June 2008
Beginner
304 pages
9h 26m
English
Content preview from Learning Flex 3Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 1. GETTING UP TO SPEED
The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.
—William Gibson
Welcome to the future. Adobe Flex 3 is the hot new technology for creating rich experiences both for the web and for the desktop (with Adobe AIR). Bridging the gap between the expressiveness and ubiquity of Adobe Flash and the power of desktop-class development, Flex is in a league of its own.
I have been working with Flex since its inception, and I can say with confidence that there’s no better time to be learning Flex. With Flex 3, it’s easier and faster than ever to create beautiful and powerful applications. Flex has been around for just a few years, but it’s been growing exponentially. Not only is there a solid market for those proficient in Flex, but the product has matured into such a robust and open platform that current developers would be wise to add it to their skill set and anyone just starting out can rest assured they’ve chosen a great technology.
What Is Flex?
Flex is the way to make rich Internet applications (RIAs) quickly and easily. At its basic level, it’s a framework for creating RIAs based on Flash Player. Along with being a framework, Flex is also a new language. At its heart is MXML, a markup language based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) that makes it really easy and efficient to create applications. Unlike developing for some desktop platforms requiring a proprietary binary file format, MXML is just text, so it’s easy to read and modify using just ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.