Adoble Flex - introduction notes

      In my first post I've spoken about some of the differences between Html and Flash. I am going to spend some time presenting to those of you who have not heard about the Flex product, some of the capabilities of the Flex 2.
      The Flex products line provides with the next generation of Developers Tool to build and deploy RIAs (Rich Internet Applications)on the Flash platform. Flex is an umbrella term for all the technologies of the Flex Product line that help developers to be extremely productive in RI Applications development. Flex allows you to create expressive content with effective interfaces, and deploy applications threw a well distributed, high performance cross-platform, cross-browsers run time environment.
      The Flex product line contains:
      *Adobe Flex Builder 2
      *Adobe Flex SDK
      *Adobe Flex Data Services 2
      *Adobe Flex Charting 2
      Adobe Flex Builder 2 is a completely new integrated development environment also known as an IDE for the Flex Framework 2, which provides coding, debugging and design tools and takes advantage of the industry leading Eclipse Tool Framework. Flex Builder 2 can install as a Standalone product, or add functionality to an existing Eclipse 3.1 installation.


It can also be used alone to develop and deploy Flex applications or can be used in conjunction with Flex Data Services. Flex Builder has a built-in compiler to create swf files from MXML and Action Script code.
      The Adobe Flex SDK provides a skeleton of the application that developers can use to extend the Flex framework which consists of prebuilt components, and these prebuilt components can be extended, or developers can build their own components from scratch.

      A highly comprehensive component framework is included within the SDK to help facilitate this. There is also a rich class library based on Action Script 3 that embodies best practices for building RIAs. The Flex SDK also contains and XML based language called MXML that provides a great way to build and layout applications as well as an the scripting language called Action Scipt 3. A compiler is also included in the Flex SDK creating swf files from your MXML and Action Script 3.

      In order to start a Flex application, the web browser will request a swf file, which is then downloaded to the client. The developers able to compile a swf file by laying out their application in the MXML language and using Action Script 3 for any logic. Action Script 3 is a class-based language that is as close to Java as you can get without actually being Java. Once the compiled swf is downloaded to the client, the swf itself can then request additional resources from the server using either Http, Soap or an Adoble protocol known as The Action Messaging Format(AMF).
      The Adobe Flex Data Services 2 add enterprise messaging support and greatly enhanced data services architecture the Flex SDK. Data services also gives you the ability to share data among multiple clients and offer support for client to client data communication. You can also push data out of the Flex Client using Data Services which gives you the ability to create sophisticated applications that displays real-time data such as sports or stock data. Flex messaging allows whole new categories of applications like data push and collaborations based applications to be delivered to the browsers in a reliable and scalable way.
      The foundation of the Rich Internet Application is the Flash Player or the Flash Virtual Machine. Flash Player 9 has been for Flex and is the backbone of the Flash platform. Of course Flash player 9 is fully backwards compatible with all of the other versions of Flash player as well. Flash Player 9 supports Action Script 3 which is a completed object pointed scripting programming language. It is a new optimized Action Script Virtual machine(AVM2) uset to execute the new Action Script new code which is significantly faster than the earlier versions. It has full run time error reporting, unlike earlier versions that were failing. There is industry standard debugging that contain stronger compile-time checking and mini new elements have been added including E4X which treats XML as a native data type, regular expressions and a brand new event model based on W3CDom events standard.
      My conclusion is that if you consider moving on and leaving HTML behind, it worth's a lot looking at this program, especially if you want to develop a rich Internet application like an e-commerce website or a website that highly interacts with the users. It has great features included and i will detail some of them on my next posts. If you also like to you can visit the Adobe website for more details.