Adobe® Flex® 3 Bible

Chapter 1. About Flex 3

Flex 3 is the most recent version of a platform for developing and deploying software applications that run on top of the Adobe Flash Player. While such tools have existed for many years, the most recent toolkit from Adobe Systems allows programmers with object-oriented backgrounds to become productive very quickly using the skills they already have learned in other programming languages and platforms.

Since the release of Flex 2, the Flex development environment has encouraged a development workflow similar to that used in other desktop development environments such as Visual Studio, Delphi, and J Builder. The developer writes source code and compiles an application locally and then uploads the finished application to a Web server for access by the user. That isn't how Flex started, however.

Flex was originally released by Macromedia as a server-based application deployment and hosting platform. In the early versions of the Flex product line, an MXML/Action Script compiler was included in a Java-based Web application hosted on a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) server. Application source code was stored on the server. When a user made a request to the server, the application was compiled "on request" and delivered to the user's browser, and hosted by the Flash Player.

This server-based compilation and application deployment model is still available in the most recent version of the server software now known as Live Cycle Data Services ES. But the version of ...