Trisha Shetty (Editor)

FlashDevelop

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Developer(s)
  
FlashDevelop Team

Written in
  
C#

Development status
  
Active

FlashDevelop

Original author(s)
  
Mika Palmu Philippe Elsass

Initial release
  
2005; 12 years ago (2005)

Stable release
  
5.2.0 / 19 September 2016; 5 months ago (2016-09-19)

FlashDevelop is an integrated development environment (IDE) for development of Adobe Flash websites, web applications, desktop applications and video games. The resulting applications run in Adobe Flash Player or Adobe AIR, on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Android or iOS. The primary purpose of FlashDevelop is enabling developers to edit, compile, debug and publish a Flash ActionScript project. It supports ActionScript 2.0, ActionScript 3.0, Haxe and other upcoming languages. It has code completion, syntax highlighting, snippets and other features similar to Microsoft Visual Studio.

Contents

FlashDevelop is free and open source software, mostly written in C# and is built on the efficient Scintilla editor component. It is extensible with a plugin architecture and is a .NET Framework 2.0 application only available for Microsoft Windows. As an open source project with a modular plugin system, users are able to improve and optimize the program, as well as write plugins for features that may be missing. The project is primarily funded by donations.

FlashDevelop uses the free Adobe Flex SDK to build ActionScript 3 and MXML applications, the free MTASC compiler to build ActionScript 2 applications, and the free Haxe toolkit to build ActionScript 3, PHP, Neko or JavaScript applications. It also has code completion and highlighting for XML, HTML, PHP, and CSS.

History

FlashDevelop was developed in 2005 by Mika Palmu and Philippe Elsass, and later, other contributors. It was created as a lightweight and free alternative to the commercial Adobe Flash Professional and Adobe Flash Builder editors, especially useful to students, hobbyists and freelancers.

Features

FlashDevelop includes the basic features expected in software development IDEs.

  • Project system with configurable compiling
  • Project templates for AS2, AS3, Adobe AIR, Haxe development
  • Project file explorer tree with basic file manipulation features
  • Configurable hotkeys
  • Application and project level options
  • Plugin system with each feature developed in a separate plugin
  • Plugins can be enabled or disabled to improve performance
  • Import Flex Builder projects
  • Supports multi-lingual code files

    • Editing

    FlashDevelop includes code editing features comparable to Eclipse or Microsoft Visual Studio.

  • Code completion
  • Code folding
  • Code generation
  • Syntax coloring
  • To-do list
  • Bookmarks
  • Code outline
  • Macros that can be written in C#
  • Zoom
  • Exploration of classes in SWF and SWC files
  • Color picker and editor
  • Snippets library

    • FlashDevelop has built-in code completion that includes a wide range of possible API.

  • Platform API (based on used Flash Player version)
  • User classes, methods, and variables
  • SWC library classes and code
  • Events when working with listeners
  • Typed array values

    • Publishing

    FlashDevelop can be used to publish websites and web applications using the following methods:

  • Compile projects via Adobe Flash IDE
  • Compile ActionScript 2 projects to SWF using MTASC
  • Compile ActionScript 3 projects to SWF using the Adobe Flex SDK
  • Compile Haxe projects to SWF via the Haxe compiler
  • Optimize JavaScript programs using Google Closure Compiler
  • Quick build to SWF for single files
  • Panel to view compiler errors/warnings

    • FlashDevelop can be used to build desktop applications and mobile applications using the following methods:

  • Compile SWF using the Adobe Flex SDK or Haxe
  • Package app for Android or iOS using the AIR Developer Tool (ADT)
  • Package app for Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X using the AIR Developer Tool (ADT)
  • Compile app for the Neko runtime using Haxe
  • Compile app for the cross-platform NME framework using Haxe
  • Compile a C++ app for Windows using Haxe

    • References

    FlashDevelop Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA