Comments on: OpenLaszlo: A new old rival for Adobe Flex

By: Timo

Timo — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:20:16 +0000

You’re absolutely right, Raju.
Besides the features of modern IDE’s that provide code assistance (e.g. the new web-service integration in FB4), I’d be nothing without at least FB4’s debugger and memory profiling tools.

Regarding costs: Paying a few hundred bucks is probably not much for a small to big company but if I were a lonely freelancer and had to spend thousands of $$$ just for Adobe’s yearly Creative Suite update (including Catalyst, Flash Builder, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash Prof.) in order to get the whole Flash workflow, I’d probably jump from the next bridge.

By: Raju Bitter

Raju Bitter — Wed, 26 May 2010 08:46:23 +0000

And another comment on costs: paying a few hundred $/EUR for a good IDE doesn’t really make a difference in larger projects. If the tool saves you a week of work in a 3 months project, you are definitely going to save money.

It’s great to have FlashDevelop, Flash Builder 4 and other tools for Flex development. I know many excellent developers that don’t use any IDE, but if you have a .NET/Java background, you are probably looking for good tool support when you learn a new programming language.

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 23 May 2010 02:55:04 +0000

Just a note on actionscript IDEs for use with the FlexSDK – FlashDevelop is a highly competitive, free open source editor. To put it simply, I own Flash CS5 and Flash Builder 4 (the new Flex Builder), and I do almost all coding in FlashDevelop. For pure actionscript coding, many people just feel that it’s better than any of the commercial offerings. Code completion and generation resemble Visual Studio more than Eclipse, so for people who prefer Microsoft’s IDE, FlashDevelop will probably give them a more favorable impression than Flash Builder.

By: Timo

Timo — Sat, 22 May 2010 21:11:24 +0000

Hey, thanks for that hint.
I’ll update my post regarding this.

By: P T Withington

P T Withington — Sat, 22 May 2010 21:08:33 +0000

OpenLaszlo as of version 4.2 (currently at 4.7) supports extensions to Javascript modelled on Actionscript3. You can create classes and declare interfaces and types just as in as3. When compiling to DHTML, the type declarations are not (currently) enforced, but they are if you compile to Flash. We are closely following the evolution of HTML 5 and Javascript and plan to take advantage of them to give better and more rigorous performance in DHTML in the future.