For a long time now Adobe’s Flex IDE has been the only tool for developing ActionScript 3 applications. Now there is an alternative in the form of PowerFlasher’s FDT 3.0.
Developed for internal by PowerFlasher, the FDT (Flash Development Tool) wowed freelancers so much that the company decided to launch it as a commercial product. Like Flex Builder, FDT is built upon the Eclipse framework and therefore has many similarities with other Eclipse-based tools, not least JDT upon which it is based.
It is great to see competing tools out there on the market and it can only serve to strengthen the popularity of the technology.
PowerFlasher’s tool can be found at http://fdt.powerflasher.com. It is really worth a look.
Tags: ActionScript, Adobe, development tool, Eclipse, FDT 3.0, Flash, Flex, ide, Java Development Tool, JDT, powerflasher
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19 November 2007 at 7:25 pm
MrSteel
With Flex SDK you can make application anywhere but for the IDE FDT is great but it costs
you can also check FlashDevelop which is great for me
http://www.flashdevelop.org/community/
20 November 2007 at 9:35 am
Rick
Without a debugger this is is basically a glorified editor. I.e useless.
20 November 2007 at 9:46 am
Simon
@Rick In FDT’s defence, the debugger is ‘coming’ soon as is an MXML parser and advanced refactoring, and since the tool has a whole host of great features already, see the product comparison, I think terming the tool useless is not entirely accurate.
20 November 2007 at 5:57 pm
Steve
I wouldn’t want to live without FDT or it’s equivalent. Even as a “glorified editor,” its’ features save me *so* much time while programming. I haven’t spent the time wtih FlashDevelop to know the differences, and I agree FDT is pretty expensive. Can anyone point to a feature comparison of the two programs?
14 April 2008 at 6:29 pm
Handy
I can’t make sense of this program. What are the benefits of FDT? I miss screenshots or something like this on the website, there is only a list of key features. Is this program better than flexbuilder?