I’m playing with FlashDevelop since reading about it on Keith Peter’s blog. It is as he says: stable, slick, and with great features like usable code completion, code folding editor, integrated class explorer (yay!) and lots more I haven’t yet touched. It’s sweet!

I was stuck figuring out the best way to include an external SWF filled with media assets into the build process. Basically, I wanted to generate the following MTASC-equivalent command line:

mtasc main.as -cp classpaths -swf assets.swf -out mymovie.swf -main

What this does is tell MTASC to compile main.as (which then compiles everything else included in it), using the classpaths specified. The -swf switch is the one that will import the media assets, but instead of “injecting” the compiled AS2 into it, I’m specifying a different output file with the -out switch. The last switch tells MTASC to start program execution in the static function main().

There are two ways to specify build parameters in FlashDevelop:

• Edit the Project Settings to set the header parameters and output file, but I haven’t figured out how to add the -swf assets.swf line. I don’t think you can do this in RC2, though this is ideal because I can compile ‘n run by just hitting F5. Instead of invoking MTASC directly, this executes FDBuild.
• Alternatively, I can use the MTASC Quick Build feature, in which you add your additional parameters in a special comment in the source file. The problem with this approach is that QuickBuild applies only to the currently-viewed file, so you have to switch back to your main.as file before you compile. Blah!

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p>Just when I was about to give up and switch back to the Flash IDE, I read here that you can actually add SWFs to the compile chain by right-clicking them in the Project Explorer and selecting add to the library. That’s a much more IDE-ish way of doing things, so I’m happy now. The documentation isn’t entirely clear on this; fortunately I stumbled upon this thread.

I was catching up with one of the engineers who works on Open Laszlo, a rich-internet application system that came out some time before Flex from Laszlo Systems. Laszlo has historically produced output for Flash Player, but now it’s targeting DHTML also! There’s a demo on the home page, showing both examples with Flash and DHTML.

I’ve been interested in Laszlo for some time, but have been preoccupied with regular Flash development using the Macromedia IDE. I think it’s time to take another look at it; Laszlo separates presentation from logic through a declarative XML-based schema that seems like it would be pretty fast. What kept me from really getting into it was the additional requirements to host it (Apache Tomcat) and my lack of a really good XML editor (I dislike formatting XML in general). The former has been addressed by neat try it out in 10 minutes tools and non-commercial hosting options, and the latter…well, I am mature enough now to overlook my silly prejudices.

I’m also curious about hAxE, the “web oriented universal language” that grew out of the MTASC team. It also can target either DHTML or Flash Player.

Anything that can isolate me from actually having to deal with the DOM and browser-based javascript is a good thing, as far as I’m concerned :-)