I was working with Flex Builder for a long time and recently decided to try FDT (Development Tool for Flash). I’ll review features new for me and features missing from Flex perspective. This comparison will focus the differences and only for pure Actionscipt 3 coding (no MXML).
| Feature | Flex Builder 3 |
FDT 3 |
| Debugging |
||
| Displaying xml structure in Debugger panel |  |
 |
| Ability to highlight changed variable value |  |
No |
| Displaying private class members in Debugger panel | No | Yes |
| Coding & Refactoring | ||
| Code templates | No | Yes |
| Advanced code formatter | No | Yes |
| Ability to compile project with errors | No | Yes |
| Hinting language key words | No | Yes |
| Ability to add new method, by typing it’s name on object instance | No | Yes |
| Change package name when moving classes between packages | No | Yes |
| Hinting package path (crtl+space to fill full package path) | Yes | No |
| Unused import management | Remove unused imports | High light as warning |
| Automatic imports, comments flooding | No | Yes |
| Validate embed resources (path, internal symbols) | When project is saved (better) | When project is compiled |
| Advanced syntax checking | No | Yes |
| Syntax checking | on save | on t he fly |
| Replace Phrase in whole project | No | Yes |
| Ability to run application in standalone debug player | Yes | Yes |
| Create constructor when creating new class | Always | Only if class extends another class |
| Displaying package structure |  |
 |
| General | ||
| Profiler | Yes | No |
| Stability | Unstable – I can’t even say how many times I got ‘internal build error’ and have to restart Flex. | Very stable |
| Speed | FDT is a little bit slower (ex. It takes a little bit longer to display list of variables in debugger panel, etc.) | |
As we can see above each application have it’s own cons and pros. Both of them have nice unique features. Definitely the best choice would be just to mix of both. At the moment FDT is my choose, mainly because of templates support and stability although I regret it cannot display xml data in debugger view the way Flex does.
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