Introduction to Adobe Flex and Flash Builder | Adobe Flex Tutorial #1

Hai, here I am starting a tutorial for adobe flex. I am planning to start from the beginning and go up to some extend. I think all of you will get some additional information about flex and it will be helpful in your applications. Also, I am considering the beginners too, that means I am starting from the scratch. So first we will start from the topic “Introduction to adobe flex”.

Introduction to adobe flex-What is flex?

In simple words “flex is a bunch of developer tools from adobe to build and deploy rich internet applications on the flash platform”.

Flex is an adobe platform for creating rich internet applications and cross-desktop desktop applications. It is an open source framework. Using flex we can build desktop, web and mobile applications. Flex will take care of the UI part or client-side code in web development.

If you want to know more about adobe flex and products visit:

http://www.adobe.com/in/products/flex.html and

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex.html

Main advantages of adobe Flex

Mainly flex is used for creating desktop, web and mobile applications.

Flex applications can run on desktop, web, android, blackberry OS and IOS devices.

Flex applications are able to access and work with device capabilities like GPS and camera and they can also access local data bases.

Flex applications are able to connect and work with java, php, spring etc and there are many severs available for that like BlazeDs,codefusion that we can connect and work.

Introduction to Adobe Flash Builder

For developing flex applications we are using adobe flash builder and there are many versions of adobe flash builder available now. Now, we can just go through the adobe flash builder pack. For the development of rich internet applications and cross platform desktop applications we are using Action script and mxml.

Introduction to adobe flex

Flash builder 4  mainly comes in three editions :

• Standard
• Premium
• Educational
  

It is an IDE for the flex framework

Based on eclipse

Provides design, coding and debugging tools

Built in compiler to create SWF’s from mxml and action script

Client-side coding

Flex applications can be written in Action script and mxml.

Action script is an object oriented procedural language.Its actually event based that we can define inside the MXML tags .and <fx:Script> tag is there we will write our Actionscript code inside that.

MXML is a tag based mark up language . Actually it is used for designing the user interface.Using this tags we can design our own UI.

The following code snippet is an example for mxml, here I am defining a button with id “myButto ” and label “Button”

<mx:Button id = "myButton"
 label = "Button"
 />

and the following code snippet gives an example for Action script code

public class MyClass

{
 private var myVariable:String="";   //declaring a variable name myVariable of type string
 public function doSomething():void  //function with name doSomething

{

//do something
 }
 }

I think this is enough for an introduction to adobe flex. In the next post we will go through how we can use flash builder to build an application in flex and further we will go through in detail of adobe flex programming.

Creating Flex project in Flash Builder | Adobe Flex Tutorial #2