Flex overview
Thursday, February 12th, 2009Flex is a free, open source framework for building highly interactive, expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. It provides a modern, standards-based language and programming model that supports common design patterns. MXML, a declarative XML-based language, is used to describe UI layout and behaviors, and ActionScript3, a powerful object-oriented programming language, is used to create client logic. Flex also includes a rich component library with more than 100 proven, extensible UI components for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs), as well as an interactive Flex application debugger.
RIAs created with Flex can run in the browser using Adobe Flash Player software or on the desktop on Adobe AIR, the cross-operating system runtime. This enables Flex applications to run consistently across all major browsers and on the desktop. And using AIR, Flex applications can now access local data and system resources on the desktop. Both Flash Player and Adobe AIR are available as a free download on Adobe.com.
You can accelerate application development with Adobe Flex Builder 3 software, a highly productive, Eclipse based development environment, and Adobe Live Cycle Data Services software, a set of advanced data services that can be used in Flex development. Both of these products are available for purchase.