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October 17, 2005

About the Different Versions of Flex Builder 2

There are 2 different ways we are making Flex Builder 2 Alpha 1 available. You can install the "Standalone" version or the "Plug-in" version. For everyone trying out Flex Builder, whether you use Eclipse or not, I would recommend starting with the Standalone version. Here's why:

The standalone packages up Eclipse, JRE (used for FB only!), the Flex Builder plugins, tutorials, samples, Flash Player 8.5 and the Flex Framework 2 SDK, which has command line compilers that you can use outside of Eclipse.

The Plug-in version is a much more minimalist affair. It's a zip file that is an Eclipse local update site that you can point Eclipse to in order to install the plug-ins. Installing Flash Player 8.5 is a separate step. And we're not making the SDK available separately.

Those are the basics. From a qualitative standpoint, the standalone verison is going to give you a great startup experience. It's has a really cool welcome page that can launch the samples or load them into FB2.

Also, please remember that this is alpha software and that we have not tested the plug-ins with every other Eclipse plug-in out there, so you're more likely to have a great experience with the standalone. For example, we've heard of incompatibilities with the Eclipse WTP, which I believe is still under development, that cause FB to not work. We weren't able to address this in time for the alpha but will fix it in a future release before final release.

After having tried the standalone, if you are an Eclipse user and want to integrate it into your copy of Eclipse, by all means do! I just want to make sure that you have the best experience when you start out!

Posted by Mark Anders at October 17, 2005 09:19 AM

Comments

just curious if there will be a standalone for mac?

Posted by: flashape at October 17, 2005 10:20 AM

There will be a version for the Mac, but it will ship after version 1.0. When we started Zorn, we did both Mac & Windows. In fact there was a bunch of Mac specific work that we had scheduled, because Eclipse is not quite as good on the Mac as on Windows.

Around the time that we made the decision to try to have a public release available for MAX, we decided to postpone the Mac until after version 1.0. Our #1 goal was to produce a good tool on at least 1 platform. Postponing the Mac version allowed us to get here with more features and higher quality.

However, our plan is to resurect the Mac build before we ship 1.0 and to get it out there as soon as we can. Having great cross platform support for developers is incredibly important to us, but it will take a bit longer than any of us would like. Thanks for the question!

Posted by: Mark Anders at October 18, 2005 12:37 AM

Is the mac version being developed for OSX on Intel?

Posted by: Mike Bedar at October 18, 2005 04:21 PM

Hi

Great to hear a Mac FlexBuilder 2 is planned.

FlexBuilder 2 is very impressive for an alpha release.
Shows great promise as an 'Eclipse Inside' product.

I don't mind evaluating Flex 2 on Windows -
but to move to it for real projects, a Mac release is essential.

All my commercial projects are Mac based, and I really don't want to have to use Windows for something as creative and cool as Flex2. It deserves better :-)

paul

Posted by: Paul Gracie at October 30, 2005 09:04 AM

Mark, thank you for the explanation. Is there any chance you will release a separate distro of the 8.5 alpha player ? PS:What did I get wrong about the FSH joke, because now I'm really lost on it ;)

Posted by: Ralph Hauwert at November 1, 2005 10:07 AM