Flex Builder - Sunday, June 29, 2008 1:54 - 4 Comments

Foundation Flex for Designers Featured in Adobe Developer Center

I noticed a little spike in my in my blog stats and decided to take look where it was coming from. It happen to be that Chapter 6 is now freely available in the Adobe Developer Center website.

It seems the book is finally picking up steam among designers and I keep hearing excellent comments about it.

Under the hood, Flash and Flex are closely related. Both work with ActionScript 3.0, both output to a SWF format, and both use Flash Player 9 to display their content. But they are very different in what they are good at.

Flash started life as an animation program and developed more features as time went on, but animation is still one of its strongest points, and is more in line with what Adobe is intending it for in their modern suite of tools.

Flex by contrast is really good at developing applications and the things that are associated with it—charting, handling data, and such. Sure, it can do animation, but the kinds of animation that Flex focuses on are things such as transitions that take place as menus expand, or items such as images scaling to different sizes in different states.

There are three major ways to integrate Flash and Flex. The first is to use Flash to create skins and component animations. The second is to bring in complex timeline animations. And the third is to bring in Flash MovieClips that can be controlled in Flex. We will be looking at all three in this chapter.

Take a look at an excerpt of Chapter 6 by clicking here.