Enabling Powerflasher FDT 4.1 to access Flex Mobile SDKs
Powerflasher FDT is an increasingly popular development environment for authoring projects for the Flash Platform. FDT 4 comes equipped with everything you'd expect to begin developing ActionScript and Flex applications, but FDT 4.1 and below do not support any mobile workflow or ship with the mobile-enabled Flex SDK.
How to do it…
There are only a few steps to getting Powerflasher FDT 4 configured for Android development:
- Visit the Adobe Open Source website at http://opensource.adobe.com/ and locate the latest build of the Flex SDK.
- Download a
ZIPfile of the latest Adobe Flex SDK and extract it to a hard drive to a location you will remember. For instance,C:\SDKs\Flex. - Launch FDT and go to Window | Preferences.
- Scroll down the FDT menu item and select Installed SDKs. You will now see a list of each of the SDKs currently available in your copy of FD:
- Click on the button labeled Add and browse to the location of the Flex SDK you recently downloaded.
- Provide the dialog with a meaningful name and click OK. For example,
Flex 4.5:
- The
Flex 4.5SDK will now be available for use in your application. To use it in a project, simply select this SDK when creating a new project or when modifying the Flex Compiler properties in an existing project:
How it works…
Powerflasher FDT 4 is an Eclipse-based IDE (just like Flash Builder) and employs many of the same methods of extending the application and adding SDK packages. Using a more recent version of the Flex SDK within FDT allows us access to the mobile theming options and other specific APIs not available in previous SDK releases.
See also…
It is important to note that versions of Flash Builder prior to Flash Builder 4.5 will not include the ability to compile projects to .APK (the Android application file extension) and you will need to compile your project using the freely available AIR SDK. See Chapter 11 for information on how to do this.
It is also worth a mention that while you can develop your applications for Android using older versions of Flash Builder, you will not receive many of the benefits provided by a newer release, such as code completion.