[xray] What is Flex (was: New Flex2 version of Xray is out to try)

[Chris Velevitch]

On 6/2/06, Chris Bare <chris at bareflix.com> wrote:
> Excuse my ignorance, but what exactly is Flex? I've looked at the
> adobe/macromedia site, but was lost in the marketing speak.
>
> Is it something I could use with MTASC, or does it require the flash ide?
> I got the impression from the marketing site that it required something on the
> server side, but from what you said, I now think it does not.

It's interesting that you haven't of Flex by now and I also wonder if
you heard of Flash Player 9 and ActionScript 3 (aka AVM2)?

Let me try and answer your question.

Flex consists of:-

1. an XML-based language (MXML) for declaratively defining the visual
part of a Flash-based application. One advantage is you can use any
text editor to develop in.

2, New UI components, totally re-written (ie new APIs)

3. Revised ActionScript (version 3) based on the EcmaScript 4 with XML
extensions. Provides a true OO language and syntactically stricter.
The XML extensions makes it a lot simpler to access element of an XML
structure using dot notation.

4. A new ActionScript virtual machine (AVM2) which is a hell of alot
faster to run AS code

5.Better debugging in the Player (version 9)

6. A free compiler to convert mxml into a swf

7. New charting components

8. New data services to connect to server side data sources (among
other things). There is a free limited number of connections version

9. Eclipse-based IDE and includes a better debugger costing under $1000 (USD)

10. Better run-time exception handling

I hope this gives you a idea.


Chris
-- 
Chris Velevitch
Manager - Sydney Flash Platform Developers Group
www.flashdev.org.au