Beginning Flash®, Flex®, and AIR® Development for Mobile Devices

2

Getting Started

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Using Flash Builder 4.5.1
• Creating a Flex mobile project
• Defining run configurations for both desktop and devices

Adobe's portfolio includes numerous software products that enable you to author Flash-based mobile applications. These include Flash Builder, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that fully supports the build of Flex Framework and AS3-based mobile projects, Flash Professional for Flash-authored projects, Device Central for emulating content, and the AIR SDK for targeting multiple platforms.

In this chapter you take a close look at Flash Builder, learning how to create a Flex mobile project and how to run that project on the desktop, and also take a look at how to configure the project to run on Apple iOS, BlackBerry Tablet OS, and Google Android.

USING FLASH BUILDER 4.5.1

Flash Builder is the ideal tool of choice for creating mobile applications using the Flex framework. Built on top of Eclipse, an IDE widely used by many Java developers, Flash Builder is a robust development environment.

This book mainly focuses on building applications with the latest version of Flash Builder — at the time of writing, version 4.5.1.

NOTE If you are using Flash Builder 4.5.0, you will need to install the Flash Builder 4.5.1 updater, which you can find on the Adobe website (www.adobe.com/support/flex/downloads_updaters.html ...