Flash Components & Flex Components (Adobe Flex)
What is Flex? Flex is an open source software application development framework from Adobe that allows you to create rich Internet applications (RIA). Flex was originally created by Macromedia, sometimes called Flex Server software, and both Flex 1.0 and Flex 1.5 were released by Macromedia along with the Flex Builder (IDE) and Macromedia Flash components, prior to Macromedia being acquired by Adobe. Since then Adobe has carried on with the development of the Adobe Flex platform and Adobe Flex RIA environment, with the release of Adobe Flex 2.0 in June 2006, that significantly changed the licensing and deployment model, making the adoption of Adobe Flex 2 SDK more widespread.
Adobe Flex 3.0 was released in Feb 2008 and this added Adobe AIR support for Flex developers to use inside the Flex 3 SDK . Most recently in Mar 2010, Flex 4.0 (known as project Gumbo when it was in development) was released and with this launch the Flex Builder IDE was renamed to Flash Builder.
What is a Flex component? A Flex component is a pre-built piece of software or code that you can re-use inside your Flash application or Flex app. Flex components usually have a visual interface as part of the Flex GUI (Flex Graphical User Interface) and these Flex controls or Flex widgets can be used to add additional functionality to your Flash app. For example, you can get Flex components that help you visualize your data in a map display format (Flex maps), or a Flex component that shows your data in a gauge display (Flex gauges), in fact you can build a Flash BI app (Flex Business Intelligence) or a Flex dashboard to display your data using Flash components very easily. ActionScript, the Adobe Flex scripting language, allows you to control the user interface and app behavior dynamically at run-time, giving you great flexibility to change the look and feel of your app with ActionScript based Flex components.
In this filtered view of our product catalog, you will find Flex compatible products that have been pre-built by software experts for you to re-use in your next Flex project. You can read about the products, evaluate the products using our Flex downloads, compare the Flex components and read Flex reviews from your fellow Flex programmers. If you like what you see, you can also buy and license the Flex product of your choice. Finally there is also a Flex News RSS data feed for you to subscribe to, to be kept up to date with all the new releases we add to our Flex component product catalog.
(1)
