Shifting Focus to Macromedia Flex



Over the past several months I’ve been dabbling with Macromedia’s Flex technology. We’ve come a long ways since the late 90’s where Flash was being used mainly as an animation tool and there were only a handful of developers that used Flash to build dynamic applications. I don’t want to get into detail about the history but it goes something like Flash/CF integration, Remoting, and now Flex.

There were obviously all sorts of technologies and hacks in between, but I’d like to take a minute to discuss Flex. First off, I’m completely blown away by it. One complaint that I constantly hear about the Flash IDE is that it’s geared towards designers. That’s how it started and over the years it became more of a developer’s tool. If you open the IDE you’ll easily get confused with facets of both worlds. There’s the timeline and symbols for designers, while developers are more interested in the UI and Data components.

Now what if I said you could build Flash applications without ever opening the Flash IDE and use a tool such as Dreamweaver, where it’s mainly code based. Flex gives us this capability with an IDE called Flex Builder. With an XML markup syntax know as .mxml, developers can now author XML files that get compiled down to Flash movies. The fact that I’m still calling them Flash movies means I still haven’t abandonded the designer mindset!

With Flex Builder you can EASILY build rich internet applications with all sorts of crazy functionality. Just like Dreamweaver you have a code and WYSIWYG view. I won’t go into details but I’m working on obtaining a non-commercial Flex license from Macromedia and will be posting all sorts of juicy goods here. I can’t post any samples from the developer edition because they files expire after one day. I haven’t been this excited about the web in a long time and I can guarantee we’re going to see truly amazing applications in the coming months…all rendered as Flash output!

One last thing that I’d like to add is that there is tight integration for Flash developers writing components. You can write components based off of Macromedia’s V2 component architecture that can be integrated directly with Flex. Then it’s as simple as calling an XML tag to create an instance of your component. I will post more on Flex component development as well as showcase it’s power in the coming weeks.



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