Installing Subclipse in Eclipse and Flex Builder 3

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I’ve recently been doing a lot of development of Flex and AIR applications, using Adobe’s Flex Builder IDE. For right now, I’ve been downloading the beta builds of Flex Builder 3, and we’re using it for several development projects.

Flex Builder 3 is based on the Eclipse IDE, and the beta comes as a complete bundle of Eclipse and the Flex Builder plug-ins. One of the things that has bothered me recently is that, although Eclipse includes Concurrent Versions System (CVS) support in the base package, there is no included support for Subversion (SVN). Both CVS and SVN are popular systems for groups of developers to keep track of source code of their projects. CVS has been around for decades, SVN is a newer solution with a lot of valuable enhancements. Luckily, there is an Eclipse module to add SVN capabilities … it’s called Subclipse.

If you visit the Subclipse website, you’ll see they have a great page that walks through the steps for installing Subclipse … except that in many cases – and ALL of mine – it simply does not work. The installation they outline makes a huge, gross assumption … that you have installed the Java development libraries and tools. I haven’t.

I ended up searching around on Google, and found the answer! And it works great! It turns out that Adobe has had this reported to them as a bug … and I have to agree that they ought to be bundling SVN support in Flex Builder 3! In the mean time, you can read through the Flex Builder 3 / SVN bug report … and the specific comment that outlines the solution … or you can follow the instructions below:

  1. Go to the menu: Help -> Software updates -> Find and install.
  2. Select search for new features to install.
  3. Check the Europa discovery site and the SubEclipse update site.
  4. NOTE:  add the Subclipse site via ‘New Remote Site’ if it isn’t present http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.2.x/
  5. Click Finish.
  6. Check Subclipse.
  7. Under the Europa discovery site open “Java Development” and check “Eclipse Java Development Tools”.  This is the key component that you need!
  8. Click Next and complete the wizard.

The wizard should download the necessary components and install everything correctly.  If you then look at the Perspectives in the upper right of the Flex Builder window, you can now open the “SVN Repository Exploring” perspective and begin using Subclipse!

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