Third-Party Tools & Solutions

This page gives a list of third party tools and solutions related to Apache Flex®.

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

Adobe® Flash® Builder® 4.7 is a development environment for building games and applications using the ActionScript® language and the open source Flex framework. Flash Builder Premium includes professional testing tools such as profilers, network monitoring, and unit testing support.
FlashDevelop is a free and open source code editor for every developer. FlashDevelop offers first class support for ActionScript (2 & 3) and haXe development. Great completion & code generation, projects compilation & debugging, plenty of project templates, SWF/SWC exploration etc. FlashDevelop is also a great web developer IDE with source-control support (svn, git, mercurial), tasks/todo, snippets, XML/HTML completion and zen-coding for HTML.
FDT is a flexible development toolkit in Eclipse for interactive developers. It's made with passion for expert Flash and Flex coding, innovative mobile development and versatile HTML5 / JavaScript / WebGL / PHP programming with haXe. Create your applications in FDT and efficiently target multiple platforms.
IntelliJ IDEA is ideal for ActionScript, MXML and CSS development, with on-the-fly code analysis, completion, navigation, advanced refactorings, code generation, UML diagrams, UI designer, interactive debugger and profiler.
An extension pack for Visual Studio Code that adds support for ActionScript 3.0 and MXML development for Apache Flex, Apache Royale, the Feathers SDK, Starling Framework, and more. Includes a SWF debugging extension that works with Adobe AIR and the standalone Flash Player projector.

Flex Frameworks

Cairngorm provides a reference architecture for Flex applications that is designed to keep things simple and testable. It describes a way of structuring large applications out of smaller units. It is independent of an IoC framework implementation, but dependent on core principles to follow when developing enterprise RIAs.
Mate is a tag-based, event-driven Flex framework. Flex applications are event-driven. Mate framework has been created to make it easy to handle the events your Flex application creates. Mate allows you to define who is handling those events, whether data needs to be retrieved from the server, or other events need to be triggered. In addition, Mate provides a mechanism for dependency injection to make it easy for the different parts of your application to get the data and objects they need.
Parsley is an open-source application framework for Flex/Flash/AIR applications written in AS3. Parsley features a flexible IOC container, dependency injection, decoupled bindings, messaging framework, managed commands, dynamic view wiring, advanced modularity, object lifecycle, localization, extensibility and more.
PureMVC is a lightweight framework for creating applications based upon the classic Model, View and Controller concept. Based upon proven design patterns, this free, open source framework which was originally implemented in the ActionScript 3 language for use with Adobe Flex, Flash and AIR, is now being ported to all major development platforms.
Fabrication is a utility for the PureMVC framework. It adds many useful features to typical PureMVC programming syntax that helps accelerate development. Fabrication is focussed on the Flex and Flash implementations of the PureMVC framework. Also Fabrication is built largely to support multi-modular application and uses only the multicore version of PureMVC.
Robotlegs is an ActionScript Application Framework. It offers: Dependency, Module, Command and View management.
Spring ActionScript is an offshoot of the Java-based Spring Framework written in ActionScript 3. It is targeted for the Flash, Flex and AIR platforms. The framework contains a versatile Inversion of Control Container, a micro MVC library and extensions for the Cairngorm and PureMVC frameworks.
Swiz is a brutally simple micro-architecture for creating Rich Internet Applications with ActionScript 3 and Adobe Flex.
Tide is a Flex client framework inspired by popular Java frameworks such as Spring or CDI and is based on the concepts of contextual components and event-based programming. It should look familiar to Java developers yet stays close to the Flex framework concepts and traditional usage.

Server Solutions

Amfphp is free and open source software, and an essential brick for the development of Applications that need to communicate with the Internet. Amfphp is used in projects that cover a wide spectrum, from games to business applications. The role of Amfphp is to provide a really simple way of connecting a client with a server.
BlazeDS is the server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Adobe® Flex® and Adobe AIR® applications for more responsive rich Internet application (RIA) experiences.
FluorineFx is the free and open source Flash/Flex remoting gateway, high-performance, scalable framework, streaming server that connects RIAs using Adobe software (Adobe Flash®, Adobe Flex®, Adobe AIR® runtime) and Microsoft .NET®.
GraniteDS brings the power of your Java EE server to the Flex side. An easy to use client-side API helps you leveraging advanced features such as authentication and secured access, dependency injection, typesafe remote calls, real-time messaging, data lazy-loading and synchronization, ActionScript3 code generation, bean validation, etc.
Adobe® LiveCycle® Enterprise Suite 4 is an enterprise document and form platform that helps you capture and process information, deliver personalized communications, and protect and track sensitive information. LiveCycle ES4 extends business processes to your mobile workforce and clients, increasing productivity while broadening service access to any user equipped with a desktop, smartphone, or tablet.
Red5 Media Server 1.0 delivers a powerful video streaming and multi-user solution to the Adobe® Flash® Player® and other exciting client technologies. Based on Java and some of the most powerful open source frameworks, Red5 stands as a solid solution for business of all sizes including the enterprise.
RubyAMF is a full-featured AMF gateway based off of Rack and supporting advanced integration with Rails and other Rack-based frameworks. It includes advanced class mapping functionality, like camel to underscore case translation, parameter mapping to convert function calls to parameter hashes for actions, hooks for processing AMF authentication credentials, and many more features.
Using WebORB, you will be able to easily integrate, test and optimize your desktop, web and mobile applications connecting to Java, .NET, and PHP backends.

Code Generation Tools

Gas3 replicates your entire JPA data model into its ActionScript3 equivalent, with support of transparent lazy-loading and bean validation. It also generates type-safe AS3 classes mirroring your Java EE services (Spring, EJB, CDI). Gas3 is available as an Eclipse plugin (on-the-fly code generation), an Apache Ant task or an Apache Maven plugin with flex-mojos.
Automatic source generation of AS3 service interfaces and proxies with Cinnamons Ant task.

Build Tools

Flexmojos provides first-class support for Flex and AIR development within Apache Maven. It allows Maven to compile, optimize, and test Flex SWF, Flex SWC, Air SWF and Air SWC.
GradleFx is a Gradle plugin for building Flex and Actionscript applications. It provides a set of useful tasks that will make building your project a breeze. All the build logic is encapsulated by the plugin and all you need to do is some configuration.

Testing Tools

HP LoadRunner is the industry standard for application performance testing. The load testing tool helps you prevent issues by detecting bottlenecks and to obtain an accurate picture of end-to-end system performance before going live. Extremely flexible for organizations and projects of all sizes, LoadRunner software testing tool enables you to test a range of applications including mobile, Ajax, Flex, HTML 5, .NET, Java, GWT, Silverlight, SOAP, Citrix, ERP and legacy.
NeoLoad is a load testing software solution designed for web and mobile applications to realistically simulate user activity and monitor infrastructure behavior.
IBM® Rational® Performance Tester is a performance testing solution that validates the scalability of web and server applications. Rational Performance Tester identifies the presence and cause of system performance bottlenecks and reduces load testing complexity.

Component Libraries

Flexicious provides custom components for Flex and Air developers. Our products include Flexicious Classic, Advanced and Spark, which are extensions to the Flex SDK DataGrid, AdvancedDataGrid and Spark DataGrid components, as well as Flexicious Ultimate DataGrid and Flexicious Data Visualization & Dashboard Framework which includes Portal, Charts, Gauges, TreeMaps, Calendar/Scheduler and more.