haXe IDE Choices for Mac OS X

In my short time spent working with haXe, NME and Jeash I have used a few code IDEs. Initially, I upgraded my FDT to version 5 which is touted as having good haXe support…. not so. The haXe support in FDT5 is very poor at present. I am sure it will get better and come into line with what is usually an awesome product (and one I have used happily for years now).

The next IDE I tried was Sublime Text 2 (see image above). There is a Beta release you can try out for free. The haXe support is pretty good and there are lots of nice touches to the IDE. In particular I loved the scrolling panel on the right. I now miss this whenever I am using another IDE. It has some code completion and you can compile in the IDE itself if you want to.

However, in the last week or two I have settled on the new haXe plugin for IntelliJ IDEA (see image above). This was actually my Actionscript IDE of choice and so I have been excitedly waiting for the haXe plugin support to arrive. It is now on version 0.2.1 and the latest release features the following:-

• Type resolving improvements
• Documentation support
• New color settings
• Jump to declaration of local, std symbol or class
• Reference and Class completion

The Jetbrains guys make great IDEs – checkout Webstorm for Javascript coding – and the haXe plugin is definitely a step in the right direction for IDEA. So for me, this is my haXe IDE of choice…..

Whitespace and haxe.xml.Fast

I have been excitedly delving into the world of haXe, NME and Jeash over the last month or so. One item that just caught me out was this:-

Don’t have any whitespace either side of your CDATA tags in XML. It will mess up the Fast parsing (at least for the html5 target). If I find a workaround I’ll post it up here….

Bad:-

<title>
<![CDATA[New ideas]]>
</title>

Good:-

<title><![CDATA[New ideas]]></title>