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Learn about some of the differences between Flex 3 and Flex 4. Learn how to write a Flex application that controls the color, color gradient, and transparency of the background of the main window when a Flex application is played in Flash Player.
Click AppBackground01 and AppBackground04 to run the Flex 3 and Flex 4 projects discussed in this lesson. (Click the "Back" button in your browser to return to this page.)

Table of contents

Preface

General

This lesson is part of a series of tutorial lessons dedicated to programming with Adobe Flex.

What is Adobe Flex?

The previous lessons in this series have primarily dealt with XML issues and have nibbled around the edges of Flex. At this point, it is time to get reallyserious about Flex and start understanding what Flex, (as an XML programming language) , is all about.

According to one of the pages on the Adobe website,

"Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on allmajor browsers, desktops, and operating systems. While Flex applications can be built using only the free open source framework, developers can use AdobeFlex Builder software to dramatically accelerate development."

Subsequent to the original publication of this lesson, Adobe has released Flex version 4 (in addition to Flex version 3) and has replaced the Flex Builder 3 IDE with a new IDE named Flash Builder 4.

Flash Builder 4 supports both Flex 3 and Flex 4.

As of June 2010, Flex Builder 3 is no longer available, but Flash Builder 4 isavailable for downloading and is free for educational use .

I have updated this lesson to accommodate the availability of Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 in addition to Flex 3.

Although Flash Builder 4 is very similar to Flex Builder 3 from a user perspective, there are numerous differences between Flex 3 andFlex 4. I will touch on some of these differences in this lesson and will explore them in more detail in future lessons.

Download links

Download links for the free Flex 3 and Flex 4 frameworks, as well as theFlash Builder 4 IDE are provided in Resources .

Powerful but more complicated

Flex 4 is more powerful, but also significantly more complicated than Flex 3. Therefore, it isn't clear to me that developers will want to make animmediate switch to Flex 4. Therefore, I will continue publishing material on Flex 3 in addition to Flex 4.

Is there a tipping point?

Anything that can be programmed in Flex can also be programmed directly in ActionScript, but the reverse is not true. It occurs to me that at some point, asFlex becomes more complicated, there may be a tipping point where developers will simply switch to ActionScript instead of expending the effort necessary to learn about new more-complicatedaspects of Flex.

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Source:  OpenStax, Introduction to xml. OpenStax CNX. Dec 02, 2014 Download for free at https://legacy.cnx.org/content/col11207/1.18
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