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).

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