Why FLEX?

Reasons made me to choose FLEX :

i. look and feel of a desktop application. Because there is no page reload.

ii. Reduction in Server Load and Network Bandwidth

iii. Common Deployment Environment

Some or all of the presentation tier of a flex application runs in flash player itself. It runs in the Client side which means “ no application server processing resources are spent for data formatting”.

By Off loading the presentation logic to the client side flash player, and eliminating the need for frequent page refreshes. Flex applications minimizes the network traffic and server load.

Common Deployment Environment:

Flex applications execute on flash players which are platform independent, so customer do not need to install any custom client software. Also flash player runs consistently in all browsers and platforms. So you don’t have to worry about the problems like inconsistent behaviors in different client environments.

Flex - RPC

Remote Procedure Call Services:

RPC services let your flex application to interact with the remote servers to provide data to your application or for your application to send data to the server.

Using Flex SDK, you can access the remote data through web services like SOAP or normal HTTP services like GET or POST requests.

For security, by default flash player doesn’t allow an application to access a remote data source from a domain other than the domain from which the application was served.

Therefore a remote server must either be in the same domain as the server hosting your application or the remote server must define a crossdomain.xml file.

Crossdomain.xml file is an xml file that provides access to swf files from certain domains or from all domains.

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.