crazy with the books (Photo credit: leff)
What is Flex?
Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework that provides enterprise-level components for Flash Platform for designing, building and maintaining expressive mobile, web and desktop applications that deploy consistently on all major devices, browsers, desktops, and operating systems.
Flex allows you to build web and mobile applications that share a common code base, reducing the time and cost of application creation and longer term maintenance.
Flex Overview
Adobe® Flash® Builder™ 4.5 software (formerly Adobe Flex® Builder™) is an Eclipse™ based development tool for rapidly building expressive applications for the following platforms:
- mobile,
- web, and
- desktop
using the following technologies:
- ActionScript® and MXML
- the open source Flex framework.
Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 introduces new support for mobile application development and testing that enables use of a common code base to build apps for the following platforms:
- Android™,
- BlackBerry® Tablet OS, and
- iOS mobile platforms
while sharing code from web applications. It includes support for the following features:
- intelligent coding,
- interactive step-though debugging,
- application profiling, and
- visual design of the user interface layout.
Can I learn Apache Flex (previously Adobe Flex) ?
Below are the Prerequisites for learning Adobe Flex includes basic understanding of following topics:
Which languages does Flex Framework supports ?
A Flex application consists primarily of code written in two different languages
- ActionScript - a fully object oriented, strictly typed, ECMA Script language. It is is used for describing the event handlers and custom application logic.
- MXML - an XML based markup language. It is used to provide description of the appearance and components that make up the application.
What is Flash Catalyst ?
An additional product Adobe® Flash® Catalyst™ (code-named Thermo) a professional interaction design tool for designers to create complex
RIA user interfaces and interactions by using a
visual editor which will create Flex application code that the
designer and developer can share.
Adobe Flash Catalyst is a tool for rapidly creating user interfaces without coding.
Future of Flash Catalyst & Flash Builders
Following the decision of Flex moving to the Apache Foundation, that Flash Catalyst will be discontinued. Flash Builder will also have features the following features removed in future:
- Design View,
- Data Centric Development (DCD)
- and Flash Catalyst workflows.
Adobe has stopped sales and development of Flash Catalyst tool,
Adobe is now focusing mainly on creating tools for native applications using AIR and HTML5 for e.g.
- Adobe Muse (http://muse.adobe.com)
- Adobe & HTML (http://html.adobe.com/)
As an alternate to Flash Catalyst it is recommended to use Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection. (refer http://www.adobe.com/in/products/flashcatalyst.html for details)
Further Reading:
- Future of Flash and Flex
- Life After Adobe Flash Builder(drdobbs.com) - Developing Flex with using Microsoft's Visual Studios IDE
Related articles:
English: Logo of the Apache Software Foundation. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Flex Becomes Top Level Apache Project!(flexmonkey.blogspot.com)
Apache Flex now an official Apache project!(blogs.adobe.com)
Congratulations to Apache Flex!(inflagrantedelicto.memoryspiral.com)
Apache Flex 4.9 Has Been Released(badu.ro)
