OK, so Macromedia announced a few weeks ago that they would be opening up the alpha of the next version of Flex to the public so we can all see what’s going on. So is Flex Builder 2 better, worse or about the same? Well from my perspective FB2a is a great improvement over FB1, and we haven’t even mentioned ActionScript 3 yet.

Flex Builder 1, codename Brady, was and still is a sort of a hacked version of Dreamweaver, (does anyone remember Dreamweaver UltraDev :P), and to this point it does seem to have an awful lot of cross over functionality - so if you have both installed it can seem like you’ve doubled up.

Flex Builder 2, codename Zorn, is built on the eclipse IDE and currently comes in two variants:

A standalone IDE version - which has eclipse ‘wrapped’ inside of itself.
A plugin version for those of you who already have eclipse installed.

If you are thinking of using / testing Flex 2 head over to Macromedia’s Labs and grab a copy

License

This work is published under a CC-GNU LGPL.