Understanding How Flex Applications Work
Flex applications deployed on the Web work differently than HTML-based applications. It’s important to understand how Flex applications work in order to build them most effectively. When you understand how Flex applications work, you can know what elements are necessary for an application and how to build the application for the best user experience. Figure 1-1 summarizes the basic concepts discussed in this section.

Figure 1-1. Understanding Flex application source-compile-deploy workflow
Every Flex application deployed on the Web utilizes Flash Player as the deployment platform. That means a fundamental understanding of Flash Player is essential to understanding Flex. Additionally, all Flex applications use the Flex framework at a minimum to compile the application. As such, it’s important to understand the relationship between the source code files, the compiler, and Flash Player.
All Flex applications require at least one MXML file or ActionScript class file, and most Flex applications utilize both MXML and ActionScript files. The MXML and ActionScript class files comprise the source code files for the application. Flash Player does not know how to interpret MXML or uncompiled ActionScript class files. Instead, it is necessary to compile the source code files to the .swf format, which Flash Player can interpret. A typical Flex application ...
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