This is a nice open source tool from Adobe for reviewing and optimising your code. Although the set-up is a bit fiddly, I installed it on FDT without any issue.

To run the plug-in you simply select ‘Run PMD’ and a list of warnings is generated. Examples include ‘HeavyContructor’, ‘TooManyFunction’ and ‘UnusedParameter’. You can click on the classes listed to highlight the source of the suspect code and decide what action, if any, to take. Very similar in function to the way FDT handles ActionScript errors and warnings

Any standards/optimisation junkies out there will find this very useful. Granted you will no doubt end up ignoring many of the ‘violations’ highlighted, but it’s great when it does spot something you’re grateful to discover and happy to amend.

Click here to get started

The first thing I did as a developer this year was to install a trial of FDT; the result of my ongoing frustration with Flex Builder and the persuasion of a swathe of developers I’ve worked with recently.

A week in and I must say I’m mightily impressed. The whole application is really responsive, much more so than Flex Builder, and some of the code generation tools are invaluable. For example I love that after adding an event listener the event handling method is automatically created with a couple of key presses.

Being Eclipse-based, overall FDT is very similar to Flex Builder. This made it exceptionally easy to make the transition and start exploring. I haven’t figured everything out yet, but have already used it to make a small widget and develop a prototype for an upcoming project for Diesel. It definitely feels like I’ll be sticking with FDT for the foreseeable future.