Adobe Flex

Draft

Definition

“Adobe Flex is a software development kit and an IDE for a group of technologies initially released in March of 2004 by Macromedia to support the development and deployment of cross platform, rich Internet applications based on their proprietary Macromedia Flash platform.”" (Wikipedia, retrieved 15:49, 6 September 2007 (MEST)).

In April 2007, Adobe announced that the Flex SDK would be released open source. A visual programming environment was provided in the form of the Flex Builder, that was to remain proprietary and commercial.

In October 2007, a press release announced that not only the price of Flex Builder was to be dramatically reduced for developers but, even better, it was to be offered for free to students and educators.

“By making it easier for educational institutions to adopt Flex 2, we are ensuring that students and researchers are better equipped to harness the power of Web 2.0 and RIAs”, said Peter Isaacson, vice president of education marketing at Adobe. (Adobe Press release at Reuteurs, retrieved 19:03, 27 October 2007 (MEST)).

Installing the Flex Framework

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Writing Flex Applications

Flex can appear a bit tricky to install for a largely non technical person. Once the framework installed, it is very easy to start writing Flex applications.

The starting point is the wirting of a mxml document. This is a text file that contains a combination of xml elements and optionally actionscript instructions.

A basic mxml document would look something like this:

file myFirstApplication.mxml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<mx:Application 
    xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" 
    horizontalAlign="center" verticalAlign="middle" 
    width="300" height="160" 
>
    <mx:Panel 
        paddingTop="10" paddingBottom="10" paddingLeft="10" paddingRight="10"
        title="My First Application"  
    >

        <mx:Label text="Hello World!" fontWeight="bold" fontSize="24"/>
    </mx:Panel>
</mx:Application>

Put the text above in a text file. Save the text file as "myFirstApplication.mxml". Assuming the Flex framework is properly installed, in the terminal, type

mxmlc myFirstApplication.mxml

Information appears on the screen and about half a second later, if all is well, you get informed that a file "myFirstApplication.swf" has been produced. Open this file in a flash player or in a web browser.

Flash 9 needs to be installed to view SWF files produced by Flex.

This is part of the Flash series of articles. But it is not a tutorial !! See also: Flash ActionScript 3 overview

Links

Adobe tutorials

• Creating Flex components
• MXML and ActionScript (Series of tutorials)

Other

• Creating Flex Components by Bruce Eckel (the person who wrote what is probably the best Java book)

• PHP and Adobe Flex, by Daniel Williams, Php Builder, 2007.

• Flex for PHP Developers

• Flexexamples.com Peter deHaan's blog (He works in the Flex team at Adobe)