We have been heavily involved in a Flex widget development project this week. I have to say…Flex is a very, very cool technology. I plead ignorance…when I used to see dynamic Flash banner ads on search engine or content pages, I just assumed they were developed by Flash developers. Now I know the truth…
They are using Flex. Flex is a development platform that combines XML and ActionScript to create Flash files. The difference between using Flex and Flash is that Flex is specifically designed for building dynamic widgets and Web components. So…if you want to create a Flash ad that has a dropdown list or that displays data from an RSS file or that has any other kind of interactivity, Flex makes it easy.
Well…it makes it easy from a user interface standpoint. You still have to know how to do some programming. I’ve been doing so much programming lately that those concepts have been freshened up in my mind. ActionScript is very, very similar to JavaScript, so it’s really not that difficult to deal with. You just have to learn what the objects are that you need and what the properties, methods and events are for those objects.
The Flex framework is free and you can actually build Flex applications using nothing more than a simple text editor. However, your development time will be greatly sped up if you use Adobe’s integrated development environment for Flex, called Flex Builder.
If you have the time or resources, I highly recommend you check out Flex and see what you can do with it.