Customer Reviews

Adobe Flex Builder 3.0

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I purchased Flex Builder 3.0 in my ongoing quest to make my websites more high-tech, and yet more user-friendly. I often wish to develop applications that can run both on the web AND on a computer desktop, attached to a database. Flex supports this, running with various web servers, and supporting desktop accessibility with Adobe Air. As a ColdFusion developer, this is an attractive feature.

Flex, supported by the Eclipse platform, is still in its early stages in some ways. To be sure, Flex greatly soups up your webpages, and makes coding easier and faster. It automatically generates code that would have required programming in Actionscript before. To be super productive, you would want to learn Actionscript, anyway. Now, most of the work is done for you by Flex, so the Actionscript is mostly reserved for enhancements.

My experience with Adobe/Macromedia products is that they will pile on the toys over time. So, now is a good time to learn this platform while Flex is simple to learn. I believe it is here to stay. With my other Adobe products, Adobe offered free DVD's with selected [...] training segments. These clips enticed me to buy a year's subscription of the [...] trainings. In those tutorials, I found Flex trainings that have helped me quite a bit to attack Flex, and interface it with my existing ColdFusion setup.

Really, the only difficult part of this is the Eclipse development platform. Eclipse is open source, and for that reason, it is constantly changing. I don't always find open source tools to be user-friendly. There are lots of techy methods to get updates, snap-ons, etc. The problem? Since Eclipse is a moving target, its layout and set of tools are rearranged constantly. So, books and web tutorials concerning Flex 3 and Eclipse may be referring to a different version of Eclipse... and those tools may not be in the same place on YOUR Flex Builder platform because you have version X.3.5.2.3.11 instead of X.3.5.2.3.09. Since it is the launching pad for developing your Flex applications, you may find this frustrating.

So, Flex is a rapid application development tool, but like a sleek race car, rapid doesn't mean simple. It is not for the faint-of-heart.

It's Flex. Of course you're not going to like it if you need someone to explain to you what it is.
"It's a very small subset of Flash" - Alex Turner
Flex is a developer's tool, this is not for designers.

There is a 30 day trial of this software available on Adobe's website. As with ALL software, try it first.

Adobe Flex Builder is a pay for plugin for the Eclipse IDE for developing Flex based UIs. The problem with this is that Flex is a subset of Flash, and a very small subset at that. Flex out of the box does not give anywhere near the range of features and controls that are available in Flash and seems to be quite immature. This product does not work with the latest verion of Eclipse at all, and I had great difficulty integrating it with a pre-existing installation of Eclipse on my mac. It has also appeared to disable several Eclipse function for me to do with source code reformatting.