sourcemate is a Flash Builder plug-in which brings in some of the features this IDE has always been lacking, i.e. code generation, refactoring, code templates (i.e. snippets), metadata tag support, and more. It’s $79 and that’s probably the best spent money if your serious about programming in Flash Builder. Together with Flex Formatter we now finally have a full-fledged coding environment available for Flash Builder. Alternatives always included FDT and IntelliJ IDEA (which is by far the best value for money), but I’m happy to see those features brought to Adobe’s IDE (albeit not by Adobe themselves).

It wasn’t until recently that I found out about very useful capability of Eclipse, i.e. filtering what goes into Errors window. This is especially useful when working with multiple 3rd party libraries. You need to add them to a class path in order to get code compilation, but the drawback is the fact that your Errors list gets polluted with all the errors found in those external libraries. Usually, you’re not really interested in it, you’d just like to see the ones relevant to you — in classes that you wrote.

Below is a quick guide how to filter the error list in Eclipse.

Click the little triangle in the top-right corner and choose “Configure Filters…”.

Select “On working set: “.

Now you need to create a working set of files you want to display errors for.

And that’s it!

Having code conventions is important, especially working in a team. It improves your experience while reading somebody else’s code and vice versa.

Formatting is just one aspect of code conventions, but an important one. Sadly Flash Builder doesn’t give you much control over how the code is formatted. Thankfully, there is a brilliant third-party plug-in that adds this ability.

You can grab Flex Formatter from sourceforge or just add the update site to Eclipse: http://flexformatter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/FlexFormatter/FlexPrettyPrintCommandUpdateSite