Open source Flash Development
I’ve been aware of MTASC for awhile now but haven’t tried it until today.
It all started out with a search for an Eclipse plug-in for Actionscript. I chanced upon this page which contains a great tutorial for acquiring and testing out all the tools you’ll need to start compiling .swf’s.
These are the pieces you’ll need:
- Eclipse – open source IDE
- ASDT – eclipse plug-in for Actionscript development
- MTASC – open source Actionscript compiler
- Flashout – eclipse plug-in that gives you a function similar to “Test Movie” in Flash
MTASC comes with all the classes for MX and 8 (the site mentions its successor, haXE, which will support Flash Players 6-7-8 and 8.5 as well as Javascript and Server-Side scripting.)
I had a little bit of trouble working with Flashout on my Mac running OS X Tiger. When I was trying to configure Flashout in the Eclipse preferences I kept getting an error message saying that it couldn’t find the FlashoutMTASCPreferences class. It turns out that Flashout requires Java 1.5 which doesn’t come with Tiger. This page gives you the fix. Essentially you have to download Java 1.5 from Apple’s site and then you need to point the CurrentJDK folder to the 1.5 folder.
