So I’ve been pondering this for a while now and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to teach myself the Flex framework this year and move the bulk of my personal projects over to Flex Builder. I’ve been poking around in Flash CS4 for the last few months and while it’s new features are great it isn’t really up to snuff in terms of a development environment. Flash’s code editor has been the bane of most developers for some time now and with this release it’s pretty clear that Adobe aren’t planning on improving it any time soon, if at all.
I guess I can’t really blame Adobe. It is now very clear that they are purposefully splitting their Flash based products into different camps now that they have recently announced a third product, Flash Catalyst. From my interpretation of the videos and information Adobe are planning FC as almost a ‘designer front end’ to Flex Builder while providing enough auto-coded functionality to stand on it’s own. With Flex 4 (codenamed Gumbo) due out sometime this year I think it’s time to bite the bullet and learn Flex.
The good news is there is lots of free content available from Adobe on getting up to speed with Flex. I’ve been spending time lately watching a free video series over at the Flex Developer Center titled Flex in a week which can be watched through the Adobe Media Player on online. What’s really great about this is that it’s free! Eat that lynda.com!
Another excellent resource is the Tour de Flex AIR application. This app acts as an interactive reference to the components that make up the Flex framework complete with MXML examples and language reference.