Eclipse 3.5 + FDT 3.5 for Actionscript development

Eclipse 3.5 + FDT 3.5 for Actionscript development

Part 1 - Advantage：

    * Cross-platform

      Actually I’m using Windows but I’m hoping to switch to MacOS X as soon as possible and I would like to maintain my work-flow. Unfortunately FlashDevelop is Windows only.

    * Advanced Refactoring

      Advanced Refactoring add common refactoring tools like Rename Type, Rename Variable/Function, Rename Package and Move Type to the FDT 3 editor.

    * Advanced Code Completition

      This powerful feature auto-completes words and phrases during typing. The advanced code completion function is available for imports, types, members and lots of basic key words. FDT 3 code completion furthermore supports generators by using extension points.

    * Improved Autocompletition

      You can now use the auto-completion to generate whole methods. Insert a name into the body of a class and press <CTRL>+<SPACE> and a new method with that name will be created. You can also generate a constructor by the same procedure if the constructors name begins with the class name.

    * Organize imports

      FDT 3 enables your editor to organize and to perform all necessary imports for a complete package or even for your whole project by a single shortcut and certainly adds missing ones automatically. Thereby, moving classes and packages or renaming them becomes quite easy.

    * Live Error Highlighting

      The integrated ActionScript parser allows detecting and visualizing lexical and syntactical errors continuously while typing new code to the editor frame and for more, a semantic analysis is performed permanently to check types, members and declarations of both the current file and the whole project. Different kinds of problems can be tagged with “error”, “warning” or “ignore”. FDT 3 offers the opportunity to add problem generators to FDT 3 by using extension points.

    * Live Templates

      Templates provide a fast way to write typical coding structures. FDT 3 analyses the surrounding code and suggests variables matching the template like types and members.

    * Quickfixes

      Quickfixes are available for many syntactical and semantic problems. This covers a wide range of e. g. non terminated statements up to undeclared variables. FDT 3 will automatically add the semicolon where necessary or define a variable with the correct type.

    * Formatter

      An integrated and extensively configurable formatter will format the source code when you demand it by shortcut. All source code that is generated by FDT 3 will automatically be formatted as well. The formatter can be configured specifically for each project.

 

While testing this combination I decided to document everything for a future reinstalling and is not a bad idea share it with everyone, so here it comes this series of posts on Eclipse and FDT integration in your development work-flow.

 

Part 2 – Installation

1) Install Java Runtime Environment

You can choose between Sun Java SE or Oracle JRockit (if your processor is Intel):