Flash Blog by Jon Danao

As I mentioned in the First Encounter, Flex is primarily built for web developers and not designers. The way I see it, it’s just like writing HTML with JavaScript but with a slight difference. Let’s take a simple sneak peek to support this claim.

Here we compare HTML and MXML when using a button:

HTML:
<button name=”myButton” onclick=”processClick()” class=”myButtonStyle”>Click Me</button>

MXML:
<mx:Button id=”myButton” click=”processClick()” styleName=”myButtonStyle” label=”Click Me” />

Let’s read these two lines of codes. First - component declaration(button/mx:button), then instance name(name/id), event(onclick/click), event handler(processClick), style property(class/styleName), style name(myButtonStyle) and lastly, the label. Both of them can use either an inline or linked CSS styles. How cool is that?!

After hearing a lot of people going gaga over ActionScript 3, I started picking up on its hype and see for myself what the buzz was all about. When I was reading on ActionScript 3, it opened the doors of Flex for me. Now I’m one of them!

My take on Flex: it’s a great tool for web developers because most of them don’t think Flash’s timeline is a significant feature in building web apps… not to mention Form Screens. The ease of inserting pre-built visual components, data binding elements, data connectivity, skinning and layouting seem so natural. Talking about skinning and layouting, I should probably write dedicated articles on these topics. They’re not as difficult as they look.

I definitely recommend Flash and web developers to try Flex. This is an amazing framework which comes with an Eclipse IDE and enormous library of components. If you want to get your hands dirty already on this, download the Flex SDK “to build and deploy Flex apps for free!”.

My domain name is almost 5 years old and would you believe this is my first legit personal website!! I hope to write a lot of useful articles on ActionScript, Flex and Apollo. Thanks for reading this first post.