Thanks! I'm actually excited about jumping in now.
It's making me wonder if some of the larger Flash apps I'm maintaining
now wouldn't benefit from a port to Flex. I'll have to look into the
server licensing to see if it makes sense for the projects I have in mind.
I guess my next step is going through as many tutorials and sample apps
as I can find.
JOR
Theodore E Patrick wrote:
My question for the Flex people is this, what does Flex bring to the
table that I can not already do with 04 Pro (not counting the new AS 3.0)?
Allot!
1. There are tons of details in building apps in Flash 2004 Pro that just
get removed when using Flex. All the small painful lessons that you needed
to know disappear as they are built into the Flex Framework. This allows you
to focus on the actual application you are building.
2. Better components and more of them. Containers, VBox, Repeaters, oh my!
3. Larger applications. Building very large scale applications in Flex is
very feasible where it was hard to do this with Flash 2004 Pro. You can
reuse blocks of MXML in Flex as a component.
4. MXML generates AS Classes. MXML is a code generator, it takes a simple
XML hierarchy and generates an AS class representing your app just before
compilation. As MXML is translated before compilation, tags can provide
embedding of graphics, component generation, and UI generation that is very
exact and detailed. In Flash the hierarchy of an application is hidden from
the developer, where in Flex the hierarchy is directly what is added into
the MXML XML tree. Flex is right aligned.
I felt the same thing about Flex 10 months ago. It took being dropped into a
Flex project to see it for myself. You can build much larger scale
applications in Flex than you can in Flash and in Flex they are 20 times
easier to maintain and change ongoing. Team development is also enhances
with Flex. As apps are mostly ASCII text, Flex is easy to work with in
version control.
Take the leap and learn Flex. It is one of the best things you can do long
term within the Flash Platform. You will loath learning a new toolset at
first but soon you will be writing application faster than before and with
less hassle. Plus as you know Flash, you can extend Flex with it!
I though for a while that Flex was going to automate me out of a job. The
reality is that once you know it, the project scope in Flex is much larger.
I am working on better projects and earning a good bit having learned Flex.
My 2 Cents,
Theodore Patrick
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