Flex Builder 2 on Eclipse 3.3
15/8/2007WARNING: FlexBuilder 2 running in Eclipse 3.3 is not supported by Adobe. Your mileage may vary, may break, may not work. If it breaks, it’s not my fault
As the warning says, officially FlexBuilder 2 is not supported on (nor, in fact, installable into) Eclipse 3.3. And this is a pity, because 3.3 has a loada lovely features, especially if you do Java development.
But… in theory Eclipse tries to perform as much backwards compatibility as possible so it *should* be possible.
Here are my steps to 3.3 nirvana:
- Download latest release of FB installer
- Download Eclipse Platform 3.2 and decompress to somewhere - referred to as [3.2 Root]
- Download Eclipse 3.3 (whatever type, Platform is the basic one) - referred to as [3.3 Root]
- Run the FB installer, ensure you choose plugin version and set the Eclipse target directory as [3.2 Root].
- Copy startup.jar from [3.2 Root] to [3.3 Root]
- Run the FB installer again, ensure you choose plugin version and set the Eclipse target directory as [3.3 Root]. Installer will fail at some point, simply ignore the error and continue.
- Open [3.2 Root] in explorer and open [3.3 Root], too
- Copy com.adobe.* from [3.2 Root]\features to [3.3 Root]\features (should be 1 folder)
- Copy com.adobe.* from [3.2 Root]\plugins to [3.3 Root]\plugins (quite a few folders and around 5 or 6 .jar files
- Remove [3.3 Root]\startup.jar
- Start Eclipse from [3.3 Root]
- Bask in the 3.3 goodness
Notes:
- If you have 3.2 with FB2 installed, skip the 3.2 installation stuff
- For teh quick win, you could try skipping the FB2 installation into 3.3. It might work… not tried it though
More warnings
Ok, confession time - it *appears* to work but there a few bugs:
- Current line highlight defaults to black. Solution: Window->Preferences, expand General->Editors, in ‘Appearance color options’ select ‘Current line highlight’ , click the color box to it’s right and choose a more pleasing colour!
- On a few Eclipse mailing lists there is mention by a member of the Adobe development team that the debugging may not work in 3.3. At first glance this doesn’t seem to be the case… fingers crossed!






