Understanding The Flex Development Ecosystem

By Author: Tom Garee
Total Articles: 2
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Since the time when Flex was released by Macromedia in 2004, the rich Internet application (RIA) development platform has grown in stature and power. After Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005 the company officially released 3 later versions to the original Flex 1.0. Today Flex 4 looks a strong contender to be the most popular RIA development platform and give a tough competition to Microsoft's Silverlight and open source AJAX. Flex development has generated a buzz in the web development community as it is stated to be open source and has a support to the already installed Flash player on billions of web browsers. This gives it a leading edge over Silverlight, AJAX, and other similar client-side scripting platforms. Adobe has recently released Flex 4 along with the Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst, which are part of the Adobe Flash Platform technology. All these are the integral part of the Flex application development ecosystem.

Flex Development Environments
The most popular and widely used IDE for Flex development is the Adobe Flex Builder, which ...
... after the release of its fourth version got a name change to Flash Builder. Flash Builder is built upon the highly rated and broadly used open source Eclipse IDE platform. Adobe Catalyst is the design tool which Adobe intends to bridge the Flash designers and Flex developers with. Flash Catalyst integrates their design workflows and programming activities seamlessly.

Other than the official Adobe Flash Builder IDE, Flex application development has been integrated with some of the popular IDEs such as:

->IntelliJ IDEA - a successful Java IDE
->Amethyst - a Visual Studio integrated Flex IDE
->Ensemble Tofino - another Flex development IDE for Microsoft developers for Visual Studio
->FlashDevelop - an open source ActionScript web development environment.

Flex Application Development Frameworks
To improve on software quality and increase programming productivity, the developers have long been using software frameworks to implement common software development patterns. The more famous ones that have been consistently gaining momentum as comprehensive Flex/ActionScript frameworks are:

->Cairngorm
->PureMVC
->Model-Glue:Flex
->Foundry
->Guasax Flex Framework
->ARP
->Flest Framework
->EasyMVC
->Adobe FAST

Flex is basically a client-side development platform that is used in collaboration with other server-side logic implementation technologies such as PHP, ASP.NET, Ruby, ColdFusion, and Perl. Flex is in fact a buildup of two underlying technologies - MXML and ActionScript. MXML is an XML based markup language that is used to describe the layout of the Flex application, while ActionScript is used to define the business logic and intelligence by the Flex developer during Flex development.

A good Flex developer can easily take up Enterprise Flex application development with official Adobe support. Adobe targets the wide enterprise application development by heavily investing in developing technologies that support enterprise application system development. High end Adobe tools and technologies like BlazeDS and LiveCycle play a major role in server side application development and integration for enterprise Flex development. In addition, the Flex/ActionScript communities have developed alternative server side integration tools to support Flex enterprise RIA development.