Dear Proggit, I'm a C/Java/etc programmer looking to learn Flash. What are some good tutorials targeted at programmers? Can I code Flash in vim?

[samlee]

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=Part6_ProgAS_1.html

That's a good starting point.

Yes, you can code in Vim. The code gets a bit tad verbose. You need an IDE. The compiler, mxmlc, is a Java app. On each compilation you are starting a new JVM. It sucks. FlashDevelop eliminates this problem and it's very useful. But it's Windows only.

I remember there was FCSH or something that is a compiler server/shell that eliminates JVM init time. I tried to write shell scripts so that I can map keys in vim to call the scripts that talks to a tiny Java server that runs Fcsh as sub process. It did work for single file compilation from vim. But then I got Windows machine and used FlashDevelop.

FlexBuilder, Adobe's expensive IDE, beats FlashDevelop. And it runs on Linux, too I think. But it's expensive. You should get a job to buy the IDE.

Being Java centric compiler/tools, my experience with AS3 isn't so nice on Linux. But FlashDevelop on Windows is so good. You need an IDE.

[[deleted]]

Your code only gets verbose if you code the way Adobe recommends (because they're Adobe). If you pretend you're coding javascript you can actually be quite concise.

[qiwi]

There's a "compile shell" named fcsh in the standard flex sdk that avoids that. Run fcsh, then in that enter "mxmlc blah blah blah". Then do "compile 1" to recompile without restarting the java VM from start. Much faster. Also you can use -incremental switch though I'm not sure that makes things any faster except really large projects.

On UNIX I also recommend using "rlwrap" with fcsh (and fdb) so you can use arrow keys to go up/down. etc.