I have finally gotten the chance to immerse myself in Flex code lately. I decided to do this series to capture my first hand experiences with Flex. Please share your feedback on the challenges and strengths I highlight. I would love to know if your experiences differ, or if you can fill in some of the gaps where I might be missing something. For those of you considering Adobe Flex, hopefully this will give you an accurate picture of building applications with Flex.
Overall, the Flex programming model is enjoyable and easy to use – minus a few annoyances with ActionScript, it is a pretty elegant language (I would like to see abstracts and private/protected constructors added). Having the MXML declarative abstraction on top of AS3 proves to be quite genius. It makes laying out graphic components quite easy by hand, and would seem to be what really empowers the visual editor.
For a Java developer, ActionScript brings my first hands on experience with closures. I am no language expert, but what is all the debate about? Of course closures should be added to Java. I know there is quite a bit of nuance on what the syntax/implementation looks like, but it seems pretty obvious that this functionality can greatly reduce the code to implement any number of things.
I am finally learning to take advantage of the event model in Flex. It took me a while to train my brain to think in terms of events and listeners. I am used to taking a much longer path to wire things together. Not to get too far off the tracks, but with this in mind I am surprised that anyone would want to use a heavy weight MVC framework within Flex (especially one that looks more like MVC2). The separation of concerns seems quite natural in Flex. I am not a hater of MVC frameworks – I have spent my fair share of time in Java MVC frameworks, but they seemed much more necessary in a Java web world where all the core language provided was JSP pages.
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