Flex Builder training

Last week I attended a 3 day workshop on Flex Builder. Flex is a Flash-based interface development tool that allows you to easily put together a Rich Internet Application (RIA) that can tie into a database backend. Flex is built on XML and Actionscript and the Flex Builder software is like an application development software where you can drag components out onto the interface and they program them to do what you want. Why not just use Flash to do the same thing? Well, Flex makes it easier to do rather complicated interface components such as accordian type menus, button bars, link bars, tab bars, and can also do what they term "view states" where you might have a box of text on the screen that can get larger or smaller when you click on it for more info. This also is less strain on the server in that it doesn't make a call to get a new web page. It is all self-contained when the page downloads initially. Flex can interface with just about any type of database backend. It could also use plain XML files if you don't have a database to call on. Flex can also use style sheets to control the look of the text and menubars and also has built-in animation effects that can be controlled via their properties. The instructor, Rob Rush, did an excellent job of teaching. You could tell he was a real user of the software. He is a consultant with Adobe and works on client web applications. He showed us some examples of projects done in Flex that were pretty amazing. It would have taken quite a bit of code in any other language to achieve the results that they were able to do much easier with Flex.