First Impressions: Adobe Flex
My friend and I are in the process of building a website, and we’ve been looking around and all kinds of interesting platforms for delivering web content. We’re probably doing most of it in Google’s Web Toolkit with a mix of Perl and Python on the backend, but one very neat thing we’re looking at for delivering a web chat interface is Adobe Flex.
Flex is a technology from Adobe that allows developers to write Flash applications. People have been doing this for a while, but (from what I understand) it’s kind of been clunky, because most applications used for doing this were focusing specifically on delivering multimedia content. But Flex is made for use specifically by developers, and so far it seems to deliver very clean, very pretty, and very easy-to-code Flash.
Besides Adobe’s provided Flickr client tutorial, I’ve been working on a chat program. The code is in MXML/ActionScript, so it’s pretty flexible and tends to do what you tell it in the same sense that Perl does.
If you need to quickly code up a quick web application, I’d suggest Flex. I think, but am not totally sure, that you can download the Flex developer kit for free. The awesome Eclipse-based editor, however, is somewhere in the magnitude of $200 USD.
Would I really pay that much for it? No. I got it for free with a student ID. :-)
You can also try a 30-day trial, I think. It looks like it’s much more advanced than I can comprehend right now. Since I’ve never done any Flash coding before, I think that’s understandable. My next task is reading up on how to do direct socket communication, which looks pretty easy via the SocketXML class.
Eeeew, non-free crap on Planet Fedora!
john
March 3, 2009 at 3:32 am
lol. I know, I know. It’s awful of me. But we can’t ignore that proprietary technologies are important to the computing world as a whole, even if we can imagine getting to a point where we can live without them. Besides, it was free for me. :-)
Matthew Daniels
March 3, 2009 at 3:35 am
It isn’t free in the sense john intended, it’s only free of charge, not free as in freedom.
And by using Flash or Flex, you’re promoting a proprietary browser plugin. It is a horribly bad idea to use these technologies.
Kevin Kofler
March 4, 2009 at 8:53 am
And besides, Adobe Flex stole the name of this fine Free Software which has been around for years:
http://flex.sourceforge.net/
Those proprietary software companies will make a big fuss if they feel somebody stole their software’s name (remember KIllustrator?), yet those same companies have no qualms stealing a Free Software project’s name.
Kevin Kofler
March 4, 2009 at 8:56 am
Fair enough. Funnily, last time I mentioned Flex to someone, their first response was to ask about yacc, so it seems that the open source lexical analyzer still holds out as the more well known technology.
It is a shame that this technology isn’t free and open source (I understand what you guys meant by free now, sorry) though. Obviously, Adobe has to make some money somewhere (in the IDE), but maybe releasing code for the underlying ActionScript -> Flash technology would be feasible.
Not that I’m holding my breath…
Matthew Daniels
March 4, 2009 at 1:54 pm