Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Tour de Flex

Flash has revolutionized the web from plain old HTML... but it wasn't so easy to learn. 1. the tool isn't free, 2. it seems so graphic oriented, it isn't write-compile-run like the typical programmer is used to.

Flex is a very cool Rich-Internet-Application tool. It is not so new anymore, now in version 3 (soon version 4). It also creates SWF files. What I like about Adobe is that it encourage you to learn its tools, with tutorials nicely available and Flex doesn't look so hard to learn. Its compiler is free, yea, the Flex Builder will cost you some money but you don't have to have it.

See the Tour de Flex to see its features.

It is much like HTML combined with javascript, so the web programmer should find it fairly easy to master. It's got all sorts of animation things that are hard to do built in, such as fading, glowing, zooming, etc

It is NOT just a sandbox like java applets, it can communicate to other urls or webservices, making rich application possible...

1 comment:

Greg Wilson said...

Hey Joseph - thanks for your blog post on Tour de Flex. I wanted to also point out that there is a desktop version available that includes additional samples, including some AIR specific samples. You can grab the desktop version at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/tourdeflex

Also - the desktop version has an eclipse plugin so you can access content directly from Flex Builder :)

Greg
http://GregsRamblings.com