Adobe Flex Builder 3.0

Other products by Adobe

Product Features

• Enables intelligent coding; interactive step-through debugging; and visual design of user interface layout, appearance, and behavior of business-critical RIAs
• Ability to import assets from Adobe Creative Suite 3 makes it easy for designers and developers to work together
• Take advantage of editors for MXML, ActionScript, and CSS; syntax coloring; statement completion; code collapse; interactive step-through debugging; and more
• Visually design and preview user interface layout, appearance, and behavior using a rich library of built-in or custom components
• Seamlessly integrate media into applications

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0014A4G5U
• Item model number: 38044406
• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 22, 2008
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,298 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

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Product Description

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Adobe Flex Builder 3 Standard software is a productive Eclipse based development tool for creating rich Internet applications for Adobe Flash Player or Adobe AIR, enabling intelligent coding, interactive step-through debugging, and visual layout and design of the user interface.

Content Assist displays code completion hints as you enter MXML, ActionScript, and CSS code.

In MXML Design mode, you interact with your Flex applications visually; dragging and dropping components on to the design area, selecting and resizing components, and so on.

When you create a project, Flex Builder switches into the Development perspective so you can begin developing your application

Top reasons to buy Adobe Flex Builder 3 Powerful coding tools: Take advantage of editors for MXML, ActionScript, and CSS; syntax coloring; statement completion; code collapse; interactive step-through debugging; and more. Rich visual layout: Visually design and preview user interface layout, appearance, and behavior using a rich library of built-in components. Create or extend those components easily if you need to. Interactive data visualization: Create data dashboards and interactive data analysis by simply dragging and dropping a chart type and linking it to a data source using the Flex Charting library. Skinning and styling: Customize the appearance of an application using CSS and graphical property editors to quickly set the most commonly used properties and preview the results in Design view. Integration with Creative Suite 3: Import ready-to-use creative assets directly into Flex quickly and easily with new Flex Skin Design extensions for Adobe Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Fireworks software. Code refactoring: Find references to classes, variables, and methods, and rename them easily. Native support for Adobe AIR: Build desktop applications with the same skills and codebase as your RIAs with new desktop components and Adobe AIR development tools. Powerful testing tools: Use memory and performance profilers to investigate memory use and analyze where applications are using resources. Advanced data services: Invoke web services or request XML data via HTTP using a rich, built-in library of data access services. Use open-source BlazeDS to easily connect applications to back-end services, leveraging Remoting and AMF, a binary, high-performance HTTP-based data transport. You can also add real-time data push and pub/sub messaging. Open-source framework: Beginning with Flex 3, the entire Flex framework is now available as an open-source project. Flex Remoting and Flex Messaging are also available as open source in BlazeDS.

Flex Overview
Flex is a free, open source framework for building highly interactive, expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops and operating systems. It provides a modern, standards-based language and programming model that supports common design patterns. MXML, a declarative XML-based language, is used to describe UI layout and behaviors, and ActionScript 3, a powerful OO programming language is used to create client logic. Flex also includes a rich component library with over 100 proven, extensible UI components for creating RIAs, as well as an interactive Flex application debugger.

Rich Internet applications created with Flex can run in the browser using the ubiquitous Adobe Flash¨ Player software or on the desktop on Adobe AIRª. This enables Flex applications to run consistently across all major browsers and across operating systems on the desktop. And using Adobe AIR, the cross-operating system runtime, Flex applications can now access local data and system resources on the desktop.

You can accelerate application development with Adobe Flex Builder 3, a highly productive, Eclipseª based development environment, and Adobe Live Cycle Data Services ES, a set of advanced data services that can be used in Flex development. Both of these products are available for purchase.

Powerful coding tools
Adobe Flex Builder 3 is a powerful Eclipse based IDE that includes editors for MXML, ActionScript, and CSS, as well as syntax coloring, statement completion, code collapse, interactive step-through debugging, and more.

Rich visual layout (Enhanced in Flex Builder 3)
Visually design and preview user interface layout, appearance, and behavior using a rich library of built-in components. Extend the built-in components or create new ones as needed.

New in Flex 3--Interactively set and preview CSS values on any of your components in Flex Builder design view.

Skinning and styling (Enhanced in Flex Builder 3)
Customize the appearance of an application using CSS and graphical property editors. Quickly set the most commonly used properties, and preview the results in design view.

New in Flex Builder 3--Design View within Flex Builder has also been enhanced to support rendering of skins and styles, allowing designers and developers to update properties and visualize how they affect each skin without needing to rebuild the application.

Integration with Adobe Creative Suite 3 (New in Flex Builder 3)
New Flex Skin Design Extensions for Adobe Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Fireworks make it fast and easy to import ready-to-use creative assets directly into Flex Builder 3. Use the new Adobe Flex Component Kit for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional to create interactive, animated content in Flash that can then be exported as a Flex component.

Code refactoring (New in Flex Builder 3)
The new Flex Builder 3 refactoring engine allows developers to quickly navigate through code or to quickly restructure code by renaming all references to a class, method, or variable.

Native support for Adobe AIR (New in Flex Builder 3)
Flex Builder 3 provides the fastest way to create applications for Adobe AIR, including all the tools required to build, debug, package, and sign AIR applications. The Adobe AIR runtime lets you quickly develop RIAs for the desktop using the same skills and code-base you use to build RIAs for the browser.

Advanced data services (New in Flex Builder 3)
Invoke web services or request XML or other data via HTTP using a rich, built-in library of data access services. Use open source BlazeDS to easily connect applications to back-end services leveraging Flex Remoting and Messaging, providing, a binary, high-performance, HTTP-based data transport, plus real-time data push and pub/sub messaging.

Flex 2 and 3 SDK support (New in Flex Builder 3)
Flex Builder 3 can create applications based on either the Flex 2 SDK or the Flex 3 SDK, enabling developers to leverage many of the great new Flex Builder 3 capabilities while maintaining Flex 2 applications.

Improved project workflows (New in Flex Builder 3)
Use new Flex Builder 3 project wizards to support the most common back ends. New wizards make it fast and easy to get started, whether you're using PHP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java. Workflow for developers using LiveCycle Data Services is improved as well. Lastly, improved project portability support enables developers to share projects and application settings more easily.

Web Service introspection (New in Flex Builder 3)
Flex Builder 3 can now retrieve a WSDL and generate ActionScript proxies to make calls and serialize/deserialize strongly-typed objects. New code hinting is available for making Web service calls and dealing with responses.

Product Description

ADOBE FLEX BUILDER 3.0

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Flex your muscles for better web content, October 14, 2009

By	Laurie Ann Mena (Riverside, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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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.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's Flex, December 13, 2008

By	Nicholas Bilyk - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

3 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not what I hoped, August 22, 2008

By	Alex Turner (Philadelphia PA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.