Flex

Adobe Flex is a software development kit and an IDE for a group of technologies initially released in March of 2004 by Macromedia to support the development and deployment of cross platform, rich Internet applications based on their proprietary Macromedia Flash platform.

In April 2007, Adobe announced plans to open source Flex, specifically the Flex SDK, although the Flash underpinnings and the Flex Builder IDE still remain proprietary and commercial.

Overview

Traditional application programmers found it challenging to adapt to the animation metaphor upon which the Flash Platform was originally built. Flex seeks to minimize this problem by providing a workflow and programming model that is familiar to application developers.

Flex was initially released as a J2EE application or JSP tag library that compiles MXML and ActionScript on-the-fly into Flash applications (binary SWF files). Later versions of Flex support the creation of static files that are compiled at authoring time and can be deployed online without the need for a server license.

The goal of Flex is to allow application developers to quickly and easily build rich Internet applications. In a multi-tiered model, Flex applications serve as the presentation tier.

Flex features development of graphic user interfaces using an XML-based language called MXML. It comes with various components and features that make capabilities such as web services, remote objects, drag and drop, sortable columns, charting/graphing, built in animation effects, and other interface interactions simple. Since the client only loads once, application workflow is significantly improved versus HTML based applications (eg. PHP, ASP, JSP, CFMX) which require executing templates on the server with every action. Flex's language and file structure are seeking to decouple application logic from design.

The Flex server also acts as a gateway to allow the client to communicate with XML Web Services and Remote Objects (such as Coldfusion CFCs, Java Classes, and anything else that supports the Action Message Format).

Commonly mentioned as alternatives to Flex are OpenLaszlo, Ajax, XUL, the ZK Framework, JavaFX and Windows Presentation Foundation technologies such as Silverlight.

References

1. Wikipedia - Adobe Flex

Related links

1. Official Adobe Flex site
2. Flex.org - Flex community website