Flex Baby Steps

This week I *finally* found some time to start playing around with Flex, and in many ways it's like learning to walk again. Things that were second nature in AS2, like loading external images or setting up event handlers, are now difficult.

Flex 2 is an IDE where Java and C# coders will feel right at home, and ActionScript 3 continues to become more Java-like. While all this make sense for building large-scale web applications, the environment feels a bit restrictive for quick prototypes and experiments. For example, I miss not being able to attach custom properties to objects on the fly. Yes, this practice can lead to messy code, but in certain situations it's a handy thing to have, and can even make your code leaner (e.g.: in AS3, if I want to add a new property to a class instance on the fly, I need to make a subclass). I don't think artists and animators will be satisfied working in Flex either. Perhaps the Flash 9 IDE will address some of these issues, and maybe my opinion will change once I become more familiar with AS3. But for now the Jury is still out.

To help familiarize myself with the language, I picked up the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook from O'Reilly. A couple caveats: First, this book only coverse AS3, not MXML, so it really only solves part of the Flex puzzle. Second, the Oct. 2006 edition has a significant number of typos (and there's no errata on their site yet!). That said, it is a well-organized book that covers the fundamentals of AS3, and it's currently one of the only books out there.