Starting with Adobe Flex
Posted on January 30th, 2009, by Cristian in Flash, Flex, AIR
As the title say I have start to learn Flex. I’m consider myself a beginner and I will try to post my experience developing Flex applications. So let me start from the beginning ….
What is Flex?
Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. Flex is designed in order to give Flash Developers an edge when developing Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).
RIAs created with Flex can run in the browser using Flash Player or on the desktop on Adobe AIR™, the cross-operating system runtime. This enables Flex applications to run consistently across all major browsers and on the desktop. And using AIR, Flex applications can access local data and system resources on the desktop. Pretty cool!
One of the major reasons why Flex is becoming more and more popular is because it utilizes ActionScript 3.0.
What do I need to start Flex?
In order to start to develop fast Flex applications you need to download from Adobe.com website Adobe Flex Builder, which is free. Flex Builder 3 it is an Eclipse based development tool enabling intelligent coding, interactive step-through debugging, and visual design of the user interface layout, appearance, and behavior of RIAs. It includes the complete Flex framework, including compilers, a component library, and debuggers, pretty everything what you need to start to work.
What is a Flex Application?
A Flex application at it’s very basic level is a Flash .swf file embedded in a generated HTML file. Since Flex outputs it’s data as a .swf, this allows you to utilize everything that Flash Player is famous for; dynamic animations, sound and video handling, and of course, the Flash Drawing API. The HTML that Flex spits out has the necessary JavaScript code in order to detect whether the user has the Flash Player installed, or whether they need to update to the current player.
More documentation
The community for Flex developers is big. You will find most of you answers on Adobe Flex 3, if not search Google. Here are some important stating points:
[...] of my Flex beginner question was “How do I connect Flex with PHP” or any other language and pull the data [...]