Recently I was tasked with an internal project, to research the feasibility of building a web-based application for Five Star’s webinars. Not all features have been outlined yet, but we know that beyond all the normal webinar functionality built into other meeting applications, we want an application that allows us to break the attendees into groups, where they can discuss a question or topic and return to the main meeting to report their conclusions.

My first step was to choose the best technology for building this application. I chose Adobe Flex. Flex is an Adobe software used to develop and deploy cross-platform rich Internet applications (RIAs). There were many reasons I chose Flex, and a few of the stand-out reasons are listed below.

• The ability to deploy cross-platform compatible web-based and desktop (AIR) applications from the same project without  any additional work.
• The extensive component library, including charting components.
• Five Star already uses Flash for most of its projects, and Flex and SWFs can easily interact with each other.

Flex is a new technology to Five Star, so I decided to start learning Flex by watching the Flex in a Week video tutorials and completing the exercises. Although Flex in a Week does not delve in depth into any of the topics, the series gives you a broad overview of all common and some uncommon tasks you will need to perform, as well as providing you with exercises that leave you with an excellent set of example files.

Day 1 and Day 2 of the Flex training went very smoothly and I felt very comfortable using the Flex interface and building simple applications by the end. Day 3 continued to go well; however, I could not complete one exercise on using RemotingObject because there were only directions for Java and ColdFusion servers and the solution for the “Implementing drag and drop between components” exercise did not work.

On Day 4 of the training I had the most trouble. I completed more exercises that did not work as expected. Even the solution files did not work when imported. Also, not all the links in the PDFs for the exercises were correct, and I had to search the Adobe site for the new pages.

Day 5 took a different format where Adobe developers were featured in the video, and they shared “how-tos” for very specific tasks. The most useful of these, I thought, was localization of content. The materials in these videos are excellent and the exercises are very useful, however each developer must have written their own directions and code for the exercises so the styles are all different from each other and different from the style of all the previous days.

Although I feel like Adobe should go back and review their exercises for accuracy, overall I had a very good experience with Flex in a Week. I would recommend the training for anyone trying to learn Flex. Below I have listed links to resources that might help you as you start learning Flex.

• Downloads – Download Flex Builder or the Flex SDK. If you plan to do the video training you will also need the Flex Skin Design Extension and Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3, so you may want to download them now too.
• Flex in a Week
• Flex Developer Center
• Flex Developer’s Guide
• Flex 3 Component Explorer

Tags: Adobe Flex

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 11:34 am and is filed under Developer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.