So after getting Eclipse 3.5 and Flex Builder Plugin for Windows to work last week, I dug in yesterday to get it working on my Ubuntu system. After reading an invaluable tutorial, I was still getting some odd errors where Eclispe appeared to recognize that Flex Builder was present (it was in the About Box), but I couldn’t get any MXML or AS editors to open. Poking in to the directory structure, I found that the $ECLIPSE_HOME/links/com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.link file was incorrect. It appears that Galileo requires the “path=” to be prepended to the path for the core plugin, but Adobe’s default install doesn’t include that part of the file. After adding “path=” to my link file, it fires up just fine. Still no design mode, but if we keep bugging Adobe about it, they might add it into Flash Builder 4 for Linux.
So I’m launching into a project to teach myself Mono/C#/Gnome#, and I have happened back upon the main reason why I don’t do development in those libraries and languages: The docs absolutely suck. Almost none of the tutorials I can find are written with the main standard development tool in mind (MonoDevelop), and so I fall back to the library documentation included in MonoDevelop.
The library documentation in MonoDevelop which includes such lovely pages as this.
Thanks guys. I mean, I can guess at what the strings app_id and app_version mean, but only after a few minutes of frustrating recompiles, and runtime errors I discover that the appname cannot have whitespace in it. This despite the clear violation of that rule in the Mono Handbook tutorial.
Of course, I realize these guys are Open Source developers, and as such, documentation is often the thing that suffers, but take a cue from the PHP and Perl folks. If you write good docs, they will come to your language. Then maybe you’ll have developers capable of fixing the memory leaks.