choose (at least) the following packages:
Axdt AS3 Feature
Flex3SDK Feature



Then click on the "Next >" button, accept the licence and proceed to install the AXDT + Flex SDK framework.

If the system complains about unsatisfied dependencies or requirements, be sure to have installed the basic packages of the Eclipse base environment. I have found in some installations that such repositories are not initially enabled.

Name: Galileo
Location: http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo

Name: Eclipse project
Location: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5

Once installed, restart Eclipse

Go to the menu: Window -> Open perspective -> Other... -> AXDT



You are now ready to start to develop Flash / Flex programs on your Linux box. You can find a simple example of how to compile your first Flash program on Linux.