Adobe Flash Builder

What do you like best?

- Made by Adobe, the same company behind Adobe Flash, Air, ActionScript and related technologies, so you get the best integration experience

- Full-featured IDE built on top of Eclipse

- Easy refactoring (i. e. renaming methods and classes project-wide)

- Allows code templates to automate the boring and repetitive tasks

- Great for writing AS3 libraries

- Can deploy mobile apps to devices

- Provides a visual editor for Adobe Flex

What do you dislike?

- It is propietary software, an there is no Community Edition, unlike with other similar vendors (i.e. IntelliJ Idea CE with ActionScript plugin).

- Very outdated. Development stopped at version 4.7.

- No Linux support, it only works in Windows and Mac.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Bear in mind Flash technology has been dying for the last decade. Adobe wont work on updates for the AIR SDK since 2020 (Harman (https://airsdk.harman.com/) will). You might want to evaluate alternatives, like FlashDevelop (https://www.flashdevelop.org) or IntelliJ Idea's ActionScript plugin (https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/preparing-for-actionscript-flex-or-air-application-development.html). See Flash Builder's end of extended support in December 2019 at Adobe's EOL matrix https://helpx.adobe.com/support/programs/eol-matrix.html.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I used it mainly for multimedia programming, like videogame development, offline learning content, and advertising.I used it mainly for multimedia programming, like videogame development, offline learning content, and advertising. It was particularly useful for navigating mid-sized projects with a lot of AS3 classes, running tests with ASUnit. Also, it helped me a lot while developing shared libraries for similar projects, and generating the .swc files.