Introduction to Adobe Flex 3

Initially Flex was developed by Macromedia in 2004 and later Adobe Systems has acquired Macromedia in 2005 and re-branded as Adobe Flex. The latest version of Flex SDK 3.5 is available freely under Mozilla Public License. This software can be downloaded from here.



The Flex SDK comes with compiler and runtime environment Flash Player. The compiler compiles the MXML and ActionScript files into Adobe Flash files (SWF). These SWF files shall be opened in Flash Player.

MXML: An XML based markup language which is used to build the GUI. The Flex compiler internally converts these MXML files into ActionScript files and the output SWF Flash files will be generated. MXML is very simple to use and easy to understand.

ActionScript: The interactivity between the components and actions for the events triggered from the GUI components is achieved by Action Script the core language of Flash Player. The ActionScript is based on ECMAScript standards. This programming language supports Object Oriented features.

Flash Player: This is runtime environment on which the SWF files will be executed.

Flex Builder: It is an IDE developed on Eclipse platform. This IDE reduces the development effort and makes programming easy in MXML and ActionScript. It contains visual design tool to develop User Interfaces and the MXML code will be automatically generated.