Chapter-13GETTINGSTARTEDWITHFLEX教程.pdfVIP

Chapter 13 GETTING STARTED WITH FLEX This chapter covers the following topics: What Flex is and how it relates to Flash How to install and use the Flex SDK How to install and use Flex Builder 3 How to create a simple Flex application with both the Flex SDK and Flex Builder Before you dig into this chapter, I have a confession to make: there isn’t enough space in this book to teach you everything there is to know about Flex. It’s not all bad, though. Instead of trying to cover the entire world of Flex in a couple chapters, I’m going to show you enough of Flex to give you a comfortable grounding and get you started. If you decide that you want to go ahead and master Flex 3, friends of ED has just the book for you: The Essential Guide to Flex 3 by Charles E. Brown (ISBN 1590599500). 485 CHAPTER 13 Introducing Flex Put simply, Flex is a family of products that makes it easier for developers to create so-called rich Internet applications (RIAs). If you think back to the discussion of Flash ActionScript 3.0 components in Chapter 9, you’ll recall that it took quite a bit of work to create a relatively simple application. The components were designed to be easy to skin and use streamlined code so movies would not have as much overhead and would load more quickly. A lot of the complexity in the previous version of the Flash components was removed for these reasons. Flex, on the other hand, has been designed from the ground up with application development in mind. The components are more