The Flex product line provides the next generation of developer tools to build and deploy RIAs on the Flash platform. Flex is an umbrella term for all the technologies of the Flex product line that help developers to be extremely productive in RIA application development.
Flex allows you to create expressive content with effective interfaces and deploy applications through a well distributed high performance cross platform, cross browser runtime environment. As you will see in this course, the Flex Tools and technologies also scale with the size of the project and the complexity of the task.
The Flex Product line contains Adobe Flex Builder 2, the Adobe Flex SDK, Adobe Flex Data Services 2 and Adobe Flex Charting 2. Adobe Flex Builder 2 is a completely new Integrated Development Environment, also known as an IDE for the Flex Framework 2, which provides coding, debugging and design tools and takes advantage of the industry leading Eclipse Tools Framework.
Flex Builder can install as a stand-alone product or add functionality to an existing Eclipse 3.1 installation. It can also be used alone to develop and deploy Flex applications or it can be used in conjunction with Flex Data Services. Flex Builder has a built-in compiler to create SWFs from MXML and ActionScript code.
The Adobe Flex SDK provides a skeleton of the application that developers can used to extend the Flex framework which consists of prebuilt components and these prebuilt components can be extended or developers can build their own components from scratch.
A highly comprehensive component framework is included within the SDK to help facilitate this. There is also a rich class library based on ActionScript 3.0 that embodies best practices for building RIAs. The Flex SDK also contains an XML based language called MXML that provides a declarative way to build and layout applications as well as an ECMAScript compliance scripting language called ActionScript 3.0.
A compiler is also included in the Flex SDK for creating SWF files from your MXML and ActionScripts. In order to start a Flex application, the web browser will request a SWF file which has been downloaded to the client. The developer is able to compile a SWF file by laying out their application in the MXML language and using ActionScript 3.0 for any logic.
ActionScript 3.0 is a class based language, that is as close to Java as you can get without actually be in Java. You will learn in detail the ins and outs of both MXML and ActionScript 3.0 in this series. Once the compiled SWF is downloaded to the client, the SWF itself can then request additional resources from the server using either HTTP, SOAP or an Adobe protocol known as the Action Messaging Format or AMF for short.
The Adobe Flex Data Services 2 adds enterprise messaging support and greatly enhanced data services architecture to the Flex SDK. Data Services also gives you the ability to share data among multiple clients and offer support for client to client data communication. You can also push data out to the Flex client using Data Services which gives you the ability to create sophisticated applications that display real time data such as sport scores or stock data.
Flex messaging allows whole new categories of applications like data push and collaboration based application to be delivered to the browser in a reliable and scalable way.
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