A little stupid.

So, great idea, install Subversion on my web server. We have subversion running on Media Temple at work and it runs well. First thing, check out what Media Temple say about Subversion on there servers, here.

Media Temples step by step tutorial seemed pretty straight forward. But was not quite working… by not quite working I mean unable to connect from any Subversion client (I was using Subclipse and also Tortoise on my Parallels XP machine).

So I asked Google. Google came back with some very helpful links. The best being from Kieth Peters (Bit 101). Kieth’s post exposes a few points that are key in getting subversion up and running on Media Temples Grid Server.

So yes… This post is just a big massive glorified link to Kieth’s post. Check the comments out, as there are a few good points there also. One of the best things to take from the comments on Kieth’s post is:

svn+ssh://<your-domain-name>/home/<your-mediatemple-server-id>/data/svn/<your-reponame>

The above will get you connected in Eclipse/Subclipse, where it says <your-mediatemple-server-id> this is without the letter s. From there you can setup your preferred subversion structure.

The main reason that I am working with FDT is because I’m back on a Mac and whilst working  @ Frost* Design a few of the existing projects there were setup in Eclipse / FDT. After working on these existing projects so far FDT seems to be the best solution for Flash development on Mac OS X.

The main things that I like about Eclipse / FDT are:

• Cross Platform! If I have to use winblows I can fairly seamlessly.
• swc assets, the swc workflow in FDT is pretty cool. This guy has a nice little tutorial covering a simple swc workflow.
• Navigating code within FDT, command clicking on a variable takes you up to that definition and then from there you can go in to that Class / Class generated from a swc, this has really helped when working with third party libraries, namely Papervision3D, so easy to have a quick read of the code that you are working with.
• Integrated version control with subclipse, don’t really want to have extra app open to handle this, however Versions is nice .
• Code formatting, you can define quite a few parameters (Preferences / FDT / Code Style / Formatter) and then just hit Command + Shift + F.
• Compiling, I don’t have to have Flash open to compile, and its quick.
• Debugging, the debugger (apparently the same as JDT and Flex Builder) in Eclipse / FDT  helped me solve some pretty nightmare problems in a recent project fairly quickly. This is an FDT Enterprise only feature.

Those are just what I can think of right now. Also Eclipse is very customisable.

Back to the actual work flow… Setup graphics in Flash, give MovieClips Class definitions, compile as a swc, add the swc to FDT’s Class path and you are ready to start using these elements. You just import these as Classes and you get all the great code completion that FDT offers, i.e. if you have a button that is a custom Class all of the available methods of that Class will show up.

It really is that straight forward. As I mentioned earlier there are some really good articles around outling this kind of work flow, here, here and some general FDT tip’s at blog.flashmech.net under the FDT category.

package {
 
	/**
	 * @author shaun
	 */
	public class Test {
 
		public function Test () : void {
 
		}
 
		private function foo () : void {
 
		}
 
	}
 
}

And some more copy.