Bruno Silva

How to Develop with Adobe Flex/Air?

The current Flex version in the streets is Adobe Flex 2. Adobe Flex 3 is almost out, though. In Flex Camp they talked about Adobe Flex 3. But the brochure that was given to the audience talked about version 2.

There is a beta version of the Flex SDK on Adobe Labs. Altough you can do a terrific job programming Flex applications using notepad, maybe it is not such a good idea. Al least concerning to productivity.

Flex Buider is the IDE meant to help developers while programming in Flex. It is based in Eclipse, so It is familiar to many developers. I was glad to know that Adobe gives free licenses on Flex Builder to educational purposes. So, students and teachers, go for it!

While working with Flex you will need to program in ActionScript 3.0. From what I’ve heard it is pretty nice, since it is objected-oriented. Now you can develop using your favorite best-practices and design patterns based on this paradigm.

Some of the functionalities are Scaffolding (generating a basic data management application based on a database schema), component theming (eg. text input, radio buttons, buttons, drop-down lists, etc) using some tools like Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks. It has some nice wizards what allow you to easily do things such as connecting to a web service, and generate an wrapper based on the WSDL definition.

Flex Builder has some Profiling functionality that allows you to track down and correct performance issues.

While demonstrating Flex Builder the speaker gave some tips about decreasing the overall size of the swf files generated by Flex. In Flex Builder you can create several modules that correspond to different swf files. This way you can re-use these component and light-weight the main swf file. When you create a Flex application it is compiled including the Flex runtime library. You can choose to load the runtime from an external swf. This way you can use caching of swf to optimize traffic usage.

Flash and Flex are meant to complement each other. Adobe Flash CS3 has the capability to export your Flash animations to the MXML format that is used by Flex. This way you can use Flash elements in your Flex applications, and even access these elements via Action Script to manipulate them. These Flash elements can have a code-behind file. This way you have a class that represents that element, where you can add meta-data and behavior (just like while developing in .NET using Visual Studio).

It is also possible to have embed Flex applications in your Flash animations. This allows you to easily integrate a form in your flash-based website, for instance. In Flex Camp one of the speakers showed some demos to show us that Flex can be used along with different flash movies that are compiled to different versions of Flash Player, and even communicate with those legacy applications/movies.

In the next (and last) post about Flex Camp @ Lisboa I will talk about server side (back-end) technologies working with Flex. Including web services, Flash Remoting and integrating Flex with PHP. Later tonight!