by Ben Gomez Farrell

I love checking out the latest technologies, but strangely, I didn't immediately jump on the Flex bandwagon. Don't get me wrong; I wasn't a Flex nay-sayer – it's just that Adobe gave me a lot to learn at the time, and frankly, Adobe made it sound a little boring by branding it as a tool to make rich internet applications. When I think RIA, I think of a slick Flex interface for doing your banking. I'd rather make games. Of course, as a long time Flash user, I immediately jumped into the Adobe Flash 9 Preview that came out in late 2006.

For those that don't regularly visit labs.adobe.com, the Flash 9 Preview was nice little present that gave us a feel for that brand new Actionscript 3 language. It was enough of a change from Actionscript 2 that it took a bit to get caught up to speed. We had a new display object, event handlers, and a host of other new ways to do even simple things. No more attachMovie, no more setting the onRelease handler of a button. It would have been a little annoying....except....it just makes more sense now. I don't have to attach an empty movieclip from the library if I have a custom movieclip that I extended. I can just say: Flash....make me a new CustomClip();

Yep, things just make sense. When I got a handle on Actionscript 3, suddenly we had Apollo, or Adobe AIR as it's called now. Like many Flashers, my wheels started to spin. I wanted to make something neat to get some AIR/Actionscript 3 experience under my belt. And that's what I did....or rather started to do. I wanted to try making a media player. I know, I know, everybody makes media players but I have a nifty little home theater PC setup, and I thought, "Hey, I can make a remote controlled interface to play my MP3s and my ripped DVDs that I converted to flash video.” While you can bet your first born child that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of Flash based media players on the web, making one would also be a learning experience, so I gave it a shot. And no, I did NOT know that Adobe was working on the Adobe Media Player at the time.

Then something terrible happened. My media player was playing my music, my videos; it was great. But 90% of my time was sucked up making the user interface. Honestly, making a framework in your free time that supports, for example, scrollable lists that size themselves correctly to your stage size, is hard. Yes, I was learning Actionscript 3, but I was bored silly. Like many of the projects that I do in my spare time, I decided to ditch it. I did learn an important lesson, though. Actually, three important lessons if you count Actionscript 3 and AIR. My third lesson was that I don't enjoy re-inventing user interface components that I see and use everyday.

Hopefully, that was the last time I had to learn this lesson. I tried using Flash components in Flash MX2004 and 8. Maybe it's just me, but they were a little difficult to use and even more difficult to skin. Setting properties varied too much across each component and I had to look in the help section each time. Anyway, a few months ago, I thought I'd give another framework in Flash a shot. I had just started learning Flex. I'd heard too much about components and containers and states and more. It all just swirled around in my head not making any sense. Fortunately, I had a long plane trip and decided to buy Programming Flex 2: The comprehensive guide to creating rich media applications with Adobe Flex by Chafic Kazoun and Joey Lott.

Amazingly, Flex started to make sense and I hadn't written one line of MXML (Flex's layout markup). I had previously downloaded a Flex trial to bungle around with and my 30-day trial was expired. Thankfully, Adobe gives us a free Flex SDK. Not so thankfully, you may resort to using Windows Notepad and the DOS command line to build your projects – because the free SDK is that minimal.

What's nice, is that the good people over at FlashDevelop (www.flashdevelop.org) make a very nice (and free) Flex and Flash project builder. You can use it in conjunction with the free Adobe Flex SDK and....well....start Flexxing. Soon, with Flex and FlashDevelop (and I didn't pay a dime yet), I was making AIR desktop and browser applications in an evening. It was quite nice not having to worry about making a drop down menu, or a scrolling list - I could just use the ones that Flex had and style it how I wanted with my own images, CSS, or by setting it's properties with MXML or Actionscript. I was honestly amazed at the amount of code I didn't have to write. I could pop a Flex component onto my application and it instantly hooked up to an XML file I had on my website. What's more, I could take each XML node and display however many of them there were with a repeater component. And then, when I ventured into the Flex 3 and AIR betas, I got a selectable file directory of my computer to go in my desktop application in the time it took me to look up and copy the component from the help file.

Now it was time to commit. I liked Flex a lot. It was fun, and not just because I wasn't bored silly re-inventing user interface stuff but also because I was churning things out rapidly and they had a nice liquid user interface that changed when I resized my window. The only problem at this point was that as a Flex newcomer, Flex felt a little inflexible. It wasn't Flex's fault; it was just that I was doing everything with text only in Flash Develop. Flash Develop is an excellent free development environment, but I needed more so I got a copy of Flex in hopes that it would make life even easier.

Right now I feel like Flex Builder is pretty much a necessity if you want to be a professional Flexxer. Playing around and testing the waters, yes the Flex SDK and Flash Develop is all you need, but having a design view for this stuff is great. The integrated debugger...well...I'll stop right there. I'm a Flash user and I'm not sure how long a debugger has seriously been an option for us. I just learned early on not to use it (and this is after having an exceptional one from my Director days). Let's just say I'm looking forward to the day when I can integrate the nice debugger Flex has given us into my workflow and NOT resort to tracing everything.

Let me tell you how I learned HTML. I used Dreamweaver in the computer labs at my college. Many times though, I had to take all that HTML into a text editor to make changes at home. Doing things in notepad really got me learning HTML quickly, but even now, years later, I always use Dreamweaver when I make a webpage, because it just has so many things that save time and effort.

Flex is the same way. You're probably not doing things in the quickest way possible with no debugger, no design view, and no menu to grab components from. But without all these things, you'll learn lots, and when you want to pay for Flex you can jump in and start blasting out those great projects quickly and without having to flip through your Flex books too much.

So please, don't take my word for it, and don't even spend money right away on Flex if you're unsure that it's for you. Play with the SDK and have fun. Soon though, that fun will turn into some paying gigs, and you'll wish you had a copy of Flex Builder for that 9am deadline.