Thursday, February 28, 2008

What's Missing In Flex Builder 3



I have been using a beta version of the new Flex Builder 3 for a while now. I am pretty happy with the new features added to it, but there is something missing that I would really expect to be there. There is no code formatting functionality for the ActionScript 3 or MXML editors. For a $249 IDE plugin, I am amazed by this.

Reformatting your code by hand is an extremely tedious and error prone task. It also seems that with FB I am especially prone to writing badly formatted code. I did a google search for ActionScript code formatter and basically came up with very little. There is a PHP cut and paste formatter hosted on Senocular, but it isn't really usable for reformatting code in the IDE. I did learn today that IntelliJ IDEA has just added Flex functionality, including code formatting and a nice set of refactorings (Copy, Move, Safe delete, Introduce variable, Migrate). I think I will have to check it out.