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Comment by hubb | Hacker News Reader

the "sdk" is open source, but flex builder isn't (and they managed to break stuff that worked fine in eclipse). and have fun trying to get the flex builder plugin to work on linux, or even get the sdk working completely on linux.

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I tried to do some flex development on linux two years ago from the command-line & I finally gave up & switched to the IDE. I hate languages where serious development is only possible from within a specific IDE. The kind of stuff I was trying to do is now fairly easy with Canvas, so good riddance to Flex!

You can also try OpenLazslo

We actually looked into that but LZX seemed like too much of a hassle. Bad call?

Have fun trying to read long non-wrapping lines of code scrolling horizontally.

I mean, come ON! A plugin for freakin' word-wrap?!

Can you explain?

The Flex Builder IDE (I used 3, but I think it's propagated on to 4 as well) does not have word-wrap when editing code. There's nothing you can do in any settings dialog or menu option to be able to comfortably edit long lines of code without scrolling.

You need to install a plugin to enable this. Granted, this is a limitation of the underlying Eclipse on which it is built, but I was using Flex Builder, not Eclipse, so my beef stands.

Citations: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/451245, http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=E0D9F

Also the Flex APIs are extremely tightly bound to closed-source Flash APIs, so its really not an entity unto itself. To be fair though, it is "open" enough to allow for example IntelliJ to support Flex development in IDEA.

Really, try FlashDevelop. It works well in Wine, and there's a beta version of it that works with Mono.

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