I have to say - I have never really liked Eclipse.  Its slow, hard to find the setting you want to change and very painful to configure things like debug. When I was working as a java EJB developer, I used to use Intellij - I loved it. So easy and quick to work with it. Intellij is definately faster than Eclipse - and as a result I feel much more productive. I really pleased to se the following in the new version of Intellij

 

I am working on a flex project now and needed a debugger. I tried for a day to get Flex Builder debugging a remote application (It is easy to get FlexBuilder to debug an application that you launch  - but getting it to accept a connection for a remote application, which in my case is running in my ubuntu vm - seems impossible. The best link I found on setting up FlexBuilder debugging are these freely accessable pages in this OReilly book. The command line debugger work fine - and if you are ok with using that or its a specific one off problem with a machine in a specific enviroment - the fdb command line debugger is an option.

But here are some screen grabs of Intellij 9.0 and some of the important features relating to flex and flex debugging

 

Creating a flex project

 

 

 

You need to have downloaded the flex3 sdk from the adobe site and point IntelliJ to it. You can enable Create Sample (5), html wappper(6) and a custom config file - so that you build from the command line (7)

 

 

I you want the HelloWorld example to run -  you need to do this

 

 

 

 Some important things to note in the IntelliJ 9.0 IDE

 

 

 

 

  • A, B: Tools->Flex -> Create Html Wrapper - allows you to create a html wrapper file for the swf you want to run / debug
  • C: Shows you a line break point I managed to create by clicking in the gutter
  • D:Intellij project files associated with this project
  • E: Shows the flex sdk libraries I am using

 

 The steps 1, 2, 3 allow you to create a run/ debug configuration - you will see I have used a url for the launch details of the application.

 

Now pressing the debug button in the IDE  will open your default browser and the simple Hello World flash application runs  and connects back to the IDE debug port.

 

 

 

 

 

If I click on the button in the flash application, the IDE show the line of code where the break point is set (A), a stack track of my current position in the code (B), values of variables currently in scope (C) and buttons that allow me to single step debug through the flex code(D).