The Flex Builder workbench is a full-featured development environment that is tailored to assist you in developing Adobe Flex, AIR™, and ActionScript applications. Flex Builder is built on Eclipse, an open-source IDE. Flex Builder is a collection of Eclipse plug-ins that let you create Flex and ActionScript 3.0 applications. Much of the basic functionality of the Flex Builder IDE comes from Eclipse. For example, managing, searching, and navigating resources are core features. The Flex Builder plug-ins add the features and functionality needed to create Flex and ActionScript 3.0 applications, and they modify the IDE user interface and some core functionality to support those tasks.

The information you need to use Flex Builder is contained in the Flex Builder documentation. Unless you are using other Eclipse plug-ins (such as CVS or Java) with Flex Builder, or you want to extend the Flex Builder plug-ins (see Extending the Flex Builder workbench), you do not need to be concerned with the underlying Eclipse framework.

Workbench The term workbench refers to the Flex Builder development environment. The workbench contains three primary elements: perspectives, editors, and views. You use all three in various combinations at various points in the application development process. The workbench is the container for all of the development tools you use to develop applications. You might equate it to Microsoft Visual Studio, which provides a framework and core functionality for a variety of development tools.

Perspective A perspective is a group of views and editors in the workbench. Essentially it is a special work environment that helps you accomplish a specific type of task. For example, Flex Builder contains two perspectives. The Flex Development perspective is used for developing applications, and the Flex Debugging perspective is used when debugging your applications. Flex Builder Professional also contains the Flex Profiling perspective.

If you use the Flex Builder plug-in configuration (see Flex Builder configurations), your workbench might contain additional perspectives such as a Java perspective that contains editors and views used to develop Java applications.

For more information about perspectives, see About Flex Builder perspectives.

Editor An editor allows you to edit various file types. The editors available to you depend on the number and type of Eclipse plug-ins installed. Flex Builder contains editors for writing MXML, ActionScript 3.0, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) code. For more information about Flex Builder code editing, see About code editing in Flex Builder.

Views A view typically supports an editor. For example, when editing MXML, the Components and Flex Properties views are also displayed in the Flex Development perspective. These views support the development of Flex applications and are therefore displayed when a MXML file is opened for editing.

Some views support the core functionality of the workbench itself. For example, the Flex Navigator view allows you to manage files and folders within the workbench and the Tasks view displays all of the tasks that are either automatically generated by the workbench or added manually.

The term view is synonymous with the term panel as it is used in earlier versions of Flex Builder, Dreamweaver®, and other Adobe development tools.

Workspace Not to be confused with workbench, a workspace is a defined area of the file system that contains the resources (files and folders) that make up your application projects. You can work with only one workspace at a time; however, you can select a different workspace each time you start Flex Builder. For more information, see Managing projects.

Resource The term resource is used generically to refer to the files and folders within the projects in a workspace. For more information, see Creating folders and files in a project.

Project All of the resources that make up your applications are contained within projects. You cannot build an application in Flex Builder without first creating a project. You can create three types of projects in Flex Builder: Flex, ActionScript 3.0, and Library projects. For more information, see Working with Projects.

Launch configuration A launch configuration is created for each of your projects, and it defines project settings that are used when running and debugging your applications. For example, the names and locations of the compiled application SWF files are contained in the launch configuration, and you can modify these settings. For more information, see Running your applications.