Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 5. Introduction to Flex Builder 3

This chapter covers the basic Flex Builder Workbench layout and areas, as well as how to customize the workbench experience. It also teaches you how to learn more about Flex Builder from within the Flex Builder Help resources.

If you're already well familiar with the Flex Builder 3 Workbench, but you'd like to know only what has been improved or added in Flex Builder 3, you can skip the "Getting Started with Flex Builder" and "The Flex 3 Workbench" sections and jump right to "What's New in Flex Builder 3" at the end of this chapter.

Getting Started with Flex Builder

The Flex Builder is a fully integrated development environment (IDE). It provides tools to assist you in creating, debugging, packaging, and compiling code into SWF applications. Following are just a few of the features:

• Text emphasis — Flex Builder 3 provides separate editors for MXML, ActionScript, and CSS code. You do not need to keep track of which editor is for which file type. This is because the Flex Builder automatically handles it for you. The editors also provide features that will be discussed in this chapter, including code hinting, navigation, formatting, commenting, and others.

• Design editor — The design view editor is specific to the MXML editor. It provides a collection of views to help create components and applications visually by placing user-interface and data-access controls on the design mode stage.

• Navigation features — The Navigator and the Outline Views provide ...