Flex'ing my muscles a bit ;)


Hey people,

This weekend was dedicated a bit to learning about Flex - the programming model to the flash runtime environment exposed by Adobe. This is a great step towards bringing on the not-so-artistic guys into programming Flash apps. Did I say "programming" flash apps? Yup, ppl. It's true that Action script has been around in Flash for some time but the Adobe Flash interface with umpteen features used to scare me off at my earlier attempts ;).

I got really interested when I saw one of the applications that Adobe had built using Flex.
https://buzzword.acrobat.com/ (screenshot above)
I must say that this was one of the most beautiful calligraphy I have seen in a rendering engine inside a browser. It was smooth and flowed beautifully. Loved it!

Flex was refreshing! Got my first AJAX driven app running within about 1/2 hour of installing Flex. Awesome! It just involved a few "good old" :) xml files in the vim editor and a batch script to compile the same.

For beginners, the "Getting Started" app is a great way to learn the ropes - http://learn.adobe.com/wiki/display/Flex/Getting+Started

There is one small setting change which I had to do to get my .swf running. Basically, for security reasons, the Flash Player does not allow random swfs (ones that you dont trust) to access the Internet. The following links help one to configure the flash player to trust the .swf files that you want.

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