Flex development in Eclipse

Question

I was about to start with a chat application like this one. I was wondering how to do it on Eclipse. Does Eclipse support Flex development? Is there a plugin or a tool which I need to download for Eclipse?
I installed Flash Develop on my machine, but I am getting some issue in unzipping the zip file for Flex SDK which I can't figure out why. Thus I was thinking of switching to Eclipse. It will be really great if someone can also help me fix this issue.

Thanks,
Stone

Answer 1

Another solution would be to use Maven and especially the Flexmojos Plugin to build your application and to use Maven inside Eclipse. This was the way we did it for quite a long time, because Eclipse really sucked if a Project consisted of 50+ Sub-Projects. In the meanwile we switched to IntelliJ but are still using the Maven+Flexmojos approach.

Answer 2

Eclipse does not support Flex development by itself. You will need to purchase Flash Builder which is based on Eclipse. It can be used is a plug-in for an existing Eclipse installation, or installed as a standalone application. There isn't a free solution for using flex inside of eclipse that I am aware of.

Flash Builder has advantages and disadvantages compared to Flash Develop. Try both and see which one meets your requirements.

If you are having trouble using the Flex SDK to with Flash Develop, please post a new question with the details.