Comments on: Adobe Flex in 10 minutes

By: carlos

carlos — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 19:20:23 +0000

Thanks for posting this!
The mxml editor in Eclipse “Europa” does present an error: it does not show the source. To resolve this, I downloaded flexbuilder_linux_install_a5_112409.bin off the same URL as the “a4″ version in this article.

There however appears to be another problem, and I wonder if anyone else has encountered this: the “fdb” debugger provided by the Flex 3 SDK disconnects at random times from the browser (ie: it displays “sesssion terminated”). Has anyone else encountered this? Is there a fix?

By: Rick Umali

Rick Umali — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 14:13:42 +0000

Thanks for posting this little tutorial. Just a quick note: If you find yourself using the command line tools (mxmlc), you may get this error “Unable to locate specified base class ‘info.tripu.blog.flex.SimpleApp’”. To resolve this, I had to drop the SimpleApp.as file into a directory structure that mimics the package name. In other words, I had to do mkdir info, mkdir info\tripu, mkdir info\tripu\blog, and mkdir info\tripu\blog\flex. Then I had to copy SimpleApp.as into the last directory that I created. Good luck!

By: tripu

tripu — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 01:09:41 +0000

Z, your analogy is interesting — I never thought of Flex in those terms. I guess you are basically right. The thing is, Flex is more powerful than plain markup+CSS+Javascript. And, more importantly, Flex guarantees (almost) perfect cross-browser, cross-platform look & feel and behaviour. Always. With Flex you can just forget about IE quirks, levels of CSS support, fonts installed on the client, Javascript vs JScript, differences in layout rendering… it's a big deal! And it comes with all the swish widgets and effects straight out of the box. About your problem — Google released its cool Google Chart, you know. Easy to use and pretty neat, but AFAIK it allows no interaction with the charts. Components contained in Flex Charting, on the other hand, can be extended to respond to user actions. (Not that I'm trying to push Flex Charting! Obviously it's not free and it comes with a moderately tough learning curve. You can probably find simpler solutions to your problem that are also free). In my post I forgot to mention that frameworks like Cairngorm also bring the MVC approach to Flex development.

By: zeta

zeta — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:16:34 +0000

So, as far as I understand: The Actionscript is the Javascript, the MXML is the HTML and the Flash plug-in is the browser. Just acting in an upper layer, right? I don’t know… I don’t see it, do you?

Anyway, I need to create a dynamic chart generator for a web application (fed from a XML or Json file). Do you think Flex is the right option? Or plain Flash? Or Javascript with Canvas? It would be nice to be able to interact with the chart itself.