Creating Flex Applications with IntelliJ IDEA
February 5th, 2008 by Egor MalyshevWe’ve got great news for those of you who were waiting for an easier way to create rich Internet applications with Adobe Flex using IntelliJ IDEA.
Many advanced features are supported by the upcoming version 7.0.3 that is already available throught the Early Access Program (EAP):
- Smart code completion for MXML and AS files, with cross-resolution of code symbols between them, even inside of mx:Script blocks and attribute values
- Automatic code formatting, highlighting and styling
- On-the-fly code validation with instant quick-fixes
- Code insections to hunt perfomance bottlenecks, bad code practicies and other problems
- Rich set refactorings
We’ve composed a comprehensive tutorial, for you to quickly start over.
To get your hands on IntelliJ IDEA Flex experience, you only need:
- IntelliJ IDEA Flex tutorial in PDF format
- Latest IntelliJ IDEA EAP Build
- And, optionally, sample project (it’s what you’ll anyways get after completing the tutorial)
February 6th, 2008 at 3:46 am
Good news to see IntelliJ IDEA support Flex. I have been using IDEA for years for all my Java coding and I think it is a very strong competitor to Flex Builder and FDT. I do not expect IntelliJ to develop a design view feature - for that I can use Flex Builder but you could make me really happy with an IDEA Flex debugger. Any plans?
February 6th, 2008 at 4:50 am
Great!
Thanks a bundle
Henrik
February 6th, 2008 at 8:00 am
Thank you guys
February 6th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Any chance of getting a Flex debugger? With these new features in IntelliJ, the debugger is the only really compelling reason to still use the Flex Builder IDE.
February 7th, 2008 at 5:07 am
Looks very promising…
February 8th, 2008 at 5:53 am
I’ve slightly updated the PDF tutorial - replaced the confusing screenshot, showing the Flex module, which is not required for working with Flex in 7.0.x, and appeared because this screenshot was occasionally taken from from one of Diana builds
February 9th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Great news - thanks.
February 12th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Thanks for the update, I can’t wait to get my hands on the new Flex functionality! Can you give us a clue as to when 7.0.3 is going to be released?
February 13th, 2008 at 8:42 am
It’s coming out the next week, sometime between 17th and 23rd of February
February 15th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Yahoo!!
February 19th, 2008 at 5:00 am
thanks a lot for flex support!!!!
February 27th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
How about Flex debugger?
February 29th, 2008 at 8:39 am
Asif, watch for IntelliJ IDEA 8.0 EAP releases - Flex debugger should be available by that time.
March 14th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Is there rough E.T.A. for IDEA 8 EAP? beta? GA?
April 1st, 2008 at 10:18 pm
Woohoo great to see flex support. Thanks!
July 23rd, 2009 at 2:16 am
I am about to start working on Flex 3. I have the latest version of IDEA 8. Does Flex Builder (that’s an eclipse thing, isn’t it?) still shine over IDEA?
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:15 am
Flex support in IDEA is in active development so I’d recommend you to use Maia (IDEA 9) EAPs for Flex development. Though IDEA 8 already has good Flex support including code assistance (highlighting, completion, formatting, find usages, etc.), compilation, launching and all other stuff required for Flex development.
Flex Builder is a product of Adobe, based on Eclipse GUI. I’ve found a couple of blog posts where people evaluate IDEA as Flex IDE:
http://blog.mikenimer.com/index.cfm/2008/11/8/Intellij-8–alternative-to-FlexBuilder
http://www.alagad.com/go/blog-entry/intellij-idea-is-now-my-ide-of-choice-hereandrsquo-s-why
If you try IDEA for Flex your feedback would be very much appreciated and we’ll do our best to improve Flex support in IDEA for Maia release!
July 30th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
I am trying out Maia for its flex support. What is the appropriate place to post how-to questions and possible bug reports?
July 31st, 2009 at 3:44 am
Hi Mary,
questions are welcome at IDEA forums (usually it is ‘Community’ forum):
http://www.jetbrains.net/devnet/community/idea/
Bug reports - at issue tracker:
http://www.jetbrains.net/jira/
Instruction is here:
http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/IDEADEV/Working+with+issue+tracker
July 31st, 2009 at 4:25 am
By the way as you may notice, this blog entry is very-very old. I advise you to forget everything written here and to look at more actual information.
Both IDEA 8.1.x release and Maia EAP have internal Flex compiler and sample application can be created and launched in few clicks without using keyboard at all.
As a quick start please look few demos:
http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2009/03/intellij-idea-flex-support/
http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2009/04/improved-flex-support/
These demos are also not up-to-date (UI was changed a little since then) and since that time Flex development became even easier.