Adobe Flash Builder

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This page is part of the Flex tutorials.

Introduction

Adobe Flex Builder is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for developing flex/actionscript/flash applications.

See also: MXML (for a short intro to MXML, the layout language), Actionscript 3 (entry point for pure AS tutorials) and Flash ActionScript 3 overview (the Flash AS equivalent).

The various freely available online documentation for Flex Builder is very good (much better than for the CS3 tool I believe). Therefore we won't (for the moment) make this a real tutorial.

Using Flex Builder

Step 1 - Create a new Project.

Like most IDEs you can't just edit a little file, but you need to define a new project: File->New; Flex project.

• We called our project "testing"

Step 2 alternative A - Add some *.mxml code.

Just copy and paste some code. E.g. get some code from the Flex datagrid component tutorial.

You should see something like this, i.e. the MXML code in "source mode".

Adobe Flex Builder 3 - Some mxml code

Step 2 alternative B - Drag a component to the stage

Click on the Design TAB and drag the component to the stage (.e.g. a label on top and a datagrid below) You should see a components selector to the left and something like in the picture below (after editing the code in "source mode").

Adobe Flex Builder 3 - Design view

Step 3 - Run / Compile

Click on the green arrow or use the "run" menu

Links

Documentation

Flex Builder

• Using Adobe Flex Builder 3 (HTML LiveDocs) - PDF version (233 pages).

General

• See the Flash and AS3 links - documentation for some links
• Explore Adobe's Flex DevNet
• Adobe Flex resources

Software

Flex Builder

• You can testdrive it for 30 days (download)
• Educators and students can get a serial number for free use by filling in a form

Alternatives

• Flashdevelop. Free and open source tool that provides syntax support and an interface with the Flex compilers.