How I became a Flex Addict

A little over two years ago if you asked me what I did at work, I would have said I was a Java SWING developer. I’d been programming in Java for about 6 years and I was happy. I developed enterprise application for my company and it was my language of choice for side “tinker” projects. A good friend of mine started working on a project in Flex 1.5 and for at least a year he tried to convince me to give it a try, but I didn’t give in until right about the time Flex 2 was released.

I finally broke down and bought the book Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source. I spent a week following the books examples before I couldn’t contain myself and started my own test project. In my spare time spread out in a week I threw in every transition and effect I could discover into this test project. The code is not pretty and I know now that much of what I did is completely wrong causing me much more work than what was necessary. Yet the result was amazing. Here was a relatively clean application (albet with little real purpose) written in one week by a complete Flex neophyte that would have taken me a month in Java SWING (taking into account the animations, reflections, etc). I have experience writing my own real time animation rendering engine in Java, but in Flex it is virtually free.

Here is that first Flex project:

You can see it is nothing spectacular and it isn’t polished enough for a paying customer (the sounds I scrounged being particularly awful), but it speaks to how easily someone coming from event driven Java SWING can jump right in and work in Flex. This first two weeks of delving into Flex had gotten me hooked. If you know Java and have been hesitating on trying Flex, don’t wait. Give Flex a try. I still use Java all the time, but generally it is on the back end. The ability to seamlessly transfer Java objects and AS3 object over the network is wonderful, but that is a whole other discussion.

Since switching to Flex I’ve been lucky enough to lead a large team developing enterprise software using Flex to create custom components and also making extensive use of modules. In my spare time, I now tinker with AIR projects. If you ask me what I at work now, I’ll say I’m an RIA Flex developer.

I do apologize for not having included the source of this demo project. This SWF was built on Flex 2, and I have not yet recompiled it for Flex 3 with source included. I plan on doing just that in a future post. I’ll also dissect some of the code and explain how I got certain interesting parts working.