Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Flex Chops

If you are reading this blog, i would assume you are familiar with flex. So i wouldnt introduce you to flex. Nor would i like to point you to different articles on the web out there. I would like to share my thoughts of the Flex framework and its internals, as i make my way through the learning process.

Adobe Flex has some decent pdf's online to guide developers on how to get started, but the tutorials only get the developers to start, they dont help the developer to become an expert. There are some books on flex and actionscript and lots of them releasing soon, but most of the books dont teach you anything new. If you have some previous experience in an object oriented language, functional language and a language which supports dynamic typing, reading a majority of the books is a waste of time and money. One good book which is geared towards Flex develpment and best practices is Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex & Java. Of the 5 books that i have read on Flex and Actionscript, this book is my favourite and shows the best ways to develop flex components and applications. Also the book Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move! provides a good insight into the basics of flash platform, the Stage compoenent, Timelines, frame events, etc.

Flex is a GUI framework, and flex is not only about MXML, its also about customizing business and layout components, and the knowledge about the internals of Flex framework is a must for a serious flex developer. So to learn the internals, i will follow the old saying "source code is the best documentation". I plan to write a series of articles on flex, sharing my thoughts. I will start with the FlexSprite and UIComponent classes, the base classes for all display compoents in flex.
Any comments/corrections are appreciated :).

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