Searching for tools on the internet always has an interesting way of throwing up a whole gang of new interesting tools and never used before utilities. I was on the lookout for a UML tool and arrived at a Wikipedia page that listed a whole gang of UML tools. Having poked around a bit I found the java IDE NetBeans on the list. 'Weeel,'I said to myself, 'NetBeans as a UML tool is interesting. Anyroad you cannot go too wrong with Sun'. My experience with Sun systems (especially with a Linux rig)have been very pleasant so I went ahead, installed NetBeans and also installed the UML plugin (simply called UML in the plugin list). I'm very happy with the tool's output so far. It gives quite reasonable satisfaction. So that went well.
I was however quite taken by the interface and layout of NetBeans that I immediately wondered ' if this would work with the Flex SDK?'. A little more time wasting online and there it was, FlexBeans, a NetBeans plugin for Flex development. I set it up and quickly created a test project. It felt quite nice. Compiling felt good too, it has more of a FlashDevelop feel to it than Eclipse/FlexBuilder. However, it is in no way as sophisticated as FlexBuilder or Flashdevelop in its project development options. For the moment it only seems to offer the ability to develop a Flex application or a Flex compoment. NO pure actionscript project which is a shame. I hope that such an option will be added soon. It also does not seem to have an html or standalone preview option- except I missed something. Still I must confess I like the feel of it and now feel I have another option for MXML/Actionscript development in Ubuntu. Try it for yourself, you might like it.