Flex development workflow with free Flex SDK

My feet... are tickled by warm, sparkly water. I haven't spent the time to get them wet yet, but my appetite is certainly whetted!

I thought I'd share my workflow, since it's not clear to me whether or not the foss mxml editor is available for download at this time or not..

The tools:

• MXML Flex SDK (the command line compiler)
• EditPlus (great text editor)
• Command Line Interface (Dos Window)
  

Once Flex SDK is installed-- setting up Edit Plus to compile mxml:

1. In EP, go to Tools>>User Tools: Add Tool
2. Command (browse to mxmlc.exe)
3. Argument $(FilePath)
4. Initial directory "$(FileDir)"
   
1. note the double-quotes above.. If you're under "Program Files" and other such crummy directory names, you'll want quotes to encompass the path as a single argument
   
5. Check Capture Output

If this is your only User Tool, you can use CTRL-1 to execute compilation... if all goes well, check out the output panel at the bottom of EditPlus for progress.

The end result of compiled mxml is swf. Because you have the Flash 9 player installed (you do, don't you?), you can execute the compiled swf at the command prompt or by a dbl-click on the compiled file in explorer. I recommend the former, b/c you can do a simple Up Arrow to recall previous command, and voila, you've got your freshly compiled swf running!

If you know of a better way, please let me know. I realize this is a far cry from Flex Builder, so don't let me know that. :D

Installing the free Flex SDK and Java JDK 1.5 SDK

So I have the not-so-unique but incredibly exciting none the less experience of attending FlashForward 2006 in Austin, TX. It's incredible-- a whole crowd of folks just like me: creatives, innovators, software developers, musicians, artists.. I love it.

My interest was piqued by Flex 2 by a brilliant presentor and Flex developer Aral Balkan. I mostly appreciated that he didn't talk designer-- he spoke geek.. Real, hardcore OOP. And here's what I gathered: Flex is simply incredible. But I donna gotta no moolah, so I intend to go the cheap route: FREE Flex SDK and Edit Plus for writing MXML. We'll see how long I last like this, but I just want to get my feet wet.... that CS degree has got to be good for something :D

So I ran into a few stumbling blocks thus far, and here are my experiences and solutions:

Downloading the Free Flex SDK:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/
Click that Developer tab and select Download Flex SDK. You'll need a macromedia/adobe user/pass but registration is free (and you should already have one, right?).

Installing the Flex SDK:
http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flex/2/install.html#installingflex2sdk

Downloading the free JDK 1.5:
http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/
Find JDK 5.0 Update 8 and click Download. I then got jdk-1_5_0_08-windows-i586-p.exe, "49.52 MB"

Installing JDK was a troublesome bother for me at first. I kept getting an error talking about Invalid drive over and over! I overcame this remnant/ghost network drive by mapping my own c drive to that disconnected, phantom network drive like this: \\MyComputerName\c$ The C: drive doesn't even need to be shared for this to work.

I hope this helps somebody....