You will learn about the Adobe Flash Platform, Adobe Flex and how Flex fits into the world of an Adobe ColdFusion developer. This is a high level discussion that will explain what Flex is and two ways that it is commonly used with ColdFusion.
Understanding the Adobe Flash Platform
The Adobe Flash Platform is an integrated set of technologies for creating rich, compelling applications, content and video. As an experienced web developer, you have probably heard of Adobe Flash and visited sites created with Adobe Flash Professional. However, this tool is only one technology in the platform.
You can use any of the professional tools to create rich media, content and applications that are played back in the Flash Player or AIR runtimes. You can also add enterprise-level functionality with the server products, but this is outside the scope of the article.
Let me focus for a minute on the professional tools and web development:
- Flash Builder has helpful designer-developer workflow tools, but is largely geared towards developer productivity for Flex application development.
- Flash Catalyst is a new interaction design tool for creating interfaces and content without writing code.
- Flash Professional is an authoring environment to create content, animation, applications, and more using visual tools, a timeline or programming.
What they all have in common is that they can compile SWF application files (among other file types), which can then be wrapped in HTML and displayed in a browser that has Flash Player installed.
Understanding the Flex framework and Flash Builder
Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder are based on the Flex 4 framework, which is a free, open source library of classes and UI components that can greatly improve your ability to create applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops and operating systems. Note that the framework provides two programming languages, MXML and ActionScript, which you can learn about in the related article Introducing the MXML and ActionScript Languages.
You can also create Flex applications using the free Flex SDK, which packages the Flex framework, along with a compiler and a debugger, in a free software development kit.
If you use the Flex SDK, you would write your MXML and ActionScript code in any code or text editor and then use the command-line compiler to compile the application.
Flash Builder 4, formerly known as Flex Builder, is the Adobe commercial product geared towards developers building applications using the Flex framework. This tool includes everything in the Flex SDK plus many features to improve your productivity.
Flash Builder is based on the non-profit, open-source Eclipse development platform and application framework for building software. For developers who are already working with Eclipse, you can use the plug-in installer for Flash Builder. Developers who have never used Eclipse can use the standalone installer which is a customized package of Eclipse that includes the Flash Builder plug-in.
The new ColdFusion Builder tool is also based on the Eclipse software environment, which means that you can do both your Flex and ColdFusion development within the same Eclipse-based environment.
Understanding how Flex applications work with ColdFusion
In this last section, I will discuss two ways that Flex applications are often used with ColdFusion:
- Application or widget embedded in a CFML page
- Application or widget directly accessing CFCs to retrieve data or use other ColdFusion services