Flex - Power of RIA

What is flex?

Flex is a development and runtime environment that you use to create rich internet applications that use adobe flash player 9.

Flex is an adobe technology.

Using flex, you can design, develop and deliver entirely new class of RIAs.

Flex lets the developers familiar with the server side technologies to build rich front end for applications.

While executing in flash player, your flex application can interact with the server side functionality such as databases, web services, java objects (data models) and other server side services.

In Flex, You use a standards based programming model to develop an application. So you have to describe the user interface and configure the user interface controls and define the data bindings.

Flex Application Development Methodology:

1. Design
2. Compile
3. Run

Design:

Design part consists of flex class libraries, MXML, Action Script, CSS and other imported files like images, swf files.

Compile:

When compiling the application, all the source code will be converted in to Action script classes. So everything here is AS classes.

Run:

The final output is a SWF file where your application resides.

You can embed this swf file into a normal html file to run your flex application.