>I was looking at an earlier post, which mention Flex. It's the first time I
>had
> heard about Flex. I had a quick look at the website. I sure not where Flex
> fits
> in with the other Adobe application i.e What is its key selling point. Is
> it
> doing something that other applications such as Flash can't do?
> It says: "Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework for
> building
> and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on
> all
> major browsers, desktops, and operating systems."

Flex is an application development tool. Think of it as similar to Visual
Basic, Java or C++. Or similar to Delphi. It's a tool designed to make it
easy to build applications - media players, image editors, data
access/manipulation tools and a zillion more things. The output is played by
the Flash player, and can sit in a web page, or on your desktop via the AIR
player. Flex Builder looks a lot like Visual Studio or any of a number of
other development tools.

> Doesn't Flash also do this. Or is the keyword here " open source" and that
> is
> its selling point. Or is it an application to be used in conjunction with
> other
> applications i.e. Flash. Or is it completey independent i.e. I can develop
> everything I need within a Flex environment

You can develop everything you need in the Flex environment, I like to
oversimplify the description like this.

Flex is Flash without the timeline.

With cross-platform output to PC/Mac plus Linux (soon) and mobile devices (a
next year perhaps).


Truthfully, Flex is a whole lot more, but the most significant difference
between Flex and Flash is that Flex has no timeline.

> Is this a difficult application to learn?
>

If you are skilled at Flash, or Java, or Visual Basic, Delphi, C++ or any
other application development tool, then I believe Flex is easy to learn. If
you are not used to using such tools, Flex requires that you draw together
knowledge of many web-based technologies like XML, JavaScript, ActionScript,
CSS, server-side scripting, data access/manipulation, database integration
and more. If you are already somewhat comfortable with these, then Flex may
still be fairly easy for you to pick up.

For most applications you have to write code to do anything useful. If you
are not a coder you will probably not like Flex.

Steve


--
http://twitter.com/Stevehoward999

Adobe Community Expert: eLearning, Mobile and Devices
European eLearning Summit - EeLS
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