Background

Adobe FlexBuilder is a set of plug-ins built on the Eclipse Platform which offers development tools around the Flex framework.

While Adobe freed the Flex SDK, including libraries and compiler, the IDE is still, at the time of writing this article, commercial.

For some reason, Adobe does not currently offer any FlexBuilder update which would allow us to install the tools as a plug-in under the Eclipse 3.3 platform in the appropriate way with the FlexBuilder installer.

This article will show you how to install FlexBuilder 2 under Eclipse Europa in a quite clean way, so that all the new features and bug fixes of Eclipse will be available to you.

A glance on what is new in Eclipse Europa Simultaneous Release:

• New and noteworthy for Platform, JDT and PDE
• New and noteworthy for WTP
• New and noteworthy for Mylyn

Prerequisites

Quite simple:

• FlexBuilder 2.x installer
• A working instance of Eclipse Europa
• Your license key!

Prepare Eclipse

First create a new extension location to your Eclipse installation.

An extension location can be created anywhere in your filesystem and must match the following structure:

./
 /eclipse
 /eclipse/.eclipseextension
 /plugins
 /features

Where .eclipseextension may be an empty file (note: Windows explorer does not allow empty file name creation, so create it in a command line box using e.g. echo > .eclipseextension)

Once it’s done, you can enable the extension location by adding it to your Eclipse installation in the Help Menu > Software Updates > Manage Configuration > Add an extension location link.

Close Eclipse.

FlexBuilder installation

Install FlexBuilder standalone

First install FlexBuilder, as a product (not as a plugin) by choosing the option “Install FlexBuilder and Flex SDK” in the “Choose Install Set” dialog.

Activate FlexBuilder

When the setup wizard is over, launch the FlexBuilder IDE which should appear in your start menu. A dialog will pop up, asking for your licence key(s). Enter it (them) and close the IDE.

Merge FlexBuilder Features in Eclipse

Let’s assume you installed Eclipse in $ECLIPSE_HOME directory (e.g. c:\dev\eclipse33) and FlexBuilder in $FLEX_HOME directory (e.g. c:\dev\flexbuilder).

First copy the $FLEX_HOME/configuration/com.adobe.flexbuilder directory into $ECLIPSE_HOME/eclipse/configuration.

Then, copy the $FLEX_HOME/plugins and $FLEX_HOME/features directories into your extension location folder.

Finally, start your Eclipse 3.3 using eclipse --clean

Fixing some bugs

Do not forget Flexbuilder is still not supposed to be run under Eclipse 3.3, and installing legacy Eclipse plugins is sometimes a pain, notably because of API changes in the platform, so you could still face some issues doing this trick.

That’s why we isolated FlexBuilder in an extension location instead of moving it directly into the eclipse installation (so, removing FlexBuilder is just a matter of disabling the extension, and imho it’s a good practice anyway).

That said, the only (small) problems I noticed until now are listed below.

Current line highlight color

The current line highlight color in flex editors might be altered under Eclipse 3.3 (an ugly black line in the middle of your editor could appear).

To fix this, just go to the Preferences Dialog in General > Editors > Text editors Tab? Then select “Current Line Highlight” item in the “Appearance color options list”. Just choose a color close to the default one to fix the bug.