FOSS tools for Flash development [closed]

Question

I'm looking into doing some development for Flash. Do I need to buy expensive commercial tools or are there some FOSS tools out there I can get started with? Clearly there are a lot of tools out there, but are they good enough to actually get work done? What would I be missing by avoiding the commercial or official tools?

Answer 1

If you're on Windows I really recommend the excellent Flash Develop. It's what I use daily at work as a flash developer, and I have access to both the Flex IDE and the plain Flash CS3.

FlashDevelop hooks up nicely with the Flex compiler which is available for free, it compiles both MXML (the "language" flex applications are written in) and Actionscript 3. It's a command line compiler so you can hook up any IDE you please to it.

This isn't exactly ideal for making animations, graphics and such, then you're better of with Flash CS3. But for plain coding this is way better, AND free.

Answer 2

Check out osflash.org - a community based on open source Flash development.

Answer 3

Open Dialect and Salasaga seem to be the main FOSS IDEs for this. They should both be cross-platform with mono and GTK respectively (not completely sure about OSX). I think Open Dialect also does AIR.

I've no idea how they compare to the commercial IDEs so you might have to try each of them to compare.